Why I Don't Have A Television and Rarely Go to Movies

I suspect that [others] would not agree on the degree to which the average pastor needs to be movie-savvy in order to be relevant, and the degree to which we should expose ourselves to the world’s entertainment.

I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.

There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).

Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage (except in Germany, to help learn the language). I don’t regret it

- John Piper, June 2009

Should We Still Be Sending and Going?

As our family prepares to move overseas, we sometimes encounter this question in one form or another: Is the Western missionary model still legitimate?”

The question stems from a variety of concerns and perspectives, but our basic answer must be “yes.” Even with the high cost of sending and recent shifts in the global Church, it is still strategic and fitting for Western missionaries to cross geographical and linguistic boundaries in the pursuit of new worshipers of Jesus. Here is why I think so:

1. God wants his name to be great in every place as well as among every people.

Though missiologists in the past couple of decades have rightly emphasized the importance of unreached people groups ("nations") as the focus of the Great Commission, there are a number of texts which seem to require a geographic and not exclusively an ethnic focus (e.g. Malachi 1:11).

The Great Commission cannot be fulfilled by only reaching the unreached who migrate to America, or Christ doesn’t receive the glory he deserves.

2. There are still hundreds of remote peoples who haven’t heard the gospel.

Many Unreached peoples are unrepresented in reached cities. In these cases, someone is going to have to cross cultural and geographic boundaries to deliver the message in the flesh.

3. Too little money is given to missions, not too much.

God has blessed this nation with an abundance of resources, yet a staggeringly low percentage of Christian spending is channeled toward missions, especially missions to the unreached.

When God’s people here in America are biblically calibrated, there are plenty of resources both to continue sending workers from the West, and to support indigenous pastors and church planters.

4. In many cases, the Church in the West has something to offer.

With a long history of Christian thought, abundant resources, and relative lack of persecution, the Western Church can often make a contribution in places where the Church is younger and less grounded.

Just as it would be arrogant to think that we know it all and have no need of the global Church, it would be arrogant to sit on our wealth of resources, history, and doctrinal development rather than make it accessible to the world.

5. Crossing cultures is a fitting means for the message.

When Christians from more privileged and dominant-language cultures (such as America), set aside their comforts, rights, and security in order to identify with and minister to people of lesser-privileged cultures and more obscure languages, something powerful and gospel-adorning is communicated.

It is the purpose of God that the incarnational activities of going and identifying illustrate and glorify the gospel (1 Thessalonians 2:1-8).

- by Bill Walsh, International Ministries Director, Desiring God

America's Debt To John Calvin

In this year of John Calvin’s 500th birthday, I don’t know of a better place to read about his impact on America than Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures On Calvinism given at Princeton Seminary in October 1898. Kuyper was a pastor, a journalist, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

John Calvin and Martin Luther were the twin pillars of the Protestant Reformation. Why do fewer people speak of Luther’s culture-shaping impact on America, but for centuries Calvin has been seen in this light? Kuyper argues,

Luther’s starting-point was the . . . principle of justifying faith; while Calvin’s . . . lay in the general cosmological principle of the sovereignty of God. . . . [Hence] Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the Church upon every department of human life.

It is the personal pervasiveness of God’s sovereignty that makes all the difference. This means that “the whole of a man’s life is to be lived as in the Divine Presence.” This “fundamental thought of Calvinism” shaped all of life. “It is from this mother-thought that the all-embracing life system of Calvinism sprang.”

For example, Calvin’s doctrine of “vocation” follows from the fact that every person, great and small, lives “in the Divine Presence.” God’s sovereign purposes govern the simplest occupation. He attends to everyone’s work. This yielded the Protestant work ethic. Huge benefits flow from a cultural shift in which all work is done earnestly and honestly with an eye to God.

Or consider how Calvinism breathed an impulse of freedom into modern history. The decisive principle was the sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. A primordial Sovereignty which eradicates in mankind . . . a threefold . . . supremacy, viz., (1) the sovereignty of the State; (2) the sovereignty in Society; and (3) the sovereignty in the Church.

God’s sovereign claim on every person and every sphere of society relativized all other claims. It began with the churches.

The sovereignty of Christ remains absolutely monarchical, but the government of the Church on earth becomes democratic to its bones and marrow. . . No church may exercise any dominion over another, but . . . all local churches are of equal rank.

This impulse of freedom spread to the political sphere. Calvin and his heirs had a strong predilection for republican government—and an aversion to monarchy. A benevolent dictatorship would be ideal in a sinless world. But in a sinful world, it brings the horrors of tyranny. “Call to mind . . . that Calvinism has captured and guaranteed to us our constitutional civil rights.”

We ask: Why then did Calvin endorse the death of Servetus for heresy? How was this part of his liberating impulse? Kuyper’s answer is helpful.

I not only deplore that . . . I unconditionally disapprove of it; yet not as if it were the expression of a special characteristic of Calvinism, but on the contrary as the fatal after-effect of a system, grey with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself.

A thousand years of abuses are not thrown off overnight. But the impulses of liberty, flowing from the decisive principle of the all-embracing sovereignty of God, proved to be unstoppable. “Calvinism has liberated Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England, and in the Pilgrim Fathers has provided the impulse to the prosperity of the United States.”

Kuyper closed his lectures with a claim that for many today sounds preposterous. Do not write him off. Get the book Lectures On Calvinism, and test these words, spoken to Americans in 1898.

In the rise of your university education . . .; in the decentralized . . . character of your local governments; . . . in your championship of free speech, and in your unlimited regard for freedom of conscience; in all this . . . it is demonstrable that you owe this to Calvinism and to Calvinism alone.

- by John Piper, June 19, 2009

"Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" - Jesus Christ (Matthew 24:35).

The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers.

Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its stories are true, and its decisions are immutable.

Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy.

It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you.

It is the traveler's map, the pilgrim's staff, the pilot's compass, the soldier's sword, and the Christian's charter.

Here, paradise is restored, Heaven opened, and the gates of Hell disclosed.

Christ is its grand subject, our good the design, and the glory of God its end.

It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet.

Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully.

It is a mine of wealth, health to the soul, and a river of pleasure.

It is given to you in life, will be open in the judgment, and be remembered forever.

It involves the highest responsibility, will reward the greatest labor, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents.

Pray it in. Read it through. Live it out. And pass it on.

-- Unknown source

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God Has Spoken By His Prophets

God has spoken by His prophets,
Spoken His unchanging Word,
Each from age to age proclaiming
God, the one, the righteous Lord.
Mid the world's despair and turmoil,
One firm anchor holding fast;
God is King, His throne eternal,
God the first, and God the last.

God has spoken by Christ Jesus,
Christ, the everlasting Son,
Brightness of the Father's glory,
With the Father ever one;
Spoken by the Word incarnate,
God of God, ere time began,
Light of light, to earth descending,
Man, revealing God to man.

God yet speaks by His own Spirit
Speaking to the hearts of men,
In the age-long Word expounding
God's own message, now as then;
Through the rise and fall of nations
One sure faith yet standing fast,
God is King, His Word unchanging,
God the first, and God the last.

-- George Wallace Briggs

What Is Recession For?

John Piper asks this question in a February 1, 2009 sermon preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church. The following is a brief excerpt.

I will mention five [of God's reasons for this recession]:

1. He intends for this recession to expose hidden sin and so bring us to repentance and cleansing.
2. He intends to wake us up to the constant and desperate condition of most of the world where there is always and only recession of the worst kind.
3. He intends to relocate the roots of our joy in his grace rather than in our goods, in his mercy rather than our money, in his worth rather than our wealth.
4. He intends to advance his saving mission in the world—the spread of the gospel and the growth of his church—precisely at a time when human resources are least able to support it. This is how he guards his glory.
5. He intends for the church to care for its hurting members and to grow in the gift of love.

Plenty Of Jobs At God's Employment Agency

There’s something positive about this current financial cataclysm.

Here's what I mean: Remember what happened on the day Stephen was stoned? We read that, “A severe persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered, and those who were scattered went on their way proclaiming the message of good news” (Acts 8:1,4). And later, “Those who had been scattered as a result of the persecution went as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the message” (Acts 11:19).

In spite of Jesus’ parting “Go ye” words still ringing in their ears, most Jerusalem Christians had remained content in their home town comfort zone. What got their attention? What got them moving? What made them obedient?

Persecution. A cataclysm of persecution. They were scattered. Not willingly, but in fact, the persecution “made havoc” of the church. It cost believers everything.

Cataclysm? Yes, but it was good for the church and good for the Gospel because they began doing what Jesus had told them to do — “They that were scattered went everywhere preaching the Word.”

Our present cataclysm is not the same as this but it has the same potential. Could it reset the direction of our lives so that 2500+ languages might have a Bible? A flood of Christian workers materialize? Billions of unreached people hear of Christ? And could it mean that even short term mission agencies will have a surplus of workers? It all can happen once we are freed from hindrances and delivered from our excuses. It doesn’t require a cataclysm to do this but such an upheaval sure helps create a situation where it is more likely to be done.

None of us really want the losses caused by this financial downturn, but here it is. Now what? Well remember . . .

God’s employment office is open and He has plenty of jobs.