The Gospel Coalition

Bob Costas nails it here, and as the opening reference to Kim Kardashian suggests, his comments apply to much more than the adolescent self-adulation of athletes. For me, washed-up has-been wanna-be athlete and former coach that I am, the key question was: “Where are the coaches in all of this?” When I played (donkey’s years ago in the amateur leagues of small town high school athletics), almost anything resembling “flash” got you benched in, well, a flash. Cost a team some points or a penalty and you’d be riding the pine for a long while. Not only would you be benched during the game, but the next day’s practice would feature a major in-your-face post-coffee grilling and a lot of extra running (appropriately dubbed “suicides”). I guess those days went the way of dinosaurs when contracts and egos grew bigger than team and character. Enough rambling of my own. Enjoy two minutes of brilliant Costas commentary:

HT: Z

Last night my wife and I remained awake well past our bedtime, riveted to the story of Dean and Julie Peterson. Their story is a powerful account of God’s grace in restoring what appeared to be an utterly hopeless marriage. Revive Our Heart offers the interview in four parts. In a day where people have so little hope for difficult marriages, you will want to hear this interview and share it with friends. It won’t be a magic cure, but it just might demonstrate that people in bad marriages (30 years of unfaithfulness and lovelessness) can with the Lord’s help repair and thrive. This four-parter is well worth the hour-and-a-half or so it takes to listen.

Part 1: “Brokenness in Marriage“: Dean and Julie Petersen’s marriage began after a date rape and appeared to be over after a number of adulterous relationships. Dean was planning on killing his pastor. His wife went to this pastor for counseling and ended up in an adulterous relationship with him.

Part 2: “Is Love More Than Feelings?” Julie received a two-second hug from a co-worker. That set her on a descent into lust.

Part 3: “How Bitterness Can Lead to Impurity” Bitterness can lead to all sorts of other destructive sins. Discover the danger of bitterness in a marriage and learn to find freedom from it.

Part 4: “Seeing Your Husband for the First Time” Once romantic feelings of love are gone, is it possible to get them back? After resenting her husband, Julie Peterson started acting loving toward him.

Seriously, these guys keep puttin’ it down for the King. This is not only poetry; it’s theater. Enjoy!

HT: Mic

A little commercial humor.

Yesterday, there must have been three people who independently of one another pointed me to the 116 Clique project, Man Up! This morning I peeped the video for the title track. I’m feelin’ it. I thought you might, too.

So, here are the thoughts I had as I watched this:
1. Gotta listen to this album.
2. So needed.
3. So encouraging. Hopeful.
4. Artistically speaking… nicely done. Head bobbin’.
5. Feels like this Christian generations’ version of Stop the Violence, only more complete in its message.
6. Gotta go play with my little boy.
7. Only thing missing: a couple older men represented. But that’s what happens when entire generations of men abdicate; they vanish from the scene.

Man up.

HT: Shane

Mrs. Blair Linne lights it up!

My wife sent me this video. I think I would be a little unnerved the rest of the day if I were Mukhtar, the bus driver in this video.

I enjoyed this conversation between Colin Hansen and John Piper regarding John’s new book, Bloodlines. I deeply respect and admire John’s faith in the Lord, willingness to risk, and courage to stand on this issue. And in these videos you can see his passion and investment in arguing for a blood-bought reshaping of our thinking about ourselves.

Confronting the Racial Sins of Our Fathers from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

Can’t Afford to Be Color Blind from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

I think John nails the colorblind issue in the second video. He captures the tension and dynamic very well, showing both the pros and the cons of the issue.

If I might, I’d want to tack on one footnote to what John has said extremely well. Sometimes the appeal to being colorblind masks a deeper issue of being “justice blind.” That is, some people have called for a colorblind society or positioned themselves as colorblind people as a means for willfully ignoring justice issues that themselves are predicated upon color. Examples abound. Fill in the blank.

So, there arises a suspicion of the notion because of very real justice or injustice issues attached to color. We don’t want a naive movement toward colorblindness (in the positive sense) when it gives room for “justice blindness.” That’s part of the tension and concern. In a society filled with systematic statistical disparities on the basis of skin color on everything from educational achievement, employment rates, internet access, incarceration, banking access, poor health, home ownership, poverty, and so on, we cannot afford a blindness to color that perpetuates a blindness to justice.

I’m grateful for Piper helping to make this plain. The move toward a post-race society must include movement to a color-just society. This is better known to us as judging a man by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin–whether that “judgment” be the charitable interpersonal judgments that help to eliminate prejudice and racism or the charitable judgments of “justice for all.”

P.S.–I’m certain someone will wish to point out that I’ve at least intimated that “justice” looks like “equality of outcome” and not “equality of opportunity.” Fair enough. But before you dismiss the thrust of this post with that critique, how about defining “justice” yourself and attending to the color-based injustices and disparities so plentifully around us before/as you point out your disagreement with my definition. Until then, I need to let you know that I kinda like the definition of “justice” that I use and pursue over the definition of “justice” you don’t.

Ever wonder what it would be like to be part of a Bible translation committee? Or, what the discussions look like as teams of scholars wrestle with difficult texts and issues?

Justin Taylor has posted this 4-minute video of the ESV translation committee wrestling with the issue of how to translate Hebrew and Greek words that could be rendered “slave” or “servant” or “bondservant.”

You can see how essentially literal translation gets complicated by cultural and historical settings and considerations. “Slave” in one ear meant something different in another era. Meaning and connotations are not static, and understanding the Bible properly requires at least two things:

1. Knowing how the original author used the word and what they intended; and
2. Being aware of how the contemporary audience hears the word and what meanings they freight it with.

So, reading the Bible well becomes a task not just in reading the words, but also of reading the contexts. Reading the bible well requires not that we read culture (singular) but cultures (plural). Moreover, reading the Bible well means allowing the Bible to read the reader, exposing our assumptions and the predispositions we bring to the text. Makes me want to read the Bible and to be read by the Bible!

She sent me this video of a father-daughter dance and said learn the moves before I return home on Monday! This is fun, but I think I’d need physiotherapy afterward

I give ol’ school points for courage in this video. Actually, I think I can probably do “tha stanky leg,” the “shag,” the “robot,” and “da butt.” Not sure I could pull of Beyonce! Laugh out loud–it’s Thursday!