Table of Contents:
Children Are a Blessing…and a Deterrent
When Drawing Near to God Hurts
Marriage: The First 50 Years are the Hardest
Exegetically Speaking
Following God
Words to Stand You on Your Feet
Jewels from Past Giants
Marks of the Master
Advancing the Ministries of the Gospel
Book Reviews
News Update
Sermon Helps
Puzzles and ‘Toons
___________________________________
Children Are a Blessing…and a Deterrent
By Justin Lonas
Editor’s note: In light of recent cultural and political discussions in the United States, this seemed a fitting reminder of God’s design for humanity. Originally published in Pulpit Helps November 2009.
“Behold, children are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward” (Ps. 127:3).
Scripture has a lot to say about children. They are an implicit part of God’s plan for creation; procreation is commanded in the mandate of Genesis 1:28 (“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”). Abraham’s promised blessing is one of descendents—the “great nation” God built through His line in order to be a blessing to all peoples (Gen. 12:2-3) started with the bearing and rearing of children in each generation. They are to honor and obey their parents (Ex. 20:12, Eph. 6:1-3) and to be lovingly disciplined by them (Eph. 6:4).
Children are referred to as a core component of Scripture’s concept of blessedness (Gen. 33:5; Deut. 7:13; 28:4; Ps. 113:9; etc.), and barrenness was seen as a tragedy. Hannah passionately beseeched the Lord to open her womb, promising to give her offspring to His service, and burst forth in praise when the Samuel was born (1 Sam. 1-2). The miraculous birth of John the Baptist was in answer to the prayers of Zacharias and Elizabeth (Luke 1:13-14). Psalm 127 portrays children as the “arsenal” of godly parents, extending the influence of God’s kingdom and providing honor to their earthly fathers and Heavenly Father.
Christ and the apostles used children as examples of pure faith, desiring God without prejudice or hope of reward. In Luke 18:16-17, Jesus received children to Himself and declared, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.” Peter tells us to devour the Word with the hunger of newborn babies (1 Pet. 2:2).
Our world also has a lot to say about children—they are a hindrance to women; they represent the end of “independence” for parents; they are expensive; they are demanding; they shouldn’t be disciplined; they will make up their own minds; society is more effective at raising them than parents; the list goes on.
One could make a good case that the rise and fall of civilizations parallels their adherence to either the Scriptural view of children or the world’s view. Shifting attitudes toward children often follow a predictable pattern. At the tipping point when we stop viewing offspring as a blessing, couples begin to delay childbearing, birth rates decline, cultural acceptance of children in public life wanes, and finally contraception, abortion, and sterilization attempt to push children out of the picture entirely.
Much of the world today is somewhere between the third and fourth phases of that continuum. We can come up with a thousand ways to justify our unnatural and unbiblical attitudes—“we don’t have enough money saved up to give them the quality of life they deserve,” or “having children right now will interfere with our long-term plans for life.” Some in the environmentalist movement argue that the only way to save the earth from pollution is to drastically cut the population by practically eliminating reproduction.
The consequences of these foolish ideas are drastic, and they are already beginning. Look at the demographic catastrophe looming over Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Canada, and the U.S. as our populations grow grayer, and fewer and fewer children are being raised up to replace retiring workers and leaders. Even the decline of biblical marriage in these cultures can be directly linked to their abandonment of children—when individuals never desire or plan to raise a family, what incentive is there to commit to a social contract to create a stable environment?
Without children and the responsibilities they bring, people are free to do “whatever is right in their own eyes” (a la Judges 21:25). Without children, what purpose is there to living rightly, taking responsibility for our choices, planning for the future, and building a heritage? Without children, there is no hope for this life.
This leads me to an observation that Scripture places such an emphasis on children for an important reason that is often overlooked in today’s discussions—kids are one of God’s means of keeping our sin in check. The innocence of a child is a powerful motivator for righteousness. For better or for worse, the presence of children in any given situation changes how we use language, how we treat others, etc. Children make us ashamed of our sin.
It seems that cultures which heavily promote (or mandate) abortion and contraception have first accepted and endorsed licentiousness and all manner of societal vices. The presence of children reminds them of the sinfulness of their choices, and, instead of changing their ways, they choose to continue in sin and eliminate their children in order to salve their guilty consciences.
The Western Church has been fighting the evil of abortion for a long time. While the act remains legal, there is evidence that the cloud is brightening at the edges—for the first time in recent memory, a majority of Americans identified themselves as “pro-life” in a 2008 Gallup poll. That’s wonderful, but convincing people not to kill children is only the first step of the long road back to a biblical understanding of the blessing they represent.
In the Church, we have to be careful to be pro-life in every sense of the term, setting an example not just by speaking up for the voiceless, but by welcoming God’s gifts of new life. When we speak against abortion and yet live out the world’s views of children in our everyday lives, it’s no wonder the argument is taking so long to stick.
No one said raising children is easy (My wife and I are relative newcomers to the world of parenting, and caring for our two young daughters has changed and stretched our relationship and resources—I’m told by those farther down the road that this is the easy part!), but it is part of our makeup as God’s image-bearers. The creation of new life is a powerful picture of God’s goodness and promise—indeed, that’s how He chose to enter His world for to redeem it. He wouldn’t tell us that children are a blessing without fitting us for the task.
Children are a blessing. They are part of God’s plan to remind us of the ongoing nature of His promise and plan for the world. They care for us in old age and carry the torch of God’s truth. They challenge us to do what is right and show us what it means to trust. We say that we want revival? Instead of wringing our hands about the fate of the world, perhaps we should take God at His word and set to work raising a generation set apart for His purposes.
Justin Lonas is editor of Disciple Magazine for AMG International in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
___________________________________
When Drawing Near to God Hurts
By Shea Oakley
Our problem isn’t being near God. Our problem is found in what He sometimes chooses to illuminate in us as a result of that nearness. When we seek and find God in such a way as to truly be closer to Him, we find that whatever He does make known about our hearts we can no longer deny. This can be a painful thing for the as-yet unperfected Christian (and that means all of us).
When you open the creaking door to an old shed or basement you might not like what the light makes visible. You may see scurrying or slithering things, cobwebs, grime and dirt that has accumulated over the years. You might even find the bones of creatures that long ago died in captivity in that dark place. You may be tempted to close that door and leave it that way.
I suspect this may be a good spiritual metaphor for what our Lord makes visible to us when we open up the deep recesses of our hearts to His light, a light that grows more brilliant as we voluntarily approach Him. We claim we want to bask in the light of God’s glory but will that desire continue if that light makes our remaining darkness visible? Are we ready to experience the pain that comes with a greater recognition of the sin that still dwells within us?
It is never easy to find out that we still have a seemingly endless way to go in ridding ourselves of all within us that isn’t fit for Heaven. This is especially true if we have spent years striving not only to do the right thing but also to be “the right thing” to truly attain to personal holiness. It can be a shock to find that we have made less progress in that direction than we had hoped. Perhaps this is the real reason why so many of us do not really seek that closely after God. Being near Him makes it almost impossible not to be confronted with our own continuing wickedness at some point, at least in the sense of what dwells in our—hopefully dying—flesh.
This is, indeed, one of the risks we take in presuming to draw closer to our all-seeing God. We may experience “the mountaintop” in such close encounters, but soon after that we may also enter the valley of struggling with some newly known transgression in our lives. When this happens our temptation may be to deny what the light of God has made visible to us. We may not be willing to face our own scurrying and slithering sins. It may seem easier to draw away from that divine illumination and try to keep such things in the dark, or even to deny that we ever saw them.
But maybe, just maybe, we will find ourselves not wanting to deny this new truth, no matter how painful it may be. Maybe we will instead find ourselves desperately wanting to give it to the one Person who can not only “make light of it” but remove it from us and remove it forever. That means keeping our sin before the piercing light of our Lord, asking in deep sincerity for Him to remove it and being willing to bear the discomfort of whatever spiritual cleansing may be required for that to happen.
If we do these things then God’s unmasking of what dwells in our darkness by His brilliant light may be something we end up deeply thankful for. We may know the unfathomable blessing of being far more deeply transfigured into the image of Jesus Christ, and if this truly comes about, we will never regret the pain that we felt when we first drew nearer to God. Knowing the furthering of our sanctification in real time will be more, much more, than worth it.
In the end we need not ever fear the light of God if we are willing to let it do its ultimate work in us.
© Shea Oakley. All Rights Reserved.
Converted from atheism in 1990, Shea Oakley has written over 350 articles for electronic and print publications since 2002, including Disciple Magazine (and Pulpit Helps Magazine), The Christian Herald, The Christian Post, Christian Network and Crosshome.com. In 2003 he graduated from Alliance Theological Seminary with a Certificate of Theological Studies. Shea and his wife Kathleen make their home in West Milford, New Jersey.
___________________________________
Marriage: The First 50 Years are the Hardest—Part 2 of 2
By Joe McKeever
Conflict makes stories work.
Write a book on how you succeeded with nary a mishap and made it to the top without a struggle of any kind and even your best friend, after buying a dozen copies, will lay it aside halfway through. It’s boring. But tell how you struggled, how you failed and got back up, how life handed you lemons and you made a meringue pie, and we will all read it and cheer you on.
Part one of this article told of ten mistakes Margaret and I made over a half-century of marital bliss. I’m putting that word in there just for her, to give her a smile. There were blissful moments, to be sure, but also so many of the bad moments—the times when you’re so miserable you don’t know what to do except throw yourself on the mercy of God and love each other by faith.
I told a friend yesterday that, in retrospect, the good times in our marriage were like the Smoky Mountains, and the bad times like the Rockies. That is, the good were nice and pleasant, green and verdant and sweet. But it’s the jagged outcrops of granite that seem to loom above everything else, causing us to remember those more than the other.
The first article was about the Rockies. This one is about the Smokies. And so you won’t wonder, Margaret and I made the list one night over supper. It’s a joint project.
II. Ten Things We Got Right in a Half-century of Marriage
1) When the going got tough, we hung in there. As we said previously, we talked about parachuting out of the pain, but hung tough. Consequently, God has blessed us richly in a thousand ways.
2) We got counsel. Again, this is told in part one. When I encounter some husband who is reluctant to accompany his wife for marriage counseling, I tell him I sympathize. I protested for nearly 20 years of marriage. The best surprise I received from sitting in the counseling room was discovering that the counselor is a friend, not a judge, not the referee, and not partial. Our counselors have always become great friends for both of us.
3) We had some great kids. Our three are now in their 40s and are the joy of our lives. Neil is the oldest (Joe Neil, Jr.), then Marty (John Marshall) and finally Carla, known to many of our oldest friends as Jinoke. We adopted her from Korea in 1974 when she was 5 years old. All three are married with kids now, and even though they live all over (one in New Orleans, one in Charlotte, and one way up in New Hampshire), we’re still close.