Still getting the gremlins out of the podcast machine, but here is an encore presentation fitting for the season. A That 70s Kid segment on the tricks of trick or treat, and encouragement to take up and read the great Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, Young Goodman Brown. Grab some apple cider, stoke the fire and enjoy.
This week’s scary encore presentation of the Jesus Changes Everything Podcast
I know they do this. In a world where a new crop of dissertations is needed every year and research grants can make or break a university I’m sure there have been extensive scientific studies into laughter. Without so much as asking Grok, however, I’m equally sure that they missed the joke. Laughter is precisely the kind of thing that will always confound scientists because it is so intensely human. It bubbles up to the surface from the parts of us too deep to fit in a test tube. To put it another way, you can’t get there from here.
Which is why it’s so funny, and telling, that they try. One of the most common forms of humor is when the prideful take a fall. The Emperor’s, shall we say, exposure, comes from this fertile field. How much more ridiculously prideful can man be then when he thinks he has a fundamental understanding of man? We must laugh when one of us takes another of us and earnestly tries to squeeze us under a microscope. And when our bellies begin to shake, instead of joining in the fun, the fool scientist sits down to take notes.
The Bible says we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:4). I’m enormously grateful for those who make careful study of our bodies, who develop skills in healing and making well. I have nothing but admiration for scientists who seek to think God’s thoughts after Him. Trying to grasp laughter, however, isn’t a man seeking to think God’s thoughts after Him but seeking to think himself god. It is a baby dressed in a business suit, an ant driving a car.
God, in His glory, has done something glorious with us. He has made us so complex, so grand in bearing His image, that every one of us that seeks to diminish us by claiming to master us, sits on a whoopee cushion. Anyone who claims humans are simple enough to understand doesn’t understand that humans are too simple to have that understanding. Anyone who rightly professes that we are too complex to understand shows himself a fool when he claims to understand.
This is not just true of laughter, but all that we are. The behaviorists who insist we can shape people by shaping their environment first must confess that the only reason they believe that is because they’re conditioned to. The people in favor of big government, on the grounds that people are so terrible, seem to forget that big government is led by terrible people. Those who insist that our denial of our racism is proof of our racism find themselves hoisted on the same petard. People are people and what’s sauce for the geese is sauce for all the other geese. It’s funny, you know?
One last thing. Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Buzz Lightyear recently got engaged. He and his fiancee’s bridal registry is at Bed, Bath… AND BEYOND.
We continue our weekly Monday night Bible study. We begin at 7:00, but local guests are invited to come for dinner too, at 6:15.
We air the study on Facebook Live (RC-Lisa Sproul). Within a day or two we post the video of the study right here for those who would like to watch on their own schedule.
We’d love to have you with us, in person if possible. We’d love for you to invite your friends. Our study considers the attributes of God, unpacking just a hint of His ineffable glory. Tonight- God Is Gracious
First, confession time. I am not 100% confident that I have read all his more than 100 books. Most of them to be sure, many of them when they were in manuscript form. Like most people I too delight over my father’s capacity to make complex things clear. I too find his style engaging. I too come away from all his books the better for it. Which doesn’t mean I don’t prefer some over others.
I divide my father’s books into two categories- those he couldn’t not write, and those his publishers persuaded him to write. They’re all good, but there is something special about a book that came out of his internal zeal. Not A Chance grew directly out of a Christmas present I helped my mother pick out for him, a telescope. The joy he took in that led to reading widely on the philosophy of science and, coupled with his pre-existent penchant for piercing logic, out came the book. It is among my favorites. Faith Alone was another that burned inside him and had to come out.
Among my favorites, certainly in my top 5, are two that are not as well known. If There’s a God, Why Are There Atheists? and The Soul’s Quest for God. The former was one of his earliest books, having been released in 1974 as The Psychology of Atheism. He was still developing both his voice and his ideas, and that’s part of the pleasure. You can see The Holiness of God in its larva stage in its pages.
The Soul’s Quest for God I love for its subject matter. My father’s skill at explaining things is only a small part of his gift. He could also, when he wanted to, move us with what he informed us of. Too many look to my father as a source of good arguments for good theology. This book demonstrates he was a good goad to a closer walk with Jesus.
My favorite, however, may be the most obscure of all the books he wrote. It is the one I could not put down. It is the one I was most eager to share with others (which explains why I don’t even have a copy anymore.) It spent not very long in print, either as a hardback or a paperback. It’s original title, Johnny Come Home. In paperback it was Thy Brother’s Keeper. It’s a novel, a virtual roman a clef. It tells the story of two young men, best friends who encounter Jesus. One leaves Jesus behind, the other goes on to have a national ministry. And it is very good.
With this book my father let himself free as he wrote. The beauty that undergirds the gospel is its foundation. The characters are real and well-developed, the story-line compelling. What I love about it most, however, is all that it showed me about him. The façade of a novel opened the door for my father to reveal himself as he did nowhere else.
It was, as I read it in manuscript form as a teenager, the first time I realized that my dad wasn’t perfect, that he wasn’t as self-assured as he seemed. It revealed also, however, that in his humanity he was a beautiful man, redeemed by a beautiful Savior. I miss him. Not the charming teacher of theology. Him.
The world is full of hypocrites. The solution to this problem is twofold. If you’re more modern, you deal with the gap between obedience and what you pretend to be by trying harder. You try to make your sin go away. If you’re postmodern, you deal with sin not by doing better, but by getting rid of the idea of sin. If there is no right and wrong, no one can rightly accuse you of acting like you are right when you are actually wrong.
The church is likewise full of hypocrites. Because we claim to be citizens of heaven but are suffused with the world, our solutions often look just like the world’s solution. We either, if we tend toward the modern, try harder to sin less and thus shorten the gap between what we pretend to be and what we are. Or, if we tend to be more postmodern, we muddy up God’s law, revel in a soft grace, and accuse our conscience of being a legalist.
The Bible’s solution, however, is neither to try to reduce the sin nor to reduce the idea of sin. It is instead to repent. We deal with our hypocrisy, our folly of pretending to be better than we are, by confessing how bad we actually are. We enter more fully into our sin by entering more fully into repentance.
Consider this: How quick are you to repent? If you’re anything like me, you’ve just this moment added several more things to repent of. First, pride. I suspect that you, if you are like me, think yourself a pretty decent repenter. You likely wish that others would learn from your wonderful example and do likewise. Indeed, now that I mention it, you can think of several people that owe you an apology, and aren’t you the one being so gracious about it up until now?
Second, lying. I suspect that you, if you are like me, have in thinking all of the above lied to yourself in an egregious way. You are deluded, your delusions springing forth from your deceitful heart like so many dandelions on a spring day.
Third, pride again. Here your pride is less about you and more about Jesus. That is, our failure to understand what failures we are is in turn a reflection on the work of Christ. We diminish His work on our behalf when we diminish the scope of our own sin. Fourth, unrepentance. That is, because, like me, you are a bigger sinner than you are willing to face; you have not repented for your sins like you ought. You have repented lightly for dark sins.
What should you do? You could get mad at me for pointing this all out. Or, you could repent. You could ask that God would forgive you for thinking too highly of yourself. You could ask that He would empower you to be swift to see your own sins and swift in turn to confess them both to Him and to those that you have wronged. You could ask that you might have earned the right to have etched on your gravestone: “He was quick to repent.” And you could thank God for His provision of His Son so that we can be forgiven.
You could ask Him to gently remind you each time you find yourself unhappy about the sins of your family, your neighbors, your fellow parishioners from your church, your parents, your elders, and others that such would be a prompt to you to assess honestly your own weaknesses. That we are sinners is a problem solved by the coming of Jesus the Savior. That we don’t know we are sinners — that is a problem for the Holy Spirit, who convicts and sanctifies.
The answer to every problem, no matter how complex, is simple — repent and believe the gospel. As frustrating as our own blindness might be, the light has come into the world. As maddening as our weaknesses might be, the Sovereign One has come and dwelt among us. As embarrassing as our pride might be, the One who is poor in Spirit has sent the Spirit to lead us into all truth, including the ugly truth about ourselves.
Before we take over the levers of power, before we dominion our way back to prosperity, before we press the crown rights of King Jesus over the culture, may we remember the crown of thorns and repent. And when we have repented, let us repent again for the anemia of our repentance. Then, let us believe that He is at work in us both to do and to will His good pleasure. And all these things will be added unto us.
Festival season is beginning to wind down. Here in Fort Wayne, Indiana Johnny Appleseed Days are in the rearview mirror. In my old hometown of Ligonier, Pennsylvania, Fort Ligonier Days have come and gone. These festivals have a great deal in common with festivals around the country. They tend to be held around the end of harvest. Many of them feature fair foods- funnel cakes and fried oreo cookies. A parade is often involved, with homecoming courts being squired along in convertibles.
There are, however, also distinctives. These festivals often zero in either on a regional food at harvest time, or on some historic event or personage. Here we remember John Chapman, the folk hero known as Johnny Appleseed, who passed away while in Fort Wayne. In Ligonier we remember the battle that took place during the French and Indian War, when the fort was commanded by a young colonel, George Washington.
As much as we might enjoy all that is common to these festivities, it is the distinctives that give each festival its charm. These are times for local communities to celebrate what makes them distinct from every other community. They are expressions of local, folk culture.
Which the juggernaut of pop culture continues to mow right over. Our shared experiences are increasingly less and less defined by the boundaries of our hometown, more and more defined by what’s streaming, what’s gone viral, what the latest craze is.
Folk culture is designed to be permanent, to sustain a local culture. Pop culture is designed to be disposable, to sustain the wealth of its creators. One encourages each of us to remember who we are, the other to forget, to be absorbed into the Borg. We are not merely allowing, but choosing to lose our accents, our peculiar vocabulary and phrases, our enigmatic habits, our acquired tastes. We want to be like everyone else.
Until we don’t. It is precisely because we are not made to live and move and have our being in pop culture that we actually, at least this time of year, remember what we once were, how we used to do things, even what we used to eat. Local festivals are celebrations of localities, and the loved ones who claim them as home.
Railroads, telegraphs, radios, televisions, a sea of franchise strip malls and the internet have done well to connect us to each other. But at the cost of disconnecting us from ourselves. May we better learn to remember where we are, that we might better remember who we are.
Ahab’s Horse
A man nursed a field, just as his father had
When along came an evil man, wicked King Ahab.
A family name was plowed under, and blood now stains the ground
You can still hear Naboth crying in that whistle’s sound.
Ahab’s horse keeps running, grinding men within its gears
It came to town and tore it down, driving here away from here.
They dangled foreign dainties, fruits found in fields afar
Made us free our jubilee, made continental scar.
They promised power paradise was just around the bend
And just around and just around and just around again.
Ahab’s horse keeps running, grinding men within its gears
It came to town and tore it down, driving here away from here.
They next strung up their wires to bring us distant cares
By dash and dot our focus caught on vanities’ affairs
A man knows not his neighbor when he studies teletype
The fruit of human kindness trodden under, over-ripe.
Ahab’s horse keeps running, grinding men within its gears
It came to town and tore it down, driving here away from here.
A Man, a land, a plan that never the twain be torn
A Horseman cometh one day and e’en this evil He has born
His wrath white hot, unquenching burns
And Ahab to his bile returns.
Ahab’s horse now paddocked, taken captive away
Home then here and here then home; we’ll drink new wine that day.
Sorry friends for my continued technical difficulties. As we did a few weeks ago, we offer here our Bible study in place of the missing podcast. Hopefully we’ll get our issues worked out soon.
If you find yourself in a grand quandary, chances are you are missing the obvious. No, I don’t mean that all difficult questions come equipped with easy answers. The point isn’t that every complex question can only be reached through muddling up simple questions. Instead what I mean is that most of the time we spend on real brain teasers would be better spent on kid’s play. Children, as a rule, don’t feel the need to understand the reasoning behind a rule. They only need to know the authority of the one making the rule. We are His children, and His reasoning is always perfect.
Consider the Christian and the homosexual lobby. We feel flummoxed, off-balance, precisely because it seems as if embracing what the Bible says on this issue will mean that the broader culture will hate us, be mean to us. It will mean being seen as hopelessly ignorant, behind the times and mean. Surely, we reason, there must be a way to look at this issue that will allow us to affirm our commitment to God’s authority while steering clear of the hatred of the world. I mean, how are we supposed to win the world to Christ if they hate us?
The reason we find the issue complicated is because we’ve already rejected the wisdom of God. He told us, over and over again, that loyalty to Him will mean the hatred of the world. He told us, not once, not ever, that the way to win the world to Him is to be sure we’re liked by the world. He told us, over and over again, that His Word is not only true but clear. He told us, not once, not ever, that God’s judgment on perversion is a thing of the past. To put it another way, when it comes to faithfully following Jesus, the hatred of the world is not a bug but a feature.
My point here isn’t to make yet another argument against the homosexual lobby. Rather my point is about us believers and our propensity to miss that which is clear and simple because we carry unbiblical and selfish presuppositions along for the ride. We deny the perversion of perversion because we’ve already perversely denied that we’re to be hated by the world.
If you’re thinking too hard, you’re trying too hard. Go back to the beginning and do the simple things. Not only is Jesus’ yoke easy and His burden light, but you don’t need a Ph.D. to know how to carry it. It is light because we don’t carry the burden of figuring it all out. It is easy because it calls us to simply trust Him, the one trustworthy being in all the universe. Trust Him. Give up on the dream of being loved by the world. Rejoice and give thanks when you are hated for His name’s sake. It’s simple.
We continue our weekly Monday night Bible study. We begin at 7:00, but local guests are invited to come for dinner too, at 6:15.
We air the study on Facebook Live (RC-Lisa Sproul). Within a day or two we post the video of the study right here for those who would like to watch on their own schedule.
We’d love to have you with us, in person if possible. We’d love for you to invite your friends. Our study considers the attributes of God, unpacking just a hint of His ineffable glory. Tonight- God Is Jealous
The claim is a bit of cliché but like most cliches, it became one because there’s truth in it. You have heard it said, “Technology is not good or bad. It depends on how it’s used.” While I think too often this nugget papers over some more subtle dangers of this technology or that, it’s still fundamentally true.
A few weeks ago the Prime Minster of the UK publicly announced his intention to pass legislation that would require all citizens to have a digital ID. He insisted that not a single soul would be free to work in the UK without one. This, he said, would solve the problem of illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel and assorted other unnamed problems. The good news is he has received significant pushback. The bad news is it hasn’t been nearly enough.
I don’t doubt that certain problems would be alleviated by digital ID. We would all reap some significant benefits. Our increased convenience, however, would be far outrun by our decreased liberty, by the state’s increased convenience in not only monitoring all that we do, but controlling what we do. Digital ID becomes the central hub of all our economic activity, and whomever controls it controls us.
The same principle applies to CBDC, central bank digital currencies. Lots of benefits for citizens. Complete control for Big Brother. End of the world kind of control- no buying or selling without Uncle Sam’s approval. Because we increasingly seem happy to trade liberty for convenience, there are those who support these kinds of measures. They make the argument that our gain is greater than the government’s gain.
Here’s how we know they are lying. If digital ID brings greater benefit to us than not having it, why in the world would the state need to mandate it? Did any government require all of us to get smart phones? Did they, back in the day, mandate all businesses to install fax machines? Did the feds come around to make sure everyone bought a refrigerator? No. Because people wanted those things they purchased them freely.
It was the inimitable sage President Reagan who quipped, “The scariest words in the world are, ‘we’re from the government and we’re here to help.'” He understood, as we all ought, that the state does not see itself as those called to punish evil doers. They see us as cattle to be herded, butchered, and put on their table. Digital ID is each of us walking through the chute on our way to the slaughterhouse.
Many nations around the world, none more draconian than communist China, already have digital ID. Pilot programs operate in multiple countries testing CBDC. And now we have the political head of the United Kingdom insisting digital ID is going to be mandatory in his nation, and soon. Do not just assume that this is just one more technological advance. Do not assume that because you like the guy in the White House there is nothing to worry about. The price of liberty, our founding father Thomas Jefferson warned us, is eternal vigilance. May we not sleep on our watch.
