Over the past two days, there have been two events which have caused serious reflection on the second most important relationship in my life (after God).  The first happened Sunday night, when I read of a young pastor of a fast-growing evangelical church who had resigned that morning due to an emotional and physical affair he had gotten into with his assistant.  News like this is always devastating to me, as it is agonizing to see how years of service to God can be undone in a moment by sinful choices.  It reconfirmed in me the need to guard myself against compromising situations, and reminded me of how Satan will come hardest as the leaders of a church, because he knows that if he can take them out, the whole thing will be shaken.  I know that Michele and I would covet your prayers and your support in making sure that our marriage and family are protected.   

Most importantly, however, that event reminded me how much I love my wife and how desperately I never want something like that to happen to our family.  Read more »

Father’s Day is fast approaching, and I want to pass along to the men of the congregation a sermon by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle called “Marriage and Men,” based on 1 Peter 3:7 (you can watch the sermon at http://www.marshillchurch.org/media/trial/marriage-and-men).  Pastor Driscoll is becoming more and more influential and widely known, usually for his Calvinist theology, his macho man image and depiction of a manly Jesus, and for occasionally crossing the line into inappropriate or crude humor.  But one thing I have always admired in him is that he appears to me of a man who knows how to love and protect his wife, love and train up his children in the Lord, and teach immature men what it means to be a real man – not a macho American man or an immature wanna-be man, but a man like Jesus.

The one word Pastor Driscoll uses to sum up what it means to be a man is this:  Read more »

One of my favorite quotes comes from the C.S. Lewis book The Four Loves, an exploration of affection, friendship, eros, and charity.  In his section on friendship, he uses an illustration about his relationship with two of his closest friends, “Charles” and “Ronald” (J.R.R. Tolkien) to make a larger point about the importance of Christian fellowship to our knowledge of God.  This is how Lewis puts it:

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.  By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.  Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke.  Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.  Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves.  Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.  They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves’… In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God.  For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest.  That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another (Isaiah 6:3).  The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we all have.

There are so many beautiful insights in this passage.  Read more »

I recently completed a sermon series on the Song of Solomon, a beautiful collection of love poems in the Old Testament that have a lot to encourage us about in the areas of love, sex, and romance. My first interaction with this book was back in 2000, when I went through a study on the Song of Solomon that had been done by a Texas pastor named Tommy Nelson with three teenage boys that I was discipling. That study was an excellent and unforgettable time of teaching these teens what it means to love someone Biblically, and is especially meaningful as one of those teens just had his first baby and one of the others is getting married this May.

The impact that study had made on those teens was one of the reasons I wanted to do a sermon series with the whole church. However, as I studied the book, read commentaries, and listened to other sermons on the Song of Solomon, I found myself moving away from the Tommy Nelson-style of preaching, which in many ways treated the book as a how-to manual for Biblical love, dating, and marriage. Read more »

 “Have you found anyone special yet?” 

“Gone on any dates recently?”

“So, when are you going to get married?” 

Are there any more annoying questions for the single person than these (usually asked by well-meaning relatives, of course)?  It is not easy to be single, especially in a world that sees marriage as something to which all normal and reasonable normal people should aspire.  And the church does not always help, often focusing heavily on married families and causing the unmarried to feel pretty invisible.

But the Biblical perception of singlehood is far different and much more respectful.  Read more »

We are two weeks into a seven week series on the Song of Solomon in our Sunday services, and my goal has been to both communicate the message of this unique book (or collection of love songs) and to use it as a springboard to communicate the Biblical view on love, sex, and marriage.  There are so many harmful messages out there on all three of those topics that I believe have contributed to a culture that is littered with broken marriages, aborted children, rampant pornography, and general chaos in the romantic realm.  As difficult as it can be to preach on these topics in church, I strongly believe that it would be worse to remain silent and hope that people can sift through the cultural messages on their own.
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“Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (Hebrews 10:25)

Last week I wrote about church transfers who leave churches out of dissatisfaction, and the importance of dealing with any unresolved issues before becoming a member of a new church so that the same pattern will not repeat itself.  One common frustration with people who leave churches is the general feeling that nobody cares about them.  They aren’t able to make it to church for three weeks, and nobody calls to see how they are doing.  They ask for prayer for something important happening in their life, and nobody checks in to see how things turned out.  Most churches talk about being a family, but what kind of family forgets to look after a brother or sister who is nowhere to be found for an extended period of time?  What kind of family turns a cold shoulder to a son or daughter going through a difficult time?  For those who expect a church to care for each other as a family, it can be disillusioning and hurtful to experience such neglect.
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If you were paying attention to the news over the past few months, you may have been shocked to see Google acquire the rights to YouTube, a popular on-line video-sharing website, for the staggering sum of 1.65 billion dollars.  If you had never heard of or visited YouTube before, let me share a couple more astounding facts about this phenomenon – first of all, it was founded in February 2005.  That’s right – after being in existence for only a year and a half, its three founders sold the rights to YouTube for over one and a half billion dollars, the greatest get rich quick scheme ever.  Secondly, by July 2006, 65,000 new videos were uploaded to the website every day by people around the world, while 100 million clips were being viewed daily.  The most popular video, called The Evolution of Dance, has been viewed over 38 million times since it was added nine months ago.

Is your head spinning yet?

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The sun is shining on the autumn leaves, reflecting a tapestry of reds, yellows, and oranges around the assembled crowd, as the young man stands, smiling. The last bridesmaid has taken her place to his right, beaming at him, and the winding path before him now stands deserted. And then, from over the hill and out of his line of sight, comes the faint noise of horse’s hooves, and soon enough he can just make out the horse and buggy coming around the bend.

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