Suffering

Here's the audio from our 2016 Shepherds Conference, "The Enemy Within: A Conference on Sexual Abuse in the Church." I'd particularly recommend "Recognizing Sexual Abuse" and "Shepherding the Sexually Abused."

Please let us know any criticisms or suggestions you have for us. We'll be doing a similar conference next year on the church's ministry to those suffering the gay/lesbian/transexual/BruceJenner/bisexual temptations. Here's the conference title and dates:

Not Ashamed: Gospel ministry in a post-Obergefell world

February, 15-17, 2017

Here then are the audio files for this year's conference on the sexual abuse of the church's children...

Almost always when I walk into a patient’s hospital room, the first thing I do is turn off the TV. Sometimes, I'll turn off the roommate’s TV, too. (Every room has two, you know.) Have you ever tried to maintain interest in someone’s diarrhea when right behind your head there’s a John Wayne marathon on AMC ?

Well, for whatever reason, today I left it on as I walked up to the bed in critical care. And sure enough, like the TV-zombie child of the 70’s that I am, I was soon fighting desperately to concentrate on my patient’s kidney failure instead of the breaking news on the Today Show: “NYC studio offers naked yoga.” That’s right, naked yoga. Fig leaves? Shame? Those are so Garden-of-Eden. Here in America, we gonna let it all hang out.

Suddenly, it became clearer than ever before that all a man needs to understand America is Isaiah 5...

But Abraham said, "Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony" (Luke 16:25).

Lately I've been thinking about addictions, whether they be fixations on fantasy or money or knowledge or alcohol or prescribed drugs or illegal drugs or sex. Solomon gave himself to these tasty pleasures: "All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure... (Eccl. 2:10). The Temple he built had it's songs and sacrifices but Solomon's palace was rockin'. He concludes that there is no mountaintop-experience, no lasting high: "All a man's labor is for his mouth and yet the appetite is not satisfied" (Eccl. 6:7). In the end, all that this fallen world offers—all of it's vacations and tastes and pleasures and buzzes and escapes—are merely pleasure for a moment. Everything under the sun is only vapor and a striving after wind (Eccl. 1:14).

Yet,  that vaporous moment is goooood, no? Let's string together moment after moment, and we'll get through this alright...

He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground." (Genesis 4:10)

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has taken the first step towards doing for the Cult of Mao what Kruschev did for the Cult of Stalin: he's publicly spoken of the terrible suffering of his own family at the hands of the Red Guards during Mao's Cultural Revolution. Melinda Liu reports: 

The Cultural Revolution remains a neuralgic political topic because it reflects poorly on Mao, who presided over that decade but is revered by many Chinese as their nation’s “Great Helmsman.” During that decade, youthful Red Guard radicals rampaged through the country, sowing violence and terror.... Even today, the government wiggles around Mao’s responsibility for the Cultural Revolution with an ambiguous formula that declares his achievements to have been “70 percent good, 30 percent bad.”

It's about time one of China's premiers officially acknowledges Mao's riot of blood. Chinese ignorance or silence concerning the over fifty million souls who were slaughtered by Chairman Mao is complicity in that slaughter and the perfect seedbed for more slaughter to come.

Christians who know and love Chinese must speak with our Chinese friends about Mao's slaughter as often as we speak with our American friends of the slaughter of the unborn. Jews aren't bashful...

Sure I am, if it were well understood how much of the pastoral authority and work consisteth in church guidance, it would be also discerned, that to be against discipline, is near to being against the ministry; and to be against the ministry is near to being absolutely against the Church; and to be against the Church, is near to being absolutely against Christ. Blame not the harshness of the inference, till you can avoid it, and free yourselves from the charge of it before the Lord. - Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, (Banner of Truth, Carlisle PA: 1974) p. 111.

When a man rejects the exhortations and admonitions of his elders over a period of years, the time will come when he will turn his back on Christ's Church. If he refuses to repent and continues to give himself to sin, his sin will bear fruit and he will be separated from the Body of Christ. He may find another church that will allow him to hide in his sin; that church may marry and baptize and bury him and his family as churches have done across the centuries; but his repudiation of the discipline of Christ's Bride is his repudiation of Jesus Christ. The binding of earth and Heaven is no game of Angry Birds or Where's Waldo...

(Andrew Henry) The conflict over Joseph Maraachli throws into stark relief our modern age's attack on the authority of fathers and mothers.

The circumstances are simple and painful. Several years ago, Moe Maraachli and Sana Nader lost their daughter, Zina, to a degenerative neurological condition. Her respiratory function deteriorated so severely that she was placed on a ventilator. Rather than allowing her to die in the hospital, her parents decided to take her home. A simple tracheotomy allowed her to breathe without the aid of a ventilator and she lived for six more months at home with her family before passing away.

Fast forward several years to the birth of Joseph. He was considered to be at high risk for the same genetic condition and was closely monitored as he grew. At four months old, he began having seizures and his parents worst fears were confirmed...

(Tim) Praise God for His faithful servants, killed in action. Let us pray for their loved ones.

For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one. (Hebrews 10:34)

(Tim) Yesterday, a friend sent me a satirical piece his son and

several friends had written about a bunch of new city church plants with

names like Elevation Church, Dust, The Line, Infusion Church, and

Austin City Life (see Howard Davis' comment, below). He commented, "What is really amazing is their unique

web sites all look alike (and) I bet all their unique worship services

are the same. And... they're all about being in the 'city.'"

From

reading many city

church web sites, it's clear such churches normally aren't missional if missional means faithfulness to Jesus' Great Commission commands. Most indicate no practice of rebuke, preaching God's Law, or calls to repentance. Instead, they prattle on about being "for the city" and they're positively chipper.

It's all about seeking common ground with

unbelievers. And if they mention God's perfections, it's only those

perfections that would be likely to make unbelievers feel good about

themselves and think God might not be so high and mighty and scary

after all. Christian faith and the Church are presenting as uniting believers

and unbelievers in the same brotherhood and sisterhood of man in and for the city. Convicting the world of sin and righteousness and judgment is out and assuring the world of our goodwill toward them in God's Name is in.

Reading Augustine's City of God

earlier today, I came across this excerpt. Augustine knew something about preaching the Gospel in the city and contextualizing the Lordship of Jesus Christ to urbane men and women world-weary in a decadent

They went into Capernaum; and immediately on the Sabbath He entered the synagogue and began to teach. They were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. -Mark 1:21, 22

(Tim: this is third in an ongoing series, with the first here and the second here) Whether in classroom discussions, the dorm late at night, our accountant’s office, or coffee with a neighbor, the believer is hard pressed on all sides to give up truth. The radical relativism that permeates our world is absolutely antithetical to Scripture. Those seeking to preach Scripture faithfully will immediately face the world's dogmatic declaration that there is no truth--only stories, perspectives, and narratives; only my truth and your truth.

The intensity of the opposition we face is directly related to our faithfulness in preaching God’s Word with a form of delivery and content that is contextualized to the end that it appears radically authoritative to those acclimated to an effeminate relativism. Or, to put it another way, in our world one way to judge whether of not a preacher is a faithful servant of God is whether he is accused of arrogance. A faithful man will employ a method and content that bears witness to his faith that he is not communicating the words of men, but of God. With Calvin, he will declare that preaching is the Word of God. And the world has no way of understanding such declarations as anything but an arrogance that's sick and pathetic.

My wife and I were out for dinner one night. As we prepared to leave, we struck up a conversation with another couple at an adjoining table. In their mid-seventies, both were strikingly tall and dignified. During the preliminary small talk, we learned they had been married fifteen years, were from the Pacific Northwest, had several children from previous marriages, and he'd spent fifty years working as a computer programmer.

Our deeper conversation started with the woman exclaiming over the beauty of the ocean. She had learned I was a pastor and, trying to relate to us on a spiritual level, she told us how the sea gave her permission to commune with God as “she” rather than “he...”