The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3C – In the Church

It’s been a week since we began our third part in The Resistance series. We are focusing on how Christians and the church have been captured by dualism. Today we are looking at statements 5 & 6 from the original article. I’ll post them here again to refresh your memories before we take a machete to them.

Statement 5: The pinnacle of service to God is full time paid Christian ministry because saving souls is the most important business on this earth. Our job in this world is to seek to see people saved from hell – worrying about society is like polishing the brass on a sinking Titanic. We are heaven bound. Earth is important but doesn’t matter as much

Statement 6: For those who are laity, their most important service of God is found in personal evangelism and doing things for the local church institution. This is what the works of service spoken about by Ephesians 4:12 is talking about – welcoming visitors to the Sunday service, playing in the music team, making cups of teas and running the AV desk.

In evangelical circles, dualism has spread to such an extent that the pinnacle of service to God is seen as full time paid Christian ministry. While many pastors and church leaders would perhaps not express the concept in such a stark manner, the implication is there in much of the church’s current practice.

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The Resistance – Word and Prayer – Part 2A

What ought Christians to do in these times? The Church in the West is weak. The enemies of Christ seem strong and own all the cultural spaces. What ought we to do? Last week we saw that the first order of business is Christian repentance both individual and corporate. We are in this mess, not because Christ is weak, not because his kingdom is failing, but because we have squandered the inheritance handed down to us by men and women who belonged to generations more faithful than the most recent ones. Today we continue our series “The Resistance”, exploring the needed Christian response to the times we live in. In Part 2 we consider the need for those in the Christian Resistance to commit themselves to dependence on Christ. This means prayer, particularly for wisdom and courage and a renewed appetite for His Word, looking at how God’s people of old have responded to times like these.

We must commit ourselves to dependence on our king. This means prayer, particularly for wisdom and courage and a renewed appetite for His Word, looking at how God’s people of old have responded to times like these.

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Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Education and Fathers

Quote

Don’t Be This Parent

Here is a quote from Father Hunger by Douglas Wilson. He is commenting on what often happens when parents finally ask for outside help after experiencing persistent long term parenting difficulties.

When parents finally get real help from someone who is willing to be honest about what is going on in their family, and how they got to where they are, it is in the highest degree likely that father or mother, or both, will be offended. Part of the reason why they have gotten this far without hearing what they need to hear is that many of their friends instinctively know this. The temptation for the struggling parent will be to think that the person who finally speaks up “doesn’t understand,” or “has a simplistic approach,” or “doesn’t know the family dynamics,” and so on. And the longer it takes for someone to finally say something, the more it seems like an intervention when it finally does happen.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

A Father’s Words

Words of reassurance, offered or withheld, are monumental in a child’s growth. Words of encouragement, or exhortation, or patient teaching, are the same. When a child has grown up under the devastation of unremitting harshness (and sometimes not so unwitting), or the devastation of neglect, the one thing a father may not say is that it “was not that big a deal.” Of course it was a big deal. The child is (hopefully) going to be praying the Lord’s Prayer for the rest of his life. What will naturally, readily, come to mind whenever he starts, whenever he says, “Our father…”? What does that mean to him in his bones, and who taught it to him?

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Fathers and Blessing

When there is a fundamental estrangement between fathers and children, the results of that unhappy mess will be that God will come and strike the land with a curse. In short, when fathers are blessed, the land is blessed. When fathers are cursed, the land is cursed.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Education and Fathers

Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Envy – the sin nobody readily admits to

The following is an extract from Douglas Wilson’s blog, which I’ve become a bit of a fan of. You can find the full post here. It’s an extract from a short sermon on the topic of envy which seems to me to be a very important topic at present.

In striking contrast to many other sins, nobody readily admits to being envious. Envy is petty and malicious. Envy is unattractive to just about everybody, and in order to operate openly in the world, it has to sail under false colors. Envy is clandestine; envy is sneaky. To admit to envy is to admit self-consciously to being tiny-souled, beef jerky-hearted, petty, and mean-spirited, and to admit this is dangerously close to repentance. To be out-and-out envious is to be clearly in the wrong, to confess yourself to be an inferior.

And so envy often decks itself out with the feathers of admiration, and tends to praise too loudly or too much. One writer said to “watch the eyes of those who bow lowest.” The praise can come from someone who does not yet know his own heart, or it can come from someone who is trying to position himself to get within striking distance. Guard your heart; don’t allow yourself to become an unctuous or oily flatterer.

Envy occupies itself much with matters of social justice, and becomes a collector of injustices, both real and imagined. Since envy cannot speak its own name, the closest virtue capable of camouflaging the sin is zeal for social justice. And since true Christians should be very much concerned with genuine justice, be sure to run diagnostics on your heart as you do so. This is because our modern political tangles are a veritable festival of envy, everywhere you look. Trying to find envy in our political disputes is like trying to find some beads at the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade.

And envy gets worse as a person’s gifts get greater—when dealing with talent, artistic temperaments, and great intellectual achievements. We sometimes assume that we can “cultivate” our way out of the temptation, which is the reverse of the truth.

Our Saviour State

“In our case, the story we’ve heard countless times concerns how the secular state, our supposed “savior,” came to exist. As the story usually goes, after the Reformation, Europe was torn apart with religious strife. The infamous “wars of religion” wracked Europe until finally, with a great sigh of relief, our fathers stumbled into the virtues of tolerance, and the secular state took over the public square. Our “deliverance” was that bloodthirsty religious convictions were finally banished into the realm of “personal belief”—a realm, of course, that had no effect on public behavior. In this story, not only are we saved by something other than the Christian gospel, but we are also saved from the Christian gospel. The story is compelling, widespread, constantly reiterated, and almost entirely false. Unfortunately, even many Christians have been taken in by aspects of it. This is how most Christians in the West have made their peace with the “escapist” option mentioned earlier. Religion is to have no effect on our views of what should and should not be allowed in the public square, but may be allowed to inform us what will get us salvation in the next life.”

from “Heaven Misplaced: Christ’s Kingdom on Earth” by Douglas Wilson