Blog Archives - Grace for Law

Grace for Law

Stats and People

1/31/2012

One of the oddities about blogs is that you really don't know what is happening with your words, once you post them. It may be that no one reads it or that a lot of people read it. We have "stats" that the companies give us, but those are really kind of odd and unreliable, as I understand it. In short, we really don't know.

Mostly, we blog for ourselves and the friends whom we know will check it out occasionally. While sitting and thinking, we think of something that we believe might be interesting or helpful to others. The main purpose of this website, for example, is not as a blog but as a source for recordings. That is, I can put recorded lessons here for people to listen to at their leisure.

So, sometimes there are some delays in blogging. It is not something I have to do every day (no one is waiting with a whip), so I sometimes miss days. Sometimes, nothing is really going on that leads to any blog.

I have been doing something of this sort for a year now (that was when I started www.lovetheirhusbands.com). It has been an interesting year and I think the coming year may be even more interesting, as life moves on.

I hope you hang on and see what happens as well.

In A New Office

1/30/2012

Well, once again I am in a new office. This time, I have not only moved offices (a common thing for me), but am joining a firm again. It has been 16 years since I have been in a law firm office with other attorneys. It will be interesting to be in a place where you can talk with other people about the things you are doing (a good), where they can talk to you about anything they want to talk about (both good and bad), and where someone can keep track of what you are doing (well, mostly not good).

My years on my own taught me a lot of things, primary among them being that I really am not a businessman at all My problem is that while I practice law to make my living, I am much more interested in preaching and teaching than in practicing law. Years pass and youth wanes, of course, but we change in many ways. In my case, a lot of it has to do with practicing law. It is a good thing to be able to do, and it is good to do it well, but it is ultimately unsatisfying.

Two thoughts come from this.

First, of course, is that it is not supposed to be satisfying. A job (or a career) is just a means to make a living. Living is more important and more enjoyable. I am not sure why lawyers think they should enjoy practicing law any more than a ditch digger should enjoy digging ditches. Enjoying your work is a nice benefit if God allows it to you, but not a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. If enjoyment was the key, how would most work get done in our world?

Second, as time passes, I grow more focused on eternal things. I used to preach every week and loved it. Then, after moving to Georgia, I sat in the pew like everyone else and listened to preaching. Recently, i have had the chance to serve as an interim pastor a couple of times, preaching every week. I realized how much I had missed that experience and how much I enjoyed it.

For years, I knew that if a choice came between preaching and practicing law for a living, I would keep preaching. Now, I think it would be a much different choice.

We change. All of us change year by year. The things we loved once no longer thrill us. The things we used to find boring we begin to enjoy. Movies we once hated now seem really good to us, while movies we once loved now seem trite and boring.

So, I am in a new office, with new co-workers, and (hopefully) new work. We will see how it goes.

Using the BIble or Teaching the Bible

1/27/2012

I came across an interesting comment the other day. We are often guilty of complaining that a particular pastor is not "teaching the Bible," only to hear the response that he "is always quoting the Bible." The comment was this: "There are a lot of pastors who use the Bible frequently, but never teach it."

This comment struck me as an excellent point. There is, in fact, a difference between "preaching the Bible" and "preaching from the Bible." There is a difference between "teaching the Bible" and "teaching from the Bible." Let me see if I can explain.

Have you ever watched a movie or a TV show that was "based on a true story" as opposed to "being a true story"? A "based on" movie can take great liberties with the factual predicates of the story. Often, they will simplify matters by blending several characters into one character, or by having one character do something that someone else actually did. Their goal is to tell "the essentials of the story" rather than to tell the story. Oliver Stone movies are often this type, as he twists history to make his own personal statement rather than teach what really happened.

We see the same thing in movies based on books. In "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy movies, for example, the story was greatly changed from the books. Everything happens very quickly (whereas the books allowed many years to pass). Frodo is made to be a young man, whereas he was 50 in the books. He runs into Merry and Pippin who end up traveling with him, whereas the book had them plan to travel with him because they cared about him. Entire sections of the book are eliminated. But they are great movies and it was a great set of books. They just aren't the same.

This is often what preachers do, especially "topical" preachers. Their goal in preaching is not to teach the Bible, but to teach "a truth" that they have derived from the Bible. They believe that their purpose is to teach these truths, to which the Bible testifies, not to teach the Bible itself. They often believe that the Bible itself is simply not that interesting to congregations. I once had a preacher of this type tell me that my sermons (working through texts) were like having the church watch me eat. He thought that his job was primarily about teaching people what he had already digested for them, like a mother bird feeding its young.

I often hear sermons (or parts of sermons) by a young pastor in our area on the radio. His sermons are very much this style. He jumps from verse to verse (always out of context), seeking some support for whatever idea he has at the moment. His sermons, week by week, do not add up to teaching the Bible at all, as they are each designed and presented for a single concept he deems to be important. No one listening to his sermons would have the slightest idea that scripture is composed of books (rather than verses) and that the teachings are far more basic than the sermons. They know all about what he thinks is important, but nothing about what God thinks is important.

How much easier it is for some men to teach this way. The sermons become about the pastor (and his vision of truth) more than about the word of God. People leave the sermons talking about what the pastor said, not what the scripture said. And, eventually, people become experts in their pastor's ideas, while remaining ignorant of God's glorious revelation of himself.

Let us dedicate ourselves to teaching God's word and not our words. We do not want to use scripture, we want to teach scripture. Why? Because scripture speaks to us the truth of God in God's own words. What more could we ever ask?

Unfriending a Facebook Friend

1/24/2012

Facebook is an ongoing storyline for many of us. We get friend requests from people we barely know (or do not know). We receive posted items that we do not like. We are "friends" with many people.

Over the couple of years I have done Facebook, I have maintained friend status with a lot of people who do not really interest me much. I sometimes even block their status posts (because they are annoying or something). But I never "unfriend" anyone. Until now.

I have a friend on Facebook whom I have never met. He was a fellow member of a discussion list and we had several good exchanges. When he left the discussion list, we became Facebook friends. Soon, however, I noticed an oddity in postings of his things. Put simply, he posted a lot of things related to Eastern religions.

Now, this was a problem because I had met him through a Christian discussion group and the whole basis of our relationship was our shared Christianity. Our discussions had always centered on the truths of the gospel, even those on which we disagreed. I was puzzled and wrote to him about the whole matter. He reassured me that these were merely his students in the classes he was teaching. No problem. He recently published a book soundly setting forth gospel truth. Everything was fine.

Until this week.

This week, I learned that he has abandoned his faith. He has rejected Christ. He has not only changed his "profile" description to a non-Christian position, but has posted a blog explaining why he has rejected Christ. So, I have been compelled to unfriend him.

Now, this does not mean that I "friend" only believers. I have no such rule or practice.

Nor does it mean that I refuse to "friend" anyone who holds to Eastern religions. I have no such rule or practice.

But the act of an adult, consciously and intentionally rejecting Christ after having confessed him for years, is a major act. It is not like an adult who never believed merely holding to his unbelief. It is something far more.

The scripture makes clear that we will be faced with these situations. John spoke of those who were "among us but were not of us," who left us. They were called antichrists (back before we decided to use the word to mean one person instead of using it biblically). Hebrews 6 warns of those who have "tasted" of the heavenly gift and who have knowledge but who then reject it. Such are more to be condemned than those who simply rejected from the first.

It is a sad situation, when a man you believed to be a brother turns his back on his faith and yours. It is tragic in a very real sense of the word.

He was, at one point, a brother. Now, he is an apostate. It is a hard saying.

Facebook is kind of a special relationship world. We have more friends there than in the real world, for the most part, and our relationship with them is kind of odd. But, still, there must be some standards. Apostasy is still apostasy.

So, I have unfriended someone. It is a meaningless act, in almost every way, but it is inexpressibly sad in this case. It is hard to lose a brother.

A Rough Week and Weekend

1/23/2012

I have not posted for several days. This usually means either I am on a vacation or I am sick/busy. This was a sick/busy break.

There is something so frustrating about being sick. We know we are going to get sick and we have been sick many times in our lives, but it is still frustrating, especially when you cannot sleep. This was my end of week/weekend experience. There is just something really sad about spending the whole weekend in bed when you cannot sleep.

Lots of things apparently happened while I was out of touch. Newt Gingrich showed that a serial adulterer can win a Republican primary, the New York Giants made it clear that Detroit going to New Orleans early in the playoffs was not a bad thing for Detroit, and I am sure something else happened somewhere, which I have not heard yet. Oh, well. Next week there will be another primary that will be the "most important ever" and I can read all the junk about that one. In two weeks, we will have a Super Bowl and the football will end, as well.

There was a big bright spot in my weekend, though. On Sunday morning, I got up and got through my Sunday School class before heading back to bed for the rest of the day. We covered the next part of Ephesians 3, in which Paul declares his prayer for the Ephesians. He prays that they will be strengthened through the Spirit, that they may comprehend the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ's love and to know that love, that they may be filled with the fullness of God.

This is one of those glorious texts that overcomes everything. Even in a weekend of sickness, this is a text that calls us to greater things. Someone asked how it was possible to be filled with all the fullness of God. Don't I wish I knew.

What I do know is so amazing, so beyond belief, so beyond explanation, that it fills my heart even in illness and even in rough weeks.

The Most Important Things

1/17/2012

In every discussion about "church," we very quickly find ourselves dealing with the "Most Important Things" people. You know who I mean.

In every discussion, someone will (usually very early) tell us that the "church" needs to focus on "the most important things." Sometimes they will make it singular ("the most important thing") or they will make it sound better ("the most spiritual things") or they may make it sound really important ("the things God cares about"), but, in the end, it is still the Most Important Things.

Christian websites and blogs and magazines enjoy this as well. We see lots of articles on "the most important things" and how important it is to "focus on" the "most important things." Right.

This works on both sides of any argument, which might make people think a minute, but they don't actually think about it much at all. It is amazing to watch.

And sad.

Lately, I have heard it mostly in discussions about "contemporary services." I was speaking the other day with a dear brother who leads such a service and he repeatedly came back to saying the church needs to focus on "the most important things." When I questioned him on the topic, he kind of lost his bearings. I have heard the same thing from people who hate contemporary services. Two thoughts.

First, there are no lists of "most important things" in scripture. Paul does use the "important' construct once. "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures." 1 Cor. 15:3. But that is never what the discussions are about. No one is arguing either for or against what Christ did. We are arguing over what we do. And there is nothing in scripture that says to your church or to you: "these are the most important things." Instead, God gave us elders to run our churches and act wisely.

Second, Christ tells us that the "most important" commands are to love God and to love our neighbors. Mark 12:28-31. But this is never what people mean, is it? The most important thing for me is to love God and love my neighbor. It is not "most important" to me that the service be a particular form or that the music be a particular music. The "most important" thing is to love God (which is not about service styles) and to love my neighbor, which would drive me to accept whatever is best for my neighbor, not to demand what I want. As a preacher, it is not important that I maintain my "style" but that I love the listeners enough to preach in a way they can access.

The "most important" thing for each and every individual is to love God and love their neighbors, if Christ is correct. It is not "most important" for you to have music you like or preaching you like or an order of service you like. It is not "most important" for you to demand that everyone else go along with your preferences in anything.

And it is certainly not "love" to use your idea of "the most important things" to force others to go along with you.

Wouldn't it be interesting to hear a discussion about service styles that was based on love rather than on someone's ideas about what is "most important?"

What To Do

1/16/2012

I've written before about the "Ratcheting Up" and "Ratcheting Down" stages of life. My wife and I are in the Ratcheting Down stage, with our children getting older now. We are back to having only one child at home (a 17-year old son).

An interesting side effect of this is that you have a lot more free time. In the old days, so much of our time was taken up with bands and activities. We took children to craft things (I remember lots of trips to Home Depot on Saturday mornings to make stuff that sits in my garage now). We took children to shows and fairs and such. We always seemed to have a lot of things to do.

Now, not so much.

So, what do you do with all that free time?

Not only do you have lots more free time, but you have lots more energy as well. Not chasing a five-year old around everywhere is very restful. The respite from having to carry conversations with pre-conversational children is very nice.

I can read books, now (better than before, anyway). I can sit on my sofa with a lamp and a cool drink and actually read for an hour or more. I can just go somewhere for the fun of going. My wife and I find ourselves with an embarrassment of time, to be honest.

Now, I am sure someone will write to me about all the "good" things I could be doing. There are all sorts of ministries and services and such into which I could pour my free time. I will, probably, find something like that to do one day. But, for now, here I am.

Part of Ratcheting Down is just getting some time to yourself, plus time to spend with your spouse, without worrying about children all the time. I think there are people who find this difficult, but I am not one of those people. I enjoy an afternoon nap or an afternoon of reading. I do not need my grandchildren coming over to liven up my life at all.

With grandchildren, I have learned that it is nice to see them when they come, and also nice to see them when they leave.

When I had lots of children around, I often wished for a moat so that I could pull up the drawbridge and keep the world out. Now, to be honest, I want the moat even more. The drawbridge would be up almost all the time, now.

I am finding quiet time to be a great gift. Someday, I will find something useful to do with that time.

But not today.

At The Local Costco

1/14/2012

The big retail news in our area is that Costco finally opened a store here. They promised to open a store some years ago, but then the economy tanked and the while thing was put off indefinitely. Now, they are back and they are open.

If you have never been to a Costco, it is basically a large aluminum box filled with lots of stuff to buy. It has the "warehouse" style of marketing, which means large supplies of large boxes of stuff at pretty good prices. If you have ever been to a Sam's Club, you will have the idea, except that Costco tends toward slightly higher-end items.

When we lived in Washington State, we used to shop at Costco pretty frequently. We had four children and lots to purchase. Costco (which sells everything in large amounts) was a good option. After moving here, we have not been in one for eight years.

Well, we've got a Costco now. Trouble is, there are only three of us at home now. Everyone else is grown and gone (or, at least, at college). Giant vats of ketchup and giant bags of vegetables or fruit are no longer really our cup of tea (or crate of tea).

I went again this morning (their gas price is excellent) and looked around at folks and a couple of things. I have figured out that the key to Costco is that they sell name-brand stuff cheaper than other people, but that store-brands are still cheaper in other places. Still.

It was interesting to see all the young families with two carts (one for children and one for groceries). It was interesting to see older couples getting just a few things (meat is pretty cheap there). Folks were lining up at the various sample stands for a taste of Fiber One cereal or a drink of some special coffee. It is still Costco.

Life goes on, doesn't it? Even as our lives change (our children leaving, for example), other lives come along. In our class on parenting, we see young couples struggling with the same things we faced 20 years ago and being given the same answers.

It is a comfort, in a way. Ecclesiastes 1 addresses the frustration of how the world stays the same no matter what we do.

A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens[c] to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

Today, I am thinking of the "generation goes, generation comes" part of that sermon. To all the young people who are in the generation that is coming, welcome aboard. You are about to see and do things you never imagined. Your life will be something you never dreamed.

And one day, when your generation is going, you will look back and remember it all. May you so live that, on that day, you can look back with satisfaction.

Visiting the Jail

1/13/2012

I hate going to jail.

One of the regular events of my professional life has been visiting a client in a jail. Perhaps some of you have never been to a jail or a prison. If you have never been to either, then you really cannot know what it is like. If you have only been to a prison, not a county jail, then you cannot know what a jail is like.

For old guys like me, the first thing we ever knew about a jail was from the old Andy Griffith Show, with two little cells in a simple office, presided over by Andy and Barney. That's not the way it works.

My client has been in this county jail (the one I visited today) for seven months. Keep that in mind. Seven months.

The jail is very small. It sits on a back lot in a very small town, with nothing to see anywhere. The jail yard is smaller than a front yard in a normal subdivision and is surrounded by high walls topped with razor wire. You could not run in the jail yard, because you could not get up any speed before hitting the fence. The most you could do for exercise is walk around the little yard.

The jail building is small, but most of it is taken up with the offices of the local sheriff, so that the actual jail area is much smaller than even a simple home. You are "behind the door," the only entrance and exit, and you never get beyond the door, except to see visitors.

For seven months, he has set in this jail. He is there because he is in federal custody, but the feds pay the county to house prisoners for the federal government. He is awaiting a sentencing hearing, which could have happened in June and may not happen until this June. It is up to the judge to decide when to give him a hearing. In the meantime, he is stuck in the jail.

There is nothing to do in the jail. You can read, but he does not really read. Otherwise, you just sit all day and do nothing. There are no fancy weight sets (like movies show in prison) to do workouts. There are no TV rooms with cable. There are just 24 hours every day, sitting in this jail. He has been there seven months. He may be there for seven more. His entire world is that small building and that small yard.

I do not like visiting the local jails. This was the smallest of the ones I have had to visit. By his actions, my client has placed himself in these circumstances. He is 23 or so years old. My son, the same age, is in Monterey, California, learning Arabic with the Army. But my client is stuck in this jail, waiting to learn how long he will be in prison.

This is where sin gets you. This is where all sin would one day get you. You will be going along in your sinful life and, suddenly, you will be taken up and put into a place where there is nothing to do all day but suffer. Where all the world cannot reach you. Where walls and locks bar you from all that is worthwhile and all that is worth doing.

You will not, however, be stuck, as my client is, not knowing how long you will be there. You will always be there. Always. You will never have a yard in which to run or a restaurant in which to eat or a child with whom to play or a day in which anything happens because you want it to happen.

We emphasize the idea that hell includes burning torment, which may or may not be the case, but the fire is surely not the point. We emphasize being "absent from Christ," although we speak to people who, in fact, do not want to be near Christ. We tell them about an "eternal punishment" even though they cannot imagine eternity. We seldom tell them the reality they must really fear.

The reality is that they will be like a man in a county jail. A man with no freedom, no joy, no hope, no plan, no power, nothing at all. A man whose entire existence occurs in a small building on a back street in a nothing town where no one cares a thing about him. A lost man.

How often do you think about what Christ has done for you? We, in modern America, tend to look at present things. We talk about "fulfillment" and "personal integrity" and "celebrating Christ" and lots of other things that are really about us, not about Christ, and have almost nothing to do with what He actually did.

Drive by a county jail sometime. Imagine spending eternity in that place. That is what Christ saves you from. Nothing that happens in this life, with its short span of years, compares with the joy of being free of that fate.

I hate going to jail.

Good News from the World

1/11/2012

We Christians spend a lot of time complaining about the world. Being rather inconstant in our thinking, we both recognize that the world is evil (a theological truth) and also whine and complain when it does evil things (a proof of our foolishness). A popular point for such complaining is the legal system.

Well, today is a good day for the legal system. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC, issued this morning, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed an important element of our freedom of religion - the right to choose ministers without asking government permission. As the government has passed employment discrimination laws, there have been many cases in lower courts regarding claims by ministers who wanted to keep jobs which their churches wanted to take away. They have claimed all manner of alleged discrimination (age, sex, race, disability, etc.). They have almost always lost because the First Amendment's right to free exercise of religion trumps all such laws.

Today, the Court decided a claim by a "called teacher" at a Lutheran school. A called teacher is one who is ordained and trained in a specific way to be a spiritual leader. Ultimately, she was terminated and claimed that she was terminated because she threatened to file a lawsuit against the church based on her disability. The church won at the lower court, lost at the Sixth Circuit, and won today (and finally) at the Supreme Court.

Put simply, the Court held that selection of ministers is a fundamental right of a body of believers, into which the government has no right to look. It concluded its opinion with this very simple truth: "The church must be free to choose those who will guide it on its way."

This is important because, in fact, the evil of the world has tried to destroy churches in many ways, not least of which is controlling who can and who cannot be ministers. As the Court noted, the Church of England allowed the government such power in the years before the American Revolution. In the First Amendment, the Founders made sure that the American government could not control churches' decisions about religion, a protection that the Obama Administration hoped to eliminate.

As a result of the decision, the First Amendment remains a powerful defense for churches in such situations. It has been under attack since the Obama Administration took office. In this case, the administration attempted to destroy the function of the religious clauses of the First Amendment entirely, arguing that the protection of free exercise means nothing more than "freedom of association" and arguing that the federal government had the right to order churches to hire and retain particular ministers, despite the beliefs of those churches.

It was a big issue, as such issues go, because churches will not, for the foreseeable future, be faced with government-imposed ministers, which was at least part of the goal of the lawsuit.

It is an evil world. We cannot look to it or to its instruments of power for our safety or protection in serving God. Nonetheless, it is a good day when one of those powerful institutions (the Supreme Court) recognizes and protects our rights against a government agency which seeks to destroy them.