The Gospel Coalition

Tim Keller on secularism and the family:

The gospel-based community practices a view of family that is contrary both to the cultural idols of secular and traditional societies. The gospel frees singles from the shame of being unmarried they find in conservative cultures. Their truest identity is in Christ and their assured future hope is the kingdom of God. Even bearing children, in the Christian view, is merely nurturing more lives for the family of God. That can be done in other ways than the biological.

On the other hand, the gospel gives us the hope and strength for the sacrifices of marriage and parenthood that is lacking in liberal cultures. Christians grasp that they were only brought to life because of Jesus’ radical sacrifice of his independence and power. We know that children are only brought to life and self-sufficiency if their parents sacrifice much of their independence and power. In light of the cross, it is the least we can do.

An important question in discerning the will of God:

Discerning the will of God often comes, rather than seeing writing in the sky, by asking a series of questions about the choices before you and then based on those answers choosing the way which seems most wise to you. Along the way, I’ve had great men and women help me see some of the right questions to ask. Questions like this…

How Introverts and Extroverts Can Benefit from Each Other:

The truth is that you need both. Our marriage is so much richer because we are able to draw from two perspectives. My introversion ensures that we go deep and make time to nourish our souls. Her extroversion ensures that we don’t get stuck there, focused exclusively on ourselves. We reach out to others. The key is learning to appreciate one another—and serve one another.

All Protests Not Equal, Time after Times:

So where to start? How about these questions: When is news really news? When is old news still big news?

Yesterday, I posted on the dilemma of self-promotion and stewardship in regards to writing and blogging. I received several encouraging comments and emails from people wrestling with the same issue. I also received some feedback from people who think this whole discussion to be an exercise in false humility.

One email, in particular, deserves a response. Here are some excerpts:

Before I go on, know this, I enjoy and learn a lot from your postings and Kevin DeYoung’s. I love you guys. (I have your book and one of his). I was also familiar with DeYoung’s blog post on self-promotion and, though I didn’t respond to his then, I’d like to now, because it’s bugged me for a year.

I find the whole “struggle” about self-promotion a little ludicrous. You guys are WRITERS. If you don’t have any desire for others to read your writing, then buy diaries, place them under your pillows and close up shop. Why get subscribers for your blog? If you’re going to write a book, then promotion (or “self-promotion”) is a part of the deal… You’re cheating Moody, Crossway and their employees if you don’t promote your books.

I mean, what is a personal blog if not self-promotion?

God gave you a gift. Use it to the fullest, which includes doing what you can within your conscience to get as many people to read your work.

This reader makes a good point. We should indeed steward the gifts God has given us for His glory and the good of the church. And all Christians ought to think carefully about how to steward a platform (any kind and size) for the good of others.

And yet, I have to take issue with his rhetorical question: What is a personal blog if not self-promotion?

If this reader means that a personal blog has an inherent element of self-promotion, then I agree. But reducing a personal blog to self-promotion is wrongheaded. A personal blog can (and must!) be more than self-promotion.

Motivation matters here. Yes, personal blogs may be a tool of self-promotion. That’s a given. But if the blogger is motivated solely by the desire to self-promote, then the blog is about building a readership for the blogger’s benefit rather than for the reader’s benefit.

So, in answer to the question, What is a personal blog if not self-promotion?, I say, “Service and stewardship.” A personal blog certainly has an element of self-promotion. (After all, why blog unless you believe you have something worthwhile to say?) But our compass should always be pointed toward “service” and “stewardship” rather than self-promotion.

Blogging is an act of service. There are days I don’t feel like blogging. Writing frequently and consistently is hard work, even if ultimately I enjoy the process. If your purpose in starting a blog is to promote your book, your conference, or whatever it is you’re selling… or if your purpose in blogging is just to get your name out there every day, don’t even bother. Instead, you should consider your blogging to be an act of service to the tribe (big or small) that reads your stuff.

I blog because there are people who (for whatever reason) find this blog worthy of their time and attention. I want to serve those readers faithfully, and I want to properly steward the little bit of influence God has given me.

Does self-promotion take place here? Undoubtedly. But there are ways that a blogger can point attention elsewhere: daily links to other good posts, taking a break from blogging, reviewing other people’s books, interviewing others… etc. I try to incorporate these into my personal blog precisely because I think a personal blog can be and indeed must be more than self-promotion.

I understand the frustration of the reader who thinks all this navel-gazing is an exercise in false humility. You got me there. I’m certain there are seeds of false humility and puffed-up pride in my motivations for even addressing this topic. Truth is, I do care what other people think of me. But I hope that my care of how I am perceived is based in a childlike humility, not an unhealthy fear of man.

Let me conclude with this passage from Mere Christianity, in which Lewis makes a point that is relevant to this discussion:

The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human.

The real black, diabolical Pride comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks.

But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says “Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals – or my artistic conscience – or the traditions of my family – or, in a word, because I’m That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it, let them. They’re nothing to me.”

In this way real thoroughgoing Pride may act as a check on vanity; for, as I said a moment ago, the devil loves “curing” a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity; better the frying-pan than the fire.

The role of FaceBook in the Egyptian uprising:

It became and remains the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt, even as protests continue to sweep the country, with more than 473,000 users, and it has helped spread the word about the demonstrations in Egypt, which were ignited after a revolt in neighboring Tunisia toppled the government there.

“There were many catalysts of the uprising,” said Ahmed Zidan, an online political activist marching toward Tahrir Square for a protest last week. “The first was the brutal murder of Khalid Said.”

National Review‘s Rich Lowry is urging Jeb Bush to run for President in 2012:

Four years after leaving the Florida governor’s mansion, he remains one of the most impressive Republican politicians in the country, a formidable policy mind with the political chops to drive conservative reforms even out of office. So why isn’t he running for president? Bush told Miller what he’s said to others, too — he won’t run in 2012, but he’ll consider 2016. This is a mistake. Bush should run now for at least eight reasons…

Profumo, Haggard, and Real Shame:

When you hang your head in shame, the last thing you should be thinking about is whether the camera has caught your good side.

Five myths about Ronald Reagan:

It has been argued that Ronald Reagan was a myth himself, a construct of his own and other people’s imaginings, rather than an extraordinary American about whom some untruths are told. The sentimental colossus his acolytes are trying to erect today, with gilded pecs, red-painted smile and an NRA-approved pistol in each manly fist, bears no resemblance to the man I knew: in private a person of no ego and little charisma, in public a statesman of formidable purpose.

In April, my new book comes out. I’m excited about it. I want to talk about it. My publisher wants me to talk about it too.

But I’m caught between my excitement for the ideas in this book and my resistance to promoting myself and my work.

So that leads me to the question: Is self-promotion always wrong?

Is it possible to choose to not talk about one’s book in order to not appear self-promoting (a more subtle form of pride)?

Is it an act of bad stewardship to not blog about one’s work, effectively walking off the platform the publisher expects you to utilize?

Kevin DeYoung writes:

Being willing to ask hard questions is a must. Do I want money and recognition? Do I feel the need for validation? Do I like it when I look successful? Or do I want people to learn more about Christ and honor him with their lives? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I pray that my heart is mostly concerned with the last yes, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I can totally relate.

A friend of mine recently counseled me this way:

“Trevin, you are constantly pointing people to other books and blogs in order to edify and encourage them. You host interviews with other authors in order to get their books into the hands of readers. If you don’t ever talk about what you’ve written yourself, you run the risk of allowing your readers to miss out on edifying work you are putting out in other venues.”

I get that. And I know that publishers have a vested interest in my own self-promotion.

But I’m still conflicted about blogging about my book. Maybe that’s where I need to be. Maybe this is the Spirit’s method of rooting out sinful motivations and spurring me on to holiness.

Maybe God is saying, “I don’t ever want you to be totally comfortable with self-promotion, even if some promotion will result in more people buying a book that is beneficial to the church.” Maybe God wants me to remember that my motives are never completely pure, and even my best intentions are tainted with sin.

So here’s how I’ve decided to proceed: carefully and methodically. Over the next couple of months, I will blog once a week about Counterfeit Gospels. I’ll write about the book’s origins, what became of my initial idea for my second book, and how I settled on the six counterfeits that make up the book’s chapters.

Along the way, I look forward to introducing the concept of “the gospel as a three-legged stool” and getting your feedback. I’ll also tweet some lines from the book for Twitter followers. The hashtag will be #cgospels.

I’m grateful to those of you who choose to read this blog often and interact with the thoughts I post here. May our exchange of ideas lead to the type of iron-sharpening that edifies the Church. And may my work ultimately point past myself and to the King who deserves all the attention.

The 10 Worst Super Bowls (HT)

The Son and the Crescent:

Bible translations that avoid the phrase “Son of God” are bearing dramatic fruit among Muslims. But that translation has some missionaries and scholars dismayed.

A President’s Prayers:

Providing the nation with a rare glimpse into his religious beliefs, President Barack Obama on Thursday said “these past two years, they have deepened my faith.” This deeper look into Obama’s private spiritual life, given at a speech during the annual National Prayer Breakfast, seemed designed to confront the controversy surrounding his religious beliefs.

Kevin Smith on “Being Real”:

For some reason, some Christians think a time of grief is a time to stay away from the gathered congregation. Have we created that feeling? Is the congregation a safe place to grieve or will you mess up the happy mood? I told them that at my greatest time of pain I would prefer to be in the midst of God’s people – singing His praises and hearing His Word. Even through pain and tears, the singing was strengthening, the preaching was encouraging, and the fellowship was priceless. I feel honored to have had a “real” moment as the leader of a flock of God’s sheep.

A few years ago, I posted this brief clip from an episode of ER called “Atonement.” The clip features a man dying of cancer who is seeking atonement for past sins. His confrontation with a liberal chaplain demonstrates the impotency of liberalism to deal with the reality of guilt:

“I need answers! I want a real chaplain who believes in a real God and a real hell!”

I love this exploration of Peter’s conversation with the Risen Lord on the shore:

Jesus looks around at Peter’s fishing boat and tackle. Peter has gone back to the old life again, unsure what to do with himself next.

Jesus says, “Simon, son of John, when I first met you, you were a fisherman, and I called you to be a fisher of humans. You were very happy then to come with me and work alongside me. Now you are back here again. Do you love me more than these?”

Peter is a bit nonplused and doesn’t know where this is leading, but manages to say: “Yes, Lord – you know I love you.”

“Well,” Jesus says, “I have a job for you. Feed my lambs.”

Peter doesn’t know what to say to this, but Jesus goes on: “And Peter, you remember how you said you would go with me even to death? How even if all the others left me you wouldn’t? It didn’t work out that like that, did it? I heard you that night, as you know. You told them you didn’t even know me. Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

Peter hangs his head. There is no denying it now. “Yes, Lord,” he says, “you know that I love you.”

But Jesus isn’t finished yet. There is no point in getting someone to see themselves as they really are if you don’t show them where to go from there. “Don’t you see, Peter?” he says. “That’s not the end of the story. Peter, the next day they took me outside the city and they crucified me. They watched me die while you hid away somewhere.

“But don’t you see what it means? I was despised and rejected by everybody. I had nothing but darkness and pain and death. But Peter, I bore all your griefs. I carried all your sorrows. I was wounded for your transgressions. I was bruised for your iniquities. Upon me was the punishment that made you whole. As they beat me, you were being healed. You were straying away like a lost sheep, Peter, but God laid on me the punishment for all your sin. Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

Peter, feeling that the tears in his eyes tell the truth anyway, says, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” And Jesus goes on to tell him of the new life he must lead, a life of serving God, a life of suffering and death, a life of following the Master.

The story hardly needs applying further. Christian faith begins (or it may begin) with understanding what Peter understood that morning. It is as we see Jesus, dying so that his people need not die, completing on the cross the work of our salvation, wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, that we see clearly the love that God has for us. It is also the point at which we begin to love God in return.

N.T. Wright, Small Faith–Great God, 72-74.

Seven links for your weekend reading:

1. Neil Genzlinger on Memoirs: “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.” (HT)

2. Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?

3. Tim Keller: Spiritual and Secular Jobs are God’s Work

4. Ed Stetzer: “The long term future of the new church is in the harvest, not a Disneyfied Sunday morning experience.”

5. How to Pray for Egypt Today: An Insider’s Report

6. Moral Collapse at Ms. Magazine — Sex-Selection Abortion as a ‘Problem’

7. A short video explaining the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England. If you’ve ever been confused by what the UK encompasses, this will clear it up for you.

Suffering in this world is terrible and limited, but suffering in the next world is terrible and eternal. And love sees it that way. Love does not shut its eyes to this world or that world. Love reckons with the reality of suffering here, and the worse reality of suffering there.

And what I see all around us today in the Christian church is the tendency to care only about the one or the other. There are these two camps:

1. I’m an activist for the cause of justice and life and wholeness and shalom and flourishing!
2. I’m not going to be distracted by all that. I’m going to rescue people from hell!

Here’s what I want. I want all of us at Bethlehem to say, “We will not make that choice!” We will say this sentence and mean it: “We care about all suffering now, especially eternal suffering later.”

That’s the sentence I want to leave ringing in your ears. I want you to feel whether you can embrace both of those. My guess is that there are people in this room very resistant to the first half and others who are very resistant to the second half.

I don’t want us to be among the sophisticated Christians who cannot take hell on their lips, let alone fire, or outer darkness, or gnashing of teeth, or torment. Oh no, we’re too sophisticated for that! I don’t give a rip about sophistication! I want truth! I want to know, God: Are these people that I hobnob with day after day on their way to destruction? If so, then I know what love requires.

And, there are others so jealous to guard that truth, that they’re afraid to death to fight any evil in this world. It’s going to look like liberalism, for goodness sakes! Let it look like whatever you want to call it. It’s just what [Jesus] says we should do.

Let’s be like Jesus. In every social issue from abortion to alcoholism, from AIDS to unemployment, from hunger to homelessness, let’s give the help that we would like to receive if it were us. And at every moment in that love, let us feel an even greater urgency to pray and speak and work to rescue people from everlasting suffering through the gospel of Jesus.

- John Piper, “Abortion and the Narrow Way that Leads to Life” (1.23.11)

The conversation our culture cannot have, but must anyway:

My real frustration is that Fitzgerald’s plea for a moratorium on the debate about the morality of homosexuality actually destroys the possibility of real, civil discourse on the question… If rhetoric is powerful enough to kill people, then demanding that people stop speaking in a certain way is the equivalent of prison.  While it may start as voluntary, the logic is an illiberal one and once adopted it will be difficult to stop an involuntary suppression of speech on the part of those Fitzgerald disagrees with.

SBC Life Focus on Doctrine - The Church: A Bride, A Building, A Body

• As His bride, we experience intimate communion with Him now, while anticipating the wedding feast to come when the Groom will reveal Himself in all His splendor.
• As His building, the temple, we experience the glorious reality of God actually dwelling in us and among us.
• As His body, we operate and cooperate as one whole unit, under the direction of the Head, to grow and function according to His purposes and to accomplish His assignments until His return.

Planned Parenthood fires the staffer who advised a pimp how to maintain his sex slave business while getting underage girls abortions.

“We were profoundly shocked when we viewed the videotape released this morning, which depicted an employee of one of our health centers behaving in a repugnant manner that is inconsistent with our standards of care and is completely unacceptable,” Phyllis Kinsler, executive director of the local affiliate, said a statement, according to NJ.com.

Time reports on baby boomers are going to seminary. An interesting report, but GetReligion thinks they’ve missed the obvious:

What I find curious is that the story focuses totally on schools that are linked to the Protestant left. Where are the quotes and information from the nation’s larger seminaries? After all, the oldline schools are very small in comparison with their evangelical counterparts.

Meanwhile, I would predict that the percentage of older, late-in-life ordinands is higher the further one heads left on the doctrinal spectrum — in keeping with church membership statistics in general. The bottom line: Can we know that this seminary trend in Time is evenly distributed across the academic board?

Photos from Chicago: Blizzard of 2011