The Gospel Coalition

For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.
– 1 Chronicles 16:6

“For I know that the Lord is great,
and that our Lord is above all gods.
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does,
in heaven and on earth,
in the seas and all deeps.
He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth,
who makes lightnings for the rain
and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.”
– Psalm 135:5-7

What follows is the manuscript for a talk titled “The Gospel and Marital Sexuality” that I presented at the Men and Women of Wisdom Conference last weekend in Hingham, Massachusetts. The audio of the talk will be released shortly, I am told. I want to stress that this is my preaching manuscript, not a transcript of all I said, so there will be some differences. There is of course a bit more fleshing out in the preaching audio than in what I pre-composed for my reference’s sake. But since I’ve received some requests for the manuscript, I present it below — after the jump, as they say — for anyone’s interest and, I hope, their blessing.
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Today is Ascension Day, traditionally marked on the 40th day after Easter Sunday. The doctrine of Christ’s ascension has many implications. Here are just five.

1. Jesus is really alive.

The reality of Christ’s ascension, inextricable from the resurrection event, tells us that he did not raise from the dead only later to die again like Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son, Eutychus, or Tabitha. Jesus’ body will not be found because he took its glorified tangibility to heaven.

2. Heaven is thicker than earth.

We tend to think of heaven as the ethereal place of disembodied spirits. And in a way it is. But Elijah is there. And Enoch. And so is the risen, glorified, incarnate Christ. Jesus is there, taking up material space. He is touchable, present. Clearly, heaven is not less real than earth but more. It is a thicker reality than our four-dimensional space, more vibrant, more colorful, more real.

3. God’s plan for human dominion of earth is being realized.

The first Adam and his helper Eve were charged with filling the earth and subduing it. They screwed it up. But God’s plans cannot be thwarted. Man will reflect God’s glory in dominion over creation. In the Incarnation, then, God sends his only Son to right the course, reverse the curse, and begin the restoration of all things. The second Adam does the job, and even in his glorification, the incarnational “miracle of addition” (see below) persists, fulfilling God’s plan for man to reflect divine glory in dominion over creation. The God-Man, who is the radiance of the glory of God, rules over the earth and is even now subduing his enemies. “The ascension means that a human being rules the universe” (Tim Keller). Just as God planned.

4. The Incarnation is an enduring miracle.

The Incarnation was a humbling of God’s Son, but not a lessening of him. As I’ve argued in Gospel Deeps, the Son maintained his omnipresence even in his Incarnation. (Historical theologians have traditionally called this perspective the extra calvinisticum.) But what the ascension means is that Jesus Christ forever remains the Christ who is Jesus. He did not revert back to intangibility. But his ascended incarnational state then is not an eternal limitation but a part of his ongoing efforts to fill all things. He takes up more space in the heavens and the earth now, not less. The Incarnation is a miracle with no expiration date.

5. The ascension is gospel for sinners!

Why? Because if, among the many things the gospel means, it means we are united with Christ through faith, it also means that where he is we will be also. It means we will go to heaven in spirit, and heaven will come to us in body. The ascension is the full fruition of the promise of Christ’s resurrection being the firstfruits of our own. The ascension means the gospel is better news than we even thought, gooder than good! Because it holds out the promise, the blessed hope, not just of life after death, but as N.T. Wright says, life after life after death. What a gracious God we have!

Pastor Matt Kruse of 7 Mile Road Church near Boston reflects on turning 40 and being spectacularly unspectacular for the kingdom:

I am thankful for men and women who leave a global, historical mark for Jesus.

But for most of us, life will be a lot less spectacular.

And we should be good with that. Wait, thrilled is a better word.

Question: Instead of obsessing about changing the world, what if we just gave ourselves to living in glad obedience to Jesus in the trenches of an ordinary life?

For me, this means:

loving a particular wife (the one I vowed to love, in all of her awesomeness and sinfulness)

raising two sons and two daughters to know and fear and love God with all they’ve got

loving my neighbors as they are given to me in different seasons of life

plying a trade as well as I can (which happens to be, in my case, for some reason, planting a church-planting church that I hope will result in the next 10 years with seeing 1500 Bostonians believing the gospel together, which I am excited about, and which I don’t think betrays the thrust of this post: I am not saying don’t be ambitious about what the Spirit might do through you; I am saying don’t miss the glory of a well-lived, simple life.)

working hard to be a faithful witness to the grace and glory of Jesus in greater Boston for however many years he gives me.

In other words, Matthew Kruse’s “ceiling,” even if I hit it, will not make for a very sexy Wikipedia page.

What it will make for is some small number of people who were not ignored by me on the way to some unattainable pipe dream, but instead loved and compelled to believe and revel in Jesus and His Gospel. I need to be content with that.

Go read the whole thing.

So reasons Time Magazine’s Mary Eberstadt in a piece titled “In Battle Over Christianity, Orthodoxy is Winning”. A selection:

The sexual revolution has accomplished what even the fractious Reformation could not. It has divided Protestantism so deeply that traditionalist Anglicans now have more in common with traditionalist Lutherans or even Roman Catholics, say, than with the reformers in their own denominations. And as the proliferation of stricter Anglican churches of Africa go to show, this traditionalism has gone global.

A second fact embedded in this story also has worldwide repercussions. That traditionalist breakaway congregation in Virginia is larger than the one on the legally winning side — as in, much. Membership on the “losing” side, by one estimate, includes some 2,000 souls, as opposed to some 174 in the congregation moving in. And though exact numbers may not always be available, the larger trend is clear: this numerical division between traditionalists and reformers is also seen around the world. It’s the stricter Christian churches that typically have stronger and more vibrant congregations — as has been documented at least since Dean M. Kelley’s 1996 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.

So, for example, the reform-minded Church of England has closed over 1,000 churches since 1980, with some later becoming discos, spas and mosques. The traditionalist Anglican churches of the Global South, on the other hand, are packed to overflowing and still growing fast. Within the Catholic Church, similarly, the most vibrant renewal movements — Comunione e Liberazione, Opus Dei, Juventutem — are also the most orthodox. Meanwhile, African missionaries from both Protestant and Catholic churches are being dispatched to the West in record numbers — in effect, re-evangelizing the very peoples who carried the cross to men and women of the subcontinent in the first place.

One explanation for the resiliency of religious traditionalism in an age of secularization is demographic. As Jonathan Last shows in his recent book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, if enough people over time decide not to be fruitful and multiply, eventually their churches will disappear. That’s because secular people have far fewer children than do believers. The flip side of that observation is equally suggestive. In the future, it is the believers of all faiths whose children will appear disproportionately in an otherwise increasingly childless world, as political scientist Eric Kaufmann showed in his 2011 book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

As changing views on gay marriage, among others, go to show, secularization marches on. Traditionalists may be on the losing end of historic real estate, at least for now, as well as booed out of the public square for their views on sex. Down the road, though, they still look to possess something else critical — a growing congregation without which every church, after all, is just a bed and breakfast waiting to happen.

There perhaps is grounds for optimism in this historical and cultural logic, but traditionalist Christians in the West have two other great reasons for some reasoned sobriety about the cultural downgrade: 1) a global perspective, in the now, which shows enormous gain for traditionalist Christianity in Asia and Africa, 2) an eschatologically “gospeled” perspective, in the now and for the future, that Christ’s kingdom has come, is coming, and will come.

(HT: Challies)

Yes.

I love John Piper, as I assume has been evident over the years, but I found his answer to this question lacking at best and unhelpful at most. To some extent, he was directed to go to the biblical outline of gender roles by the phrasing of the question itself. But I think a better answer would be simply to step back, redirect, and consider the nature of a book. Any book. Any kind of book. Written by any author. Period. Female authors and male authors. Even Christian authors and non-Christian authors.

There is only one authoritative book. Every other book we can learn from and draw from and consider, testing all things its author teaches and clinging to whatever truth shakes out, even using what we see true in it in our life and ministry and public sermons.

I do subscribe to complementarianism, which means many things, one of which is that I agree with Dr. Piper that the Bible restricts pastoral authority in the local church to men. (Not just any men, of course, but those meeting the further qualifications for elder.) But the other key word in that phrase, the one that is not “men,” is “local.” Because of this, I don’t read any book, listen to any preaching, or otherwise gather any counsel outside of my church that I consider authoritative over me in the sense the Bible is concerned to restrict to only elders. Because I pastor a congregational church, all the members of my church, male and female, have in some sense authority over me. But only my elders have pastoral authority over me. This means that I don’t even read a John Piper book as if he has pastoral authority over me any more than I would read a Marva Dawn book as if she has pastoral authority over me. And I’ve read both and learned from both and used both.

Perhaps a better answer could have come from a better question. The better question is not “Is using a book by a woman a violation of the Bible’s restrictions on pastoral authority?” but “Is using any book a violation of the Bible’s restrictions on pastoral authority?” And the answer to both is “No.”

Now, of course, we ought to weigh some authors as more thoughtful, more faithful, more biblical than others, but I suppose that goes without saying.

A Minister’s Burden
(John Newton)

What contradictions meet
In ministers’ employ!
It is a bitter sweet,
A sorrow full of joy:
No other post affords a place
For equal honor or disgrace.

Who can describe the pain
Which faithful preachers feel,
Constrained to speak in vain,
To hearts as hard as steel?
Or who can tell the pleasures felt,
When stubborn hearts begin to melt?

The Savior’s dying love,
The soul’s amazing worth,
Their utmost efforts move,
And draw their bowels forth;
They pray and strive, the rest departs,
Till Christ be formed in sinners’ hearts.

If some small hope appears,
They still are not content,
But with a jealous fear,
They watch for the event:
Too oft they find their hopes deceived.
Then how their inmost souls are grieved!

But when their pains succeed,
And from the tender blade
The ripening ears proceed,
Their toils are overpaid:
No harvest-joy can equal theirs,
To find the fruit of all their cares.

On what has now been sown,
Thy blessing, Lord, bestow;
The power is Thine alone,
To make it spring and grow:
Do Thou the gracious harvest raise,
And Thou alone shalt have the praise.

Trigger warning: Vomit.

Our oldest was up most of the night last night throwing up. She was not running a fever, so we are praying today it’s more something she ate than a bug of some kind. Becky stayed up with her, continually cleaning and emptying the receptacle kept by the bedside when sprinting to the toilet was a bridge too far. It’s a special thing, cleaning up somebody’s vomit.

Last night I was reminded of the first few months after our move to Vermont in fall of 2009. Because our house in Tennessee hadn’t sold (and still hasn’t, by the way, although that’s a saga for another time), Becky stayed there, keeping her job to help us keep covering the mortgage, while our girls and I made the long trek northwards. We were 9 long months apart, and it was heartbreaking for all of us. Our girls kept getting sick with various viruses and what-have-you in those months. It was bizarre and trying.

One night our friends Elder Dale and Mrs. Elder Dale were over keeping me company. The girls were already in bed. Our oldest wandered into the living room groggy-eyed to inform me that our youngest (who was in the top bunk) had thrown up her pepperoni pizza dinner (and more) all over the floor. From her prime position, she managed to get vomit on nearly everything.

And then something amazing happened. Elder Dale asked me, “How are you with this stuff?” I said, “Well, I’ve cleaned it up plenty of times but it’s always really rough. It’s all I can do to keep from throwing up myself.” Dale responded, “I’m pretty good with it.”

And then he proceeded to clean up my kids’ throw-up. And there was a lot of it. A lot of it on a lot of things. And this man who I’d only known for a few months cleaned up my daughter’s foul expectorant. It was at that point that I realized we were never leaving this church.

Elders who will clean up your kids’ vomit, who can find? They are more precious than rubies.

How do we become holy without becoming ‘holier than thou’?

By actually becoming actually holy.

Holiness and holier-than-thou-ness aren’t parallel phenomena. They run on different tracks. If someone is growing in arrogance, pride, and self-righteousness, by definition they are not growing in holiness.

The problem arises in equating holiness with religious behavior. Holy people do obey God, of course. But the character of holiness, in which the Spirit does his progressive sanctifying work in our hearts (and therefore in our thoughts, speech, and actions), produces qualities of humility, gentleness, kindness, and self-control. Any arrogant fool can abstain from certain sins or give to charity and what-not. The Pharisees certainly did that, and all our legalistic contemporaries do too. But that is not real holiness. That is moralistic separatism or some such thing.

Therefore, it is impossible to become both holy and holier-than-thou. To grow in one, is to atrophy in the other.

But I am grateful that while I still struggle with a variety of sins, most especially the root sin of pride, I have God’s promise that he will complete the work he began in me, and that Jesus is both the author and the perfecter of my faith.

“Too many Christians are possessed with the idea that secret societies control the world. There have been countless theories that propagate this idea that the world economy and its political and social systems are controlled by a few evil and sinister men belonging to secret organizations that seek to rule the earth . . .

“Conspiracy believers . . . have taken a fact from history here, a fact from history there and have constructed distorted theories that secret people control everything that is happening in the world. Many believe and are caught up in the notion, creating an illusion that is very hard to get away from them.

“The Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Masons, the Trilateral Commission, and the international bankers are some of those who, in the minds of many, seek the abolition of private property, family structure, organized religion, national governments, inheritance rights, and capitalism. Scary thoughts! Worse than the boogeyman I was afraid of as a kid.

“The facts demonstrate that Christian people who believe and embrace these kinds of theories are in the same boat as atheists, agnostics, and evolutionists. They have thrown God out of the picture as one who has lost control of his world . . . There are conspiracies; make no mistake about that. Unfortunately there is a dark side to the world. Throughout history there have been despots who have tried to seize control of governments and their citizens. I am positive this is the plan of Satan. However, never has there been one successful ploy over any great length of time because the heart and the mind of a person cannot be controlled forever. The heart and mind of a person belong to God.”

– from Sherman Smith’s Foreword to Gregory Camp’s Selling Fear: Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia (Baker: 1997), pp.9-10.