What Do You Most Want in Life?

What is it that you most want in life? I love the way Ecclesiastes shows the goodness of many things God gives us to enjoy while warning us that good things are not the source of our ultimate hope in this sin-broken world.

It is one thing to say that, but it is often hard to let that truth grip us. For that, we need the help of imagination. We need the fact to intersect with our lives and thinking. I appreciate Zack Eswine's help here (From Recovering Eden: The gospel according to Ecclesiastes, pg. 76-77)

When we were young, we dream of a house to buy, a yard to create with, pieces of furniture to possess, and a bank account from which to use for our gain. When we are old, a time comes to sell everything that once represented our dreams of a future. We have to move to an assisted living facility, or in with our kids while someone else uses the drapes we left on the windows we used to wash and enjoy.  

A young woman fills a hope chest with treasures over which she dreams, and intends to bring into her future with her man. An elderly woman has long since buried her lovely man and now has to sell or give her hope chest away.  

"As he came from his mother's womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand." (Eccl. 5:15) 

The One greater than Solomon [ie. Jesus] takes up this truth and preaches it. There are treasures, so called, that last for a moment but rust and moth eat away. Other treasures exist of a kind that rust and moth cannot touch. The former make us smile, but they cannot keep the frowns of the world from taking place. A treasure of a different kind is needed that can outlast this life under the sun (Matt. 6:19-20).
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Even though there are these pleasures in the world that are ours for use, they cannot satisfy what only God can.

Persecution in Russia

As we thought about persecution this past week in Sunday's sermon, I'll point us to a prayer request for our brothers and sisters in Russia.

According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Russian government has passed and signed into law massive restrictions on religious liberty (Here is the press release from the USCIRF).

According to Joe Carter, at the Gospel Coalition,

The new law will ban “preaching, praying, proselytizing, and disseminating religious materials” outside of sites officially designated by the state. Citizens can also be fined up to $15,000 for engaging in these activities in private residences or distributing unauthorized religious materials through “mass print, broadcast, or online media.”

Even foreign missionaries will have to be invited by a government sanctioned organization and will be limited to working within specific locations.

We can be sure this law will bring about persecution for our brothers and sisters and make it more costly for them to "make disciples." Let's pray for their courage and strength to follow Jesus even if it means the plundering of their property and more.

"Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, And The Dallas Police Massacre"

As Rod said on Sunday, as he prayed, "It seems our flag is always at half mast." How should we as Christians mourn, speak, and act? Should it look different than the world around us? What about our social media posts? Should they look different than those who don't know Christ?

I found this podcast about the recent acts of violence in our country helpful in answering these questions (from Heath Lambert on the Truth in Love podcast).  Take a listen. It is about 15 minutes long (though I listened to it in my pocketcast app at 1.3 speed and it took less than 15 minutes...perhaps one of our math students can tell us exactly how long it should have taken).

An Ominous Sign for Religious Liberty

We finished our book club last week by looking at John Piper's final chapter in Desiring God, "Suffering: The Sacrifice of Christian Hedonism." In that discussion, I mentioned that we face relatively light persecution at this point but that it seemed that would probably not remain the case. I mentioned that religious liberty is waning in our country. I wanted to mention one recent example.

Why talk about this?
The reason I point this out is to help us get serious about properly valuing Christ now. A shallow or superficial connection to Jesus is not going to stand up when difficulty for following him comes. Second, I want us to be aware of what is going on so we can argue for religious liberty in our spheres of influence. Finally, I want us to know what is going on so we can pray for others and our country. Notice, my reason is not so we will feel sorry for ourselves and bemoan how things used to be better. There is not really a place for that when we know we live under our sovereign God's care and love.

An example of a threat to religious liberty.
A privately held pharmacy in Washington state has effectively been shut down by that state's government because they refused to sell a drug used to kill unborn children in the womb. This refusal is out of their religious convictions that life begins at conception and this drug would effectively be killing one patient at the request of another. See the video below for more details:



In June, 2016, the US Supreme Court decided not to hear the case. This effectively means these pharmacists have lost the case and will no longer be able to run their pharmacy. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, in dissent,

This case is an ominous sign...If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have cause for great concern.

This is a sitting supreme court justice writing that we ought to be very concerned about what the Supreme court is doing in this case. What they are doing is ignoring the constitution, which is the document they are charged to apply to laws in this country.

The first amendment to the constitution reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This has subtlety been changed, in regards to application of the law, to guarantee a freedom to privately hold beliefs and to worship as you want. That is, you can have your religious views and conscience as long as it doesn't affect the way you live, talk, or do business. However, this law actually guarantees more than that. It promises the right to exercise one's religion freely - not just to go to what church one wants to attend.

Let's spend some time thinking about the value of Jesus so that we will be ready to lose everything, if necessary, in order to have him.

The Con of Abortion Debate

This week the US Supreme Court struck down a Texas law regarding abortion clinic safety regulations. You can read more about the facts of the case here from Joe Carter at the Gospel Coalition.

What Walker Percey (American Novelist 1916-1990) wrote to in a letter to the New York Times in 1981 still seems to be quite relevant. Here is an excerpt (whole thing is here):

The current con, perpetrated by some jurists, some editorial writers, and some doctors is that since there is no agreement about the beginning of human life, it is therefore a private religious or philosophical decision and therefore the state and the courts can do nothing about it. This is a con. I will not presume to speculate who is conning whom and for what purpose. But I do submit that religion, philosophy, and private opinion have nothing to do with this issue. I further submit that it is a commonplace of modern biology, known to every high school student and no doubt to you the reader as well, that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism. 

Such vexed subjects as the soul, God, and the nature of man are not at issue. What we are talking about and what nobody I know would deny is the clear continuum that exists in the life of every individual from the moment of fertilization of a single cell. 

There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment. 

Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is cross-examining a high school biology teacher and admonishing him that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human ovum is an individual human life. He is enjoined not to teach his private beliefs at a public school. Like Galileo he caves in, submits, but in turning away is heard to murmur, “But it’s still alive!” 

To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.

"Should I Attend a Homosexual Wedding?"

This past Sunday I mentioned an article by Kevin DeYoung in which he gives his response to the question of whether Christians should attend a homosexual wedding if the ceremony is entirely secular.

In short, as personally painful as it may be, and as much as the world will call us names and castigate our motives, those who believe marriage is between a man and a woman should not attend a ceremony that purports to be the marrying of a man and a man or a woman and a woman, even if that ceremony is completely secular in nature.

In the article he gives three reasons to support this view (which I agree with).

1. The purpose of a wedding ceremony is to celebrate and solemnize.
2. Wedding ceremonies are almost always public in nature.
3. The stark either/or options are not of our making.(referring to the "either you care about me and come or you don't care about me" proposition we might face). 

Under this last point he writes

If traditional Christians have to learn to love gay and lesbian friends and family members despite decisions they disagree with, then gays and lesbians should learn to love their Christian friends and families despite decisions they disagree with. We should take time to hear why our attendance means so much to them. And then, hopefully, they will take time to hear why our faith in Christ and obedience to the Bible mean so much to us.

I encourage you to read the whole article. It is worth reading, thinking about, and talking about with fellow Christians. I know this is something we will face (even afterwards someone told me they already faced this question at work). Let's have thought about it ahead of time so that we are ready to respond with convictional kindness. We want to glorify God and love our neighbors. It takes wisdom to do that. 

Thinking about the Tragedy in Orlando

It wasn't until after our worship service  on Sunday that I heard there had been a massacre in an Orlando night club. Two things come to mind in regards to this:

First, anytime I hear of a tragedy like this I am reminded of Jesus' words when he was asked about similar events in his day:

There were some present at that very time who told [Jesus] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices [a massacre]. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

Tragedies like this serve to call us to consider the fragility and brevity of life. It also calls us to consider that all of us have a sin problem and that we must repent before the judge of the universe. Our neighbors need the hope of God's salvation through Jesus. There is no room for self-righteousness. Times like this are a call to self-evaluation and offering the only true and lasting hope to those around us.

Second, we ought to weep with those who weep. We realize that all those lives that were slain and all those family members grieving are image bearers- made in God's image. That, in and of itself, gives us reason to cry over the evil that was committed.

If you are still processing the events of this weekend, I encourage you to listen to Albert Mohler's briefing podcast from Monday, June 13, 2016. It is about 20 minutes long and helpfully reminds us of how Christians ought to think and grieve and offer the hope of the gospel.