Parenting: Your Marriage Preaches

What is the most effective parenting tool for the Christian? It is your marriage. Here is a great excerpt from the highly recommended book, Gospel Powered Parenting:

“This mystery [marriage] is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” Here is Paul’s point. From before time began, God had marriage on his mind. He was preparing a bride for his Son, whom he would marry forever. It would take the crucifixion and resurrection of the Groom to bring this marriage to pass. Think of it. God created the most intimate human relationship, marriage, to speak of the intimacy of his relationship with his church.

God created the institution of human marriage to reflect, or mirror forth, this eternal union. In other words, human marriage exists to point men and angels to the eternal marriage of Christ and his church. The gospel made this divine marriage possible. Here is our point: human marriage exists to preach the gospel. It exists to illustrate the fruit that should follow the preaching of the gospel in the church.

To whom do our marriage preach? Of course, the first audience is God and his angels. They watch and rejoice, or if our marriage is a war zone, they grieve.

Who is the second audience? Most of us think first about our non-Christian neighbors. Maybe they will see our attempts to model Christian marriage and want the gospel? They might, and we hope they will, but actually they are the third audience.

The second audience, usually overlooked by most Christians, is our children. What is our marriage telling them about Christ and his bride? They see it all. They hear our fights. They absorb our attitudes. They know who or what really sits on the throne of our lives. They watch how we handle resentment. They hear the way we talk to each other. They know when we hear the Sunday sermon and apply it. They also know when we ignore it.

The message that our marriage preaches either repels or attracts our children. God wants your child to watch your marriage and think, “I want a marriage like that, and I want the God that produced it.” Or, “When I think of the beauty of the gospel, I think of my parents’ marriage. I want to be part of a church that is loved by God the way my dad loves my mother. I want to be part of a church that finds its joy in submitting to Christ as my mother joyfully submits to my father.”

Gospel-Powered Parenting: How the Gospel Shapes and Transforms Parenting, William P. Farley (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009).

Book Review - The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

You may be thinking, “Oh great; another guilt trip coming from another book telling me how much I fail at evangelism.” There have been many books written on evangelism and every time we see it we are simply reminded how much we fail at the Great Commission. Books range from different styles of personal evangelism to church programs to supplement evangelism to how to make your church more appealing to “seekers.” The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever is different; and quite refreshing.

This book is different in that while it does admit our failures, it doesn’t try to offer another program to throw in the arsenal. Dever simply takes a look at the basics of evangelism in chapters answering some simple questions: Why Don’t We Evangelize, What is the Gospel, Who Should Evangelize, How Should We Evangelize, What Isn’t Evangelism, What Should We Do After We Evangelize, and Why Should We Evangelize. The book simply explains what is so often ignored or at best assumed in most other evangelism books in order to “be an encouragement, a clarification, an instruction, a rebuke, and a challenge all rolled up into several short chapters.” (pg. 16)

The first chapter takes a look at the various excuses and complaints that keep us from evangelism. Instead of just offering a Bible verse to show where the excuse fails, Dever offers many practical steps to overcome our fears and move toward better obedience. It is not so much a rebuke as it is a gentle push in the right direction.

By far the best and most important chapter in The Gospel and Personal Evangelism is the second chapter detailing what the gospel is. Too often in evangelism discussions the gospel is assumed or lost in a sea of Christian clichés. After enough clichés are thrown around the message loses its meaning and ceases to be the gospel. Dever addresses many of these misunderstanding a paints a clear picture of the message, “our problems aren’t fundamentally that we have messed up our own lives, or have simply failed to reach our full potential, but that we have sinned against God. And so it begins to dawn on us that we are rightly the objects of God’s wrath and his judgment, and that we deserve death, separation from God, and spiritual alienation from him now and even forever.” (pg. 35)

“Christ isn’t just our friend. To call him supremely that is to damn him with faint praise. He is our friend, but he is so much more! By his death on the cross Christ has become the lamb that was slain for us, our redeemer, the one who has made peace between us and God, who has taken our guilt on himself, who has conquered our most deadly enemies and has assuaged the personal, just wrath of God.” (pg. 39)

And the response to this good news is often confused in our messages to the world. We like to tell people to “ask Jesus into your heart” or “accept Christ” while these are not the response commanded so often in Scripture. These may have elements of truth in them, but throughout the New Testament the response to the gospel message is to repent of your sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Another helpful segment of the book is Dever’s chapter on How We Should Evangelize. Too often we get bogged down in discussions on which program is best or which method works for what personality style you have. Mark Dever explains here that it doesn’t matter as much which method you use but it is the message that must be clear, biblical and bathed in much prayer. We must strive to verbally (that means with words, no matter how much you try to state a falsely attributed St. Francis of Assisi quote) explain the gospel to all who will listen so that it provokes deep self-reflection.

Other chapters take a look at why evangelism is important, what should accompany evangelism, and how our witnessing attempts get distracted by things that aren’t evangelism; imposition, social action, public involvement, apologetics, and pragmatic numbers counting. In the end, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism simply encourages the believer to be faithful to tell the message no matter what the result: “The redemption of an eternal soul is one sale that we, in our own strength, cannot accomplish. And we need to know it, not so that we won’t preach the gospel, but so that we won’t allow the gospel that is preached to be molded by what finally gets a response!” (pg. 109)

“We do not fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not subsequently converted; we fail only if we do not faithfully tell the gospel at all.” (pg. 112)

Book Review: The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World

Start a conversation today with a non-Christian and you may notice quite a bit of difficulty in maintaining a rational discussion. Today’s American culture is becoming much less familiar with the Christian story. Our country is becoming more biblically illiterate making evangelism a much longer more difficult endeavor. Many in our society don’t know who Jesus Christ is or what the cross represents. The number of people claiming to not believe in a God at all is on the rise. And increasingly, several dialogues may leave your head spinning or pounding as you try to understand the postmodern mindset that says you can’t know what is true or that all beliefs are true.

In The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, seven essays are compiled by John Piper and Justin Taylor explaining how we must engage this postmodernism with the truth of Christ. The authors who contributed to the book include: David Wells, Voddie Baucham Jr., D.A. Carson, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, Justin Taylor, and John Piper. Each author biblically expounds on the importance of truth, joy, love, the gospel, and the church in relation to this increasingly postmodern world. Justin Taylor summarizes them all in the introduction; “The church should become that for which it was created, namely, the pillar and buttress of truth, joy, and love in order to display the glory of God and the supremacy of Christ in all things.” (pg. 14)

David Wells begins the book with a chapter calling for defending the truth of the Christian faith. Our culture is increasingly becoming pluralistic, seeing little difference in religions. The church has been unable to offer anything of deep meaning to the culture. It has tried to accommodate other religions to the point of offering simple life enhancement and appearing to be no different from the rest. We must strive to hold to truth, declaring the counter message that Christ is the only way. Instead of pandering to the culture’s ideas, we are to offer a message that contradicts the world’s ideas. “Is the evangelical church faithful enough to explode the worldview of this new spiritual search? Is it brave enough to contradict what has wide cultural approval? The final verdict may not be in, but it seems quite apparent that while the culture is burning, the evangelical church is fiddling precisely because it has decided it must be so like the culture to be successful.” (pg. 38)

In the chapter on Truth and The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, Voddie Baucham Jr. dissects the truth of the Bible in answering four basic questions of life: who am I, why am I here, what is wrong with the world and how can what is wrong be made right? He answers these in full detail by explaining that we are the beautiful creation of God; that we were made to give glory to Him; the thing that is wrong with the world is you and me through sin; nothing we can do can make it right, but Christ made it right by taking the punishment on the cross for us. “[According to postmodern secular humanism] the solution to our woes is more education and more government. That’s the only answer our culture can propose: teach people more stuff and give them more information…If you take a sinful, murderous human being and educate that individual, here merely becomes more sophisticated in his ability to destroy.” (pg. 57) Our only hope in the world is to throw ourselves at the mercy of God and trust in Christ for righteousness.

John Piper continues the theme of his entire ministry writing about joy in The Supremacy of Christ. He gives the condensed version of the chapter by saying, “(1) Jesus’ greatest joy is in the glory of his Father, and (2) he shares this joy with us by means of understandable propositions (or Bible doctrine) about himself and his Father and his work, which the Holy Spirit illumines and ignites as the kindling of our passion for Christ.” (pg. 72) Piper explains it as we are being made to be more like Christ, our greatest joy also becomes that of Him; giving glory to the Father. By revealing Himself through the Bible, he gives us an opportunity to know Him more and through that knowledge we find more joy in His infinite glory. “If you say, ‘My joy is in the journey toward knowing, not the arrival,’ you make an idol out of the journey and you turn heaven into a disappointment…If you get most of your joy from what you don’t know about God, God is not glorified in your joy. His Son and his Book and his world are the revelation of his glory. He has made the knowledge of himself possible…Therefore, the joy you have in what you know of God is intensified by the expectation that there is so much more to see. The mystery of what you don’t know gets its God-glorifying power from what you do know. God is not glorified by strong feelings of wonder that flow from ignorance of what he is like.” (pgs. 80-81)

Especially in our culture the word “love” is very misunderstood. We say so often the promise of John 3:16 and because of the misuse of the word we often miss the depth of God’s love. D.A. Carson discusses God’s love for us (and how we are to relate it to the lost world) by first meditating on the love within the Trinity. “All of this manifestation of glory, of the goodness of God, is displayed because the Father loved Jesus before the creation of the world. The thought is stunning. All this display of the glory of God focuses finally on the goodness of God in the cross and vindication of the Son for the sake of poor sinners – and al of it is grounded in the sheer love of the Father for the Son – the same love, Jesus insists, that the Father has for us.” (pg. 94) What an amazing thought that the all-sufficient Creator of the universe who was supremely satisfied with the love He shared within the Trinity, decided to create us humans to pour out even more of His love!

Tim Keller, in the chapter focusing on the gospel itself and how we must share it with the world, stressed the importance of being very clear in our presentations. The old ways of programmed, scripted evangelism don’t work anymore because of the biblical illiteracy of our country. We were a country founded on Christian principles and shaped by biblical themes. However, many people today on the street have never heard the Christian story or are completely ignorant of any biblical references. Keller explains that we must start our evangelism farther back at the existence of God and the creation of the universe far before we can walk someone through the Romans Road. “The problem with virtually all modern evangelism programs is that they assume listeners come from a Christianized background, and so they very lightly summarize the gospel and go right to [personal commitment]. But this is no longer sufficient.” (pg. 115) We must be complete in our gospel proclamations; not just declaring salvation from sins, but also giving hope of the restoration of all things. People recognize that something is wrong with the world, and we can give them hope of a new creation.

The final chapter is written by Mark Driscoll who challenges the church to stand for truth and be an example of Christ in the world. “Jesus is as popular, controversial, and misunderstood as ever. Therefore, it is imperative that Christians contend for a faithful and biblical Christology and contextualize that Christology for a fruitful and cultural missiology.” (pg. 127) There are a lot of popular “Christs” in the world today, but it is important for us to be clear which is the true Jesus revealed to us in the Bible. Many today focus on the humble incarnation of Christ and forget that He is the reigning King of kings who will return in flaming glory to pour out His wrath on sinners. We are commissioned to tell the world of His patience and loving-kindness that is displayed until the time He returns. Driscoll, however, reminds us that while we have been given this authority to proclaim the gospel message to the world, it is Christ who is in charge and we are simply to be an example of the humble Jesus who proclaimed the good news and sacrificed his life for those He loved. Similar to Keller’s essay, Driscoll says, “Sadly, too often the church is filled with language, customs, and styles that are so altogether foreign to the average lost person that unless contextualization occurs and explanation is given, lost people will remain, in Paul’s words, ‘foreigners’ and not friends.” (pg. 144)

The entire book presents concepts that are important for every faithful Christian to understand. As missionaries in our own sub-cultures we cannot assume a changing culture will understand and embrace our unchanging message. But, we must stand for truth while we live humble lives expressing joy in God and love for others that gives us an opportunity to explain the complete gospel to a world that misunderstands the message of Christ.