My friend Phil Gioja at Center Street Productions has been doing some more creative work on a message I gave on Easter Sunday. We talked together about losing my image (the video) so that the words could be more useful to other churches. Here’s what he came up with. Good work Phil.
“In a Christian community, everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. It will be well, therefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that he may know in hours of doubt that he, too, is not useless and unusable. Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of the fellowship.”
http://dailychristianquote.com/dcqbonhoeffer.html
I was reading the book of Moses, the Torah, specifically the book of Deuteronomy and ran across this pregnant passage. Moses is the mouthpiece of God, he is sharing God’s will for the nation when they come into the land and begin to set up governmental structures. He speaks of a time in the future when they will set up a kingship in anticipation of the ultimate kingship of God Himself.
Deuteronomy 17:15-17 (ESV)
15 you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. 16 Only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses, since the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ 17 And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.[1]
I read this passage and immediately thought of Senator Mark Hatfield’s comment about the danger of politics and governing in general. Senator Hatfield once said,
“I don’t know of any profession or pursuit in life that is more seductive than politics,
because it deals primarily with power.”[2]
Isn’t this what Moses and God are concerned about in this passage?
Vs. 16—“only he shall not acquire many horses.”
Horses were the key to military power in ancient world. With them you drove your chariots, the tanks of that era. With them you moved your people and equipment over vast distances. This is the temptation to POWER.
Vs. 17—“he shall not acquire many wives.”
This is the temptation of SEX that often travels with a sense of power.
Vs. 17—“nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.”
This is the temptation of RICHES.
Saul, Israel’s first King, succumbed to the temptations of POWER.
David, Israel’s second King, succumbed to the temptations of both POWER and SEX, and
Solomon, the third King, succumbed to all three.
These leaders of government all failed to heed the warning of Deuteronomy 17 and the nation paid the consequences. Pray that our leaders, no matter what their party and policy, would learn to fight these temptations lest our nation suffer the consequences. And pray that God would give you wisdom in who to elect to lead our nation.
[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Standard Bible Society, 2001. [2]Christianity Today “Mark Hatfield Taps into the Real Power on Capital Hill,” (October 22, 1982), 22.
Marty Schoenleber, Jr. is the founding pastor of one church, the interim pastor of another church and the church planting trainer/mentor of over 200 other church planting pastors. He is adjunct professor of Church Planting at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and has taught Preaching at the International School of Theology, and Evangelism at Moody Graduate School of Theology. He is also the Director of the Saint John’s Pastoral Center, a pastoral care and retreat center located in a growing number of Bed and Breakfast houses across the mid-west. His latest book is Picking a President: Or Any Other Elected Official (CrossBooks, [late May 2012]). To enjoy a free subscription to his blog, log-on to www.chosenrebel.wordpress.com, where you can post your comments, view past blogs in our archive and read the latest reflections on church planting, Biblical Expositions and musings about church, culture and spiritual formation. Follow Pastor Marty on twitter @1Chosenrebel4JC.
Preached on Ezra 7:6-10 this morning. Here’s the outline:
We need to be doers of the word, walking into the day with hearts atune and ready to do the will of God. Here’s how the process starts.
“God wants to be the primary pursuit and goal of all that you study. He wants to be at the center of your intellectual and emotional universe. He is a jealous God and He longs for your affections.”
Story out about a church that is reaching out to people in the community who might not otherwise go to church–they are live-streaming their worship service into a local bar with a camera set up in the bar that also plays back at the church so worshipers there can see the worshipers at the bar.
Here’s the link: The article is short. Read it and tell me what you think.
Question: What’s wrong or what’s wonderful about this story?
Weekend Musings
Take a look at the not so brilliant response of an atheist who commented on this post. It will strengthen your faith in the gospels. For more see … Brilliant Defense of the Historicity of the Gospels.
(From Kairos Journal)
Traditional marriage is on the rocks in the West, and not just because of the influence of the homosexual activist community and the introduction of so-called gay marriage. Heterosexuals are also to blame for marriage’s bad press. Since the 1960s and 70s, heterosexual cohabitation outside of marriage has 
skyrocketed. In fact, the number of American couples cohabiting has risen 1,500 percent in the last fifty years, with more than 7.5 million couples currently living together. Most American adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner to whom they are not married at least once, and most marriages will be preceded by cohabitation.1 When queried about why they live together, many couples exclaim, “Oh, marriage is just a piece of paper.” While Christians know that lifelong, heterosexual marriage is much more than that, the justification for living together is often made on the assumption that cohabitation is more emotionally healthy than marriage.
When one examines the data, however, cohabitation is actually harmful to couples and children. Even secular researchers have concluded that couples who live together before marriage tend to be less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce.2 In her statistical analyses of the rise of cohabitation and its effects, sociologist Patricia Morgan has debunked four popular myths about living together:3
Myth no. 1: Living together sets women free from the shackles of a male-dominated, dependent relationship in marriage.
Fact: Women and their children are at greater risk of being abused in a cohabiting relationship than they are in a marriage.
Myth no. 2: “It’s the quality of the relationship that matters, not the bit of paper.”
Fact: Where people live together without marrying, the quality of the relationship is often significantly worse than it is in marriage.
Myth no. 3: Cohabiting relationships are just as stable as marriage. The “bit of paper” does not mean anything.
Fact: Cohabiting relationships break down more easily than marriages do. Couples who have children without getting married are very unlikely to stay together while their children are growing up.
Myth no. 4: People live together until they have children and then get married.
Fact: Couples who have children and then marry are more likely to divorce than couples who marry first then have children. Cohabiting couples with children are more likely to break up than those without children.4
So, people may offer a variety of reasons for living together, but emotional health and the well-being of children cannot be among the justifications.
Christians should rejoice over God’s good and gracious gift of covenantal marriage. Helping congregations—especially young people preparing for marriage in the future—understand the benefits of monogamous married love and dispelling the myths of cohabitation are great privileges afforded to the faithful shepherd.
Footnotes:
| 1 | Meg Jay, “The Downside of Cohabiting before Marriage,” The New York Times,http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-downside-of-cohabiting-before-marriage.html?_r=2 (accessed April 18, 2012). |
| 2 | Ibid. |
| 3 | Morgan’s study centers on England and Australia, though it does connect with the literature on the U.S. and continental Europe. |
| 4 | Adapted from Patricia Morgan, Marriage-Lite: The Rise of Cohabitation and Its Consequences (London: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2000). |
Holy Saturday must have felt like the longest day of their lives. But Sunday was coming.The sunrise of the third day was approaching.The tomb was still full, but not for long.
More, see The Silent Saturday Between Horror and Glory.
The following article is from Kairos Journal and it is one one of the most interesting 600 words I have read this year. I want to read more from this Jewish scholar and his perspective. See if you don’t see what I mean. Take three minutes and read this article. It’s another great example of “ideas have consequences.”
Sparked by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia, World War I began in 1914. In turn, World War II started in the 1930s, with Japan’s, Italy’s, and 
Germany’s invasions of China, Ethiopia, and Poland, respectively. But, according to Ivy League sociologist Philip Rieff, there is a longer running “world war,” one which erupted with particular ferocity in 1882, when Friederich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead.”1 The parties to this larger conflict do not bear the names Central Power, Axis, and Allied. Rather, this is a war between first, second, and third “worlds” (overarching cultural perspectives)—the last two in particular.
According to Rieff, the first world is pagan, obsessed with gods, whether the Olympian deities of ancient Greece or the aboriginal spirits of Australia’s outback. The second world is monotheistic; in its realm, the Living God authoritatively issues prohibitive commandments. The third world is obsessed with erasure,2 determined to destroy the second culture, indeed, culture itself, and usher in an “age without moralities and religions.”3 Instead of commandments, it favors the ever-shifting phenomena of “values.”4 While the first world had taboos and the second had divine “interdicts,” the third world starts with “remissives” (excuses and exceptions) and ends in “transgressives,” where once-condemned sins are now celebrated.5
The move from first to third worlds is a transition from fate to faith to fiction. One is finally left in a place where “there is no truth, only rhetorics of self-interest.”6 Where once there was a “Way,” a via (“verticality in authority”), and “the sacred,”7 now there is only human vanity and license, a world where relativistic multi-culturalism is actually anti-culturalism.8 Having thrown off a master, man is now “mastered only by his desires.”
Schools teaching “self-esteem therapy are preparatory schools” for third world “scourges,” driven by “an ideology of anger and hatred,” bent on destroying “white males, patriarchy, biological constraints on sexuality, the ruling class, capitalism, pet ownership, law: any restraint that keeps a man or woman from becoming the world.”9 Such “[t]hird world education is a matter of indoctrination into the fictive culture of the primacy of possibility”10—a universe with no limits.
In Rieff’s terms, the acts of those committed to this downward spiral are “deathworks,” and its “negational artists” are legion: the American poet Wallace Stevens (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”);11 the Irish writer James Joyce (Finnegans Wake);12 American novelist Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness);13 Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism);14 German tyrant Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf);15 Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon);16 French artist Marcel Duchamp (Etant donnés);17 British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations);18 American broadcaster Bryant Gumbel (adversarial interview of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy on NBC’s Today Show);19 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade); 20 American filmmaker Martin Scorcese (Goodfellas);21 American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (Self-Portrait);22 and French philosopher Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge). 23
A Jew, Rieff lifts up the Hebrew (and biblical) practice of shuv (repentance).24 He applauds the “interdicts,” the “Nots,” of Pope Benedict: “To be a Christian is a life and to the life belongs: not to have abortion, not divorce, not to have homosexuality.”25 And he cherishes the work of “sacred messengers,” such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago is “the greatest book of remembrance, the greatest martyrology, ever written.”26 Unfortunately, Rieff is suspicious of Christianity as he misreads threats to “sacred order” in the gospel of grace. He is stuck on Sinai, but in this day of third-world barbarism,27 that is not a bad place to begin.
Footnotes:
1 Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 69.
2 Ibid., 199-200.
3 ibid., 5-7.
4 Ibid., 11.
5 Ibid., 12.
6 Ibid., 14.
7 Ibid., 12.
8 Ibid.,14.
9 Ibid.,173.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 38.
12 Ibid., 28, 94.
13 Ibid., 41.
14 Ibid., 67.
15 ibid., 75.
16 Ibid., 107.
17 Ibid., 109.
18 Ibid., 146.
19 Ibid., 153.
20 Ibid., 154.
21 Ibid., 184.
22 Ibid., 198.
23 Ibid., 206.
24 Ibid., 60.
25 Ibid., 59.
26 Ibid., 192.
27 Ibid., 197.
Latest video is up. Phil Giajo did an amazing job filming, editing and posting this all in less than 11 hours. Great job Phil. May God use your efforts to reach many with the gospel this Easter season.And May God use the video to inspire other churches in what they might do to tell the gospel story in their community.
I'm investing my remaining years in the young leaders of the next great worldwide church planting movement.
