Archives for 2007

These comments on Canada’s alleged public education system:

No student left behind: “‘What it really is, is about passing the buck,’ said Anton Allahar, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario. ‘In a system where one is not accountable you pass them on to the next level, from Grade 3 to Grade 4 or from first year, to second year, to third year, so that somebody else later on down the line someone else inherits the problem.’

In their recent book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, Prof. Allahar and his colleague James Cote lay significant blame for the current state of affairs at the feet of a public education system they say is breeding ’empowered idiots.’

‘This idea of boosting self-esteem of students, especially those who don’t do well, has led to problems at primary, secondary and university educational levels where you have people who don’t aspire to do well, but still expect the star,’ said Prof. Allahar in an interview.

‘They still expect the reward and they still expect mommy and daddy and teacher to say, ‘Way to go! You gave it your best!’ But they are not giving it at their best. So what people like Jim Cote and I have inherited at the university level is a lot of people with very high self-esteem who are idiots.'”

Sigh…

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

That would be our Lord Jesus Christ. Today I preached an additional message in our Law, Legalism, and Life series as suggested last week by my sister.

The Spiritual Life of Jesus Christ: an exhortation to put on Jesus Christ with Rm 13.14 as its text was our message. I began the message by noting that our ultimate standard for Christian living is our Lord Jesus Christ himself.

When we think of Jesus as our standard, what aspect of his nature comes to mind? Usually I think of Jesus as God – it is a little jarring to think of him in terms of who he is, the God-MAN. Current heresies tend to deny his deity, so we tend to think of him that way in a reactionary defensive kind of mode. In the early centuries of the church, the heretics tended to deny his humanity in some way, in keeping with the Greek/Gnostic notion of the material world being evil.

But when we are urged to ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ’, what are we being asked to do? Are we being asked to imitate Christ as God? How can we do that? No, we are being asked to emulate and imitate his perfect humanity.

Proposition: To fully live up to Biblical Christian standards, the eyes of your spirit must be focused on following the pattern of the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ.

What kind of spiritual life did Jesus exhibit?

In the life of Christ we see that Jesus practiced what he preached – true spirituality. The one who exhorted us to love our enemies healed Malchus’ ear. The one who told us to turn the other cheek answered not again when falsely accused before Pilate. The Lord Jesus could have called 10,000 angels but denied himself, submitted to the will of the Father, endured the abuse of men, ‘as a sheep before her shearers is dumb’. Jesus is the perfect example of spiritual humanity. How was that spirituality developed? Simply by the self-consciously divine nature of God in Christ? Or simply by that nature alone?

We find him persistently praying. His prayers were such that they moved the disciples (men who had heard prayers and been offering prayers all their lives) to ask Jesus to teach them to pray. We find Jesus habitually and persistently in the synagogues. Luke says it was his custom. It is mentioned so much in the Gospels that I think not a sabbath went by that the Lord was not in a synagogue somewhere. Do you realize that synagogue worship is not required by the OT Law? It isn’t even on the radar screen in the OT. Jesus was in the synagogue because he loved God.

How did Jesus come to this kind of spirituality?

It is undeniable that Jesus grew physically – he was a babe, a child, a boy, and then a man. It is undeniable that he grew mentally (and that to some extent he limited his omniscience as the Son of man as a part of the mystery of the incarnation). We see him seated at the feet of the doctors of the law in the temple, a 12 year old boy, ‘listening and asking questions’ – he is growing mentally.

An often overlooked facet of Jesus life is that he grew spiritually. As a babe, he was cared for and led by devout human parents who consistently kept the Law. On the eighth day he was circumcised, in accordance with the law. On the 40th day he was redeemed as a firstborn, in accordance with the law. On the same day his mother was purified by offering two turtledoves, in accordance with the law. His parents both persistently attended the Passover every year (though it was only required of men). When discovered by his parents in the temple, he returned home with them and ‘was subject’ unto them. Jesus was the perfect model of humanity, growing spiritually each step of the way in his life. The Bible tells us that the child grew in wisdom and grace (Lk 2.40, 52). What is that but spiritual growth?

Jesus is of course on a higher spiritual plane than his parents. John the Baptist considered himself to be unworthy to stoop and loose Jesus shoes, the Lord’s parents were certainly not higher than the Baptist. Yet Jesus submitted himself to their authority, obeyed their leadership, observed their rules and the rules of his religion (Judaism) and beyond.

Are you a Christian? Do you want to be like Christ?

Then you need to emulate his spiritual life. That’s how you are going to put on Christ.

• Prayers
• Bible reading, memorizing, study
• Faithfulness to the assembly — really, you should be in every service
• Commitment to membership [accountability and service]

Proposition: To fully live up to Biblical Christian standards, the eyes of your spirit must be focused on following the pattern of the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ.

~~~

In our afternoon service we began a new series on the nature of the Church. The message was It’s Not Your Church

Our text was Mt 16.18. We looked at the foundation of the church: Jesus the Christ, the Son of God. We looked at the formation of the church: Jesus Christ, the builder. We looked at the future of the church: victorious over the gates of hell [from the cross onwards to the coming of the King, the grave is no victory over the saints, the Lord is the victory].

If It’s Not Your Church, then whose is it? It’s His church. The church belongs to the One who builds it. He may use men and the gifts he gives them to build the church, but ultimately, he is the one at work, he is the one who builds.

Our attitude towards His church should be one of submission. Submission for accountability and discipleship. Submission for opportunities to serve.

~~~

We had a number of visitors today, mostly from out of town. We also had a couple of absences today, so we were about average in attendance after all.

I did experience a ‘first’ for me in preaching the first message. I got about three quarters through and discovered a page of my notes was missing. I had to have some of my people look up a verse for me with their concordances while I was preaching. I managed to remember most of the notes on the page and with the help of our people, carried on. I have forgotten my whole set of notes a couple of times before, but that one was a first!

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

I have a clip from a message preached in 1991 called “Gray-Area Decisions Made Easy”. The bulk of the message contains reasonable decision making questions Christians should ask about whether they should do or not do something. The subject matter is what the preacher calls ‘non-moral’ things, but things about which Christians have had questions throughout the history of the church.

I don’t agree with some of the interpretations offered in the message. The preacher misses some key passages quite badly. However, as a whole the thrust of the message is reasonably biblical.

Much more than these errors of interpretation, the thing that bothers me most about the message is a statement made in the introduction. I don’t know if this will work, but I am including a link to a 27 second clip from that introduction. Below is my transcript of the clip. I think it is accurate:

“I went away to college at a very narrow kind of circumscribed legalistic school and everything was reduced to rules. We had rules for everything. In fact we used to say the school song was ‘I don’t smoke and I don’t chew and I don’t go with girls that do.’ That sort of summed up the whole approach to spiritual life. Everything was reduced to some kind of list of things that were forbidden.”

I, too, went away to that same college. I, too, had to sign the same rule book. But I find it extremely disingenuous for the speaker to suggest that the leadership at that college thought then (or even still think today) that spirituality equalled keeping the man-made rule book of the college. What a foolish and uncharitable misrepresentation! When I was a student there, no one assumed that the student who didn’t break the rules was spiritual. Keeping the rules was one thing, spirituality something else again.

Even more disturbing to me is this question: What does such a distortion say about the credibility of the one speaking?

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

P.S. Yes, I know the clip is from 1991. Would anyone care to confirm a change of attitude in the intervening years?

From Today’s Family News:

“We hoped to grow old here,” Mennonite resident Ron Goosen told CBC News. “We have our burial plots and we hoped to be buried here, but it doesn’t look that way.”

As a follow-up to the story I linked to earlier, it seems that the provincial authorities are digging in their heels while the ‘little people’ are voting with their feet.

The Quebec government is particularly secular. It may also be the most oppressive regime in Canada. The history of Catholic dominance always meant many difficult hurdles for any kind of protestant/evangelical/Bible-believing group within Quebec. The secular mood of the last 40 years or so changed none of the oppressiveness, only adding increasingly unbelieving authorities in charge.

The rest of the country is not quite as oppressive, but the general mood of politicians, especially on the left, is antagonistic to freedom. Conformity to the norm is the goal of the state, as it has ever been in history, and as it always will be. The only way that real freedom of religion can be maintained is if Bible believers maintain status as a significant minority in the population and tend to vote in a unified pattern. When that happens, the pols pay attention.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

This morning, early, my wife took our daughter and son off to Sea-Tac for their return to BJU. A few tears were shed, I can assure you. I want them both to launch out on their lives of service for the Lord, but in my heart, I’d kind of like to keep them as kids forever.

After they left, I got one of my deacons and we proceeded to demolish the main bathroom of our house. We have had a long standing problem with leaks in the shower. It is time to fix it, and with the shower population cut in half, now was the opportune time.

Man… what a mess. I discovered that my leak (yes, it was my fault!!) had soaked into the particle board on the floor (the particle board was someone else’s fault) and the musty smell was emanating from there. Tonight, as we head for bed, the floor is ripped up, the drywall around the tub is ripped out [and partly replaced] and the place is drying out. Tomorrow we should get the drywall in, a ceiling fan installed and the subfloor replaced. We also hope to have the tub surround in place. The painting and linoleum will have to wait a day or two, but at least the bathroom will be functional again.

NAU Genesis 3:17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. 18 “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

“Sales of Christian products increased to $4.6 billion last year, according to reports by the major trade association for Christian retailing.”

The numbers reported here are kind of staggering. Ties in with a post Chris Anderson made today, linking to an article on the philosophy of cartoonist Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.

Luke 18:8 … However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

I thought yesterday might bring the conclusion of our ‘Law, Legalism, and Life’ series, but my sister made a suggestion that will extend the series by one week.

This week, our subject is ‘Separation from the World‘. The sermon is a culmination of all that went before.

In the series, we established that the Christian church has always called for morality and holiness in its people (with varying degrees of success). It is true that mistakes have been made in application, but the energizing spirit behind the call for holiness is the Spirit of the Lord. Those who decry standards of holiness today are the innovators.

Our intent has been to uphold salvation by grace alone and not to impose a new structure of law on the Christian church. Rather, we want to establish minimum standards of conduct as a guide (and a goad) on the path to perfect holiness, the goal of Christian life. [And our expectation is that none of us will achieve that goal in this life – but we will die trying.]

We offered seven reasons why Christians should proclaim and practice standards of holiness in Christian living:

1. There is such a thing as behaviour that pleases God
2. The fact is, faith is more than just your ticket to heaven
3. The operation of God’s grace in a Christian life tends towards godliness (Tit 2.11-12)
4. The notion of lawlessness is incompatible with Christianity
5. The liberty part of Christian liberty means ‘set free’, not ‘self serve’
6. The Christian mission is ultimately tasked with the discipline of discipleship (Mt 28.19-20)
7. The nature of Christianity is that its people are subjects of The King

This brings us to Separation from the World. Our text was 1 Jn 2.15-17.

In this message we defined the world as the value system and philosophy of men without God. I noted that our text calls us not to love this world, neither the things in this world. The phrase ‘in the world’ here bears some resemblance to Paul’s phrase, ‘in Christ’. Just as the believer is ‘immersed in Christ’, made a wholly new man, under new lordship, and so on, just so the ‘things in the world’ are immersed in the world system and are thus affected by its values and thinking.

It is important to recognize that the ‘things in the world’ as defined in 1 Jn 2.16 are actually ‘outside’ of us, they are things in the world. One of the complicating factors in understanding the passage is that we recognize these things as also being in us, that is, in our old nature. The apostle’s focus here is not on us, however, it is on the world. We are not to love the world nor the things-in-the-world. They are dominated by a world-system opposed to God. So for example, we have these kinds of things ‘in the world’:

• The sex-saturated advertising world – almost every product you can imagine is sold somewhere with subtle (or very unsubtle) suggestions of illicit sexuality.
• The sex-saturated music world: sexuality saturates the driving beat, the sensuous mood, the sultry sound of almost all modern music.
• The earth-centered world of myriads of possessions…
• The ego-saturated business world, housing market, political world, etc.

There are things in the world that are just things. No inherent moral value involved… just things. But the world system takes those things and invests them with its values, creates a culture around them that makes them worldly. For example:

• Skiing – just a thing, not worldly, it is just an activity; but the ‘ski-bum’ culture, the partying, the immorality, the ‘playboy’ mentality; that is the world taking something and making it its own.
• Biking – just a thing, an activity, no inherent evil in it; but the ‘biker’ culture surrounding it, the loud driving music, the dress, the attitudes, the drugs [often, not always], the language; that is the world taking something and making it its own.
• Clothing – just a thing [and a necessary thing]; but the culture of fashion [whether high fashion or low grunge fashion] becomes the world taking something, investing it with sexuality or rebellion, and making it its own.

Worldliness is simply a mindset that loves the world and its things. This is wrong for a Christian for several reasons.

First, because God commands us not to love the world.

Second, because worldliness is evidence of no love for God – ‘the love of [for] the Father is not in him’ [an extremely sober possibility for a Christian].

Third, because worldliness wastes a life that could have been lived for eternal things on temporal things (1 Jn 2.17).

Fourth, because worldliness is a betrayal of Jesus Christ (Jas 4.4).

Our response to worldliness should be to flee: flee worldly lusts (1 Tim 6.10-11, 2 Tim 2.22). We should understand the world’s strategy to pressure our conformity, but we should not give in. We should instead live as ambassadors for Christ in a broken, failing, and sin-sick world.

~~~

In our Bible study time, we devoted our efforts to a discussion of Separation from the World and Christian standards in two categories: How we dress and Church attendance. Next week we will touch on Music, then on topics our people bring up.

~~~

For our afternoon service, Rory preached his last message of the summer on the topic Christian Runners from Heb 12.1-3. He admonished us to lay aside the weights and sins that hinder our Christian race and to follow Christ, enduring the difficulties of the race for the glory of God. His message was a great complement to our study in the morning and a welcome admonition for our lives.

Tomorrow he and Susan head off for school again. I do look forward to the day when there is no more leave taking and we will all stand perfected in the presence of the King.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

For the last few weeks (maybe a month already) I have had a daily download of links from Google News using the search terms “Christian fundamentalist”. (I have had two other alerts from Google for some years now, one for any article containing the words “Bob Jones University” and the other for “Gleevec”, my wife’s anti-leukemia drug.)

The words ‘Christian fundamentalist’ are applied quite loosely to a wide range of characters by the world’s media. Generally speaking, they seem to use them as a pejorative against various evangelical groups, most of whom would shun the term. To the world, however, anyone who believes in the literal interpretation of the Bible is a ‘Christian fundamentalist’. The misunderstanding of the term by the media is probably somewhat self-conscious (my opinion), but it does illustrate the overwhelming task real Christian fundamentalists have in making much of an impact in the world.

A recent piece on the Powerline blog illustrates the obtuseness of CNN and their star reporter Christiane Amanpour. The Powerline bloggers are a team of lawyers who I have followed for some time. They would not be Christian fundamentalists at all, but they are reasonable men who have a more objective view of the news than most of the media.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3