A Wise Man...

I have been sitting under some of the best Bible teaching that I've ever heard. Dr. James Raiford has been teaching our A.B.C. 08 (Autumn Bible Conference) this week. What a joy to hear a man so carefully & accurately communicate the Word of God! Let me encourage you to download his teachings at the end of this week at the Church of the Wildwood's Web site. The theme of our conference is "The Sufficiency of Scripture". His pulpit ministry is just tops, a real expositor. There is, however, another side to this man. I've been spending time with him one on one & at the tables of many of our Church members. We 'discussed' Calvinism vs Arminianism yesterday at lunch. We were in the home of one of our church families. I lean far more toward Calvinism & Dr. Raiford more towards Armenianism (though neither of us to an extreme). Here's what amazed me. This man is so very gracious in his disagreement. He is also so very careful not to destroy me in debate in front of my people (I am very sure he could easily do this with one half of his brain tied behind his back). I even had to encourage him to speak more freely so as to get a better understanding of his opposing position. Wow! That is so very impressive to me. I guess I'm still young & when I'm right & I know it, I can have a tendency to blow away any & all dissenting views. A wise man can rest in his wisdom & win his opponents with grace. Dr. James Raiford is a truly wise man.

Biting the Bullet

Today was one of those days you dread. My daughter Anna brought 'Bullet' to our family in April. He was a stray puppy that was headed for the pound. Anna talked me into keeping him & that wasn't too hard as his disposition was very gentle & sweet. Bullet & our dog Trigger were seeming to get along well but I told my children that as soon as Bullet got bigger than Trigger we'd have a fight on our hands. From day one, Trigger let Bullet know who was boss which was fine with meek Bullet. I noticed that lately Trigger was more aggressive towards him. It is turning fall & something 'turns on' in Trigger this time of year. He's a full blooded mountain curr & hunting & tracking are in his blood. The two dogs got out Wednesday & went running. When they came home, Bullet was limping & bleeding. It was obvious that he had been attacked & it was also obvious that his front fore leg was severely broken.
I didn't sleep at all Wednesday evening knowing what I had to do the next morning. I already prepared the kids & told them that surgery was out of the question. Anna slept on the dining room floor with Bullet for much of that night. She somehow knew & it was so painful to watch.
One of the men in my church happened to be in my office when Paul Jr. told me about Bullet's leg. He too knew what would most likely outcome of it & he gave me his vets name & graciously said the He & his Wife would like to take care of the bill. Talk about making a horrible day so much better. Just to see that level of compassion & caring.
When Zack & I came home from the vet without Bullet, the whole house just seemed empty. Sam came running out to meet me and said rather matter of factly, "Well, did you kill Bullet"? I need to talk to that boy about tact even though he's only three. Everyone was heart sick so I loaded them all up & took them to Wafflehouse for breakfast. Yea, I had to bite the bullet today & man did that hurt.

A Beautiful Site...

I agree with John Piper who said in a message, "Every day that you don't wake up in hell is a great day" I know what I deserve & what I don't. I am also learning WHY God delights in giving...because the giver gets the glory. I know you're probably wondering what the above pic has to do with my theological rambling...well I'll tell you:
My dear wife INSISTED on the family taking this pic on our last evening on our way cool vacation. No one wanted to do it but she pulled the mommy card & we all came under conviction & cooperated. This very pic is the ONLY one of all of us together in our travels & it also happens to be my favorite. Here's the connection: I don't deserve my wife & I know it. On her worst day (& she's had them) she is still light years ahead of me. She's taken a pretty tough stance around our house lately & we've all been kind of watching to see is its for real. Well, it is. I am amazed at her utter wisdom & tenacity. She has inspired me to be a better husband and father without one word of nagging. She's done it by her example and she probably doesn't even know it. I thank God for the privilege to have Elizabeth for my completer. As you should know by now, I don't believe in luck or happenstance. God gave her to me plain & simple. Like most of His gifts, I didn't realize what I had at first & I'm ashamed to say how long it has taken me to realize what jewel of a woman she is. Nope, I don't deserve her...that's called grace.

Lest We Forget...

Do you remember where you were when our nation was attacked by Islamic cowards seven years ago? I was walking down my hall to leave for the office. My Mother in law was visiting & she had the TV on fox news. There was one of the World Trade Center Towers with billowing smoke coming out of it. "What happened?" I asked. She said a plane ran into the tower. No sooner did she get that out of her mouth than both of us saw the second plane. When it hit, my heart sank...this was no accident. Then came the news of the pentagon & the heroism on flight 93.

I watched some clips of the various memorials around the country today. When I saw those people holding up pictures of their loved ones who perished in these cowardly acts, my heart sank again. Its only been seven years yet we have forgotten. Those who lost spouses & children & friends...they haven't forgotten. How is it that we forget so soon? At least half of this country has forgotten why we are fighting in Iraq & Afghanistan. There hasn't been another 9/11 since but that has come at the price of even more American blood.

Forgive us Lord for we have a poor memory. We have 'gotten over' the horror of 9/11 because it is in the past & we have been indoctrinated to 'live for today'. Forgive us for not lifting to You in prayer the shattered families that lie scattered in the wake of this dark day in our national history. Forgive us Lord for forgetting. Please Father, intervene in every family touched by this tragedy. Bring this nation back in line with your will and your ways. Raise up your Church & restore your heart to her. May she be a beacon of hope in this sin saturated United States of America. Teach her to so love your Son that she loves her fellow man. Raise us up to be your healing & America's hope.

In Jesus' Name...Let it be

Thinking it Through

I came accross this post by Pastor Doug Wilson. While I do not share all of his theological views, his "thinkging through" the Palin issue has produced a helpful tool for those of us in the complementarian camp.

An Epistemological Pileup
All right. As far as I can make out, our debate over Sarah Palin revolves around three distinct issues, all three of which have merged in a highly entertaining and jumbled fashion — a sort of epistemological pile-up.
The first is the propriety of voting for a Republican. A large number of us (myself included) have been let down so many times by these people that anything, no matter how good it looks, feels to us like Lucy setting up the football for Charlie Brown one more time. Just one more time. Please?
The second issue is the propriety of voting for a woman to hold civil office, exercising authority over men in that realm. Some argue from the clear biblical teaching on male headship in the family and the equally clear biblical teaching on the requirement for male leadership in the Church, and say that we can extend this restriction into the civil realm. And I believe that we could do this, were it not for the clear scriptural counterexample.
And last, we have the concerns that revolve around the age of Sarah Palin’s children. The idea is that there is no way for her to fulfill her obligations to her family, which are fixed by God, and also fulfill the obligations she would have as vice-president.
Some of those with concerns only have one of these concerns. Some have all three. Some don’t have any. Shake vigorously and discuss. For my purposes here, I want to address them seriatim.
First, it has been well said that Washington contains two parties — the Evil Party and the Stupid Party. And some of us began to suspect a number of years ago that the stupidity of the SP was beginning to look like it was being done on purpose, making it therefore a higher and more nefarious form of evil. The serpent was more subtle than all the beasts of the field.
At the end of the day, this issue is a matter of trust and the believability of individuals. And if someone trusts someone that you cannot bring yourself to trust, then that’s okay. Free country. It would be a moral issue if someone were to say, “Yes, I know these promises are all a sham, but I am going to pretend to believe them anyway.” That is willful blindness. But differences of opinion are not in that category. I can easily see how men of good conscience could differ over whether Ronald Reagan’s campaign promises were trustworthy or not. If you don’t believe it, then don’t. It is the candidate’s job to persuade you, not your job to prove to his satisfaction that he is untrustworthy.
For what it is worth, as I think back over all the votes I have cast in presidential elections from the seventies down to the present, sometimes for Republicans and more recently not, the only person that I know I would vote for again is Ronald Reagan. And this despite the fact that he had a pretty rocky relationship with some of his kids, and on that basis I believe him to have been disqualified to hold office in a local church. The offices are different. I would do this because I agreed with him on the key political issues, and believed that he agreed with me. I can understand why others would not believe him — but I do maintain that I can think this way without being a ninnyhammer.
The idea that women should be excluded from civil office, period, is an exegetical question, and one that I believe that can be settled because of the perspicuity of Scripture.
A curse is pronounced on a people in Isaiah 3:12 that is relevant to this discussion. It is possible that this is not referring to actual women, but to girly men, to effeminate men. To men of arrested development, and a junior high approach to sex. Bill Clinton comes to mind. In other words, the men who rule are being called womanish, or childish. Like calling Ralph Nader matronly.
Like I said, that is possible. But I take it in the more straightforward sense — that a society is under a weight of judgment when it has a dearth of men capable of exercising godly rule. This could happen because the men are all dead, or gone, or they are abdicating wimps. In any case, I believe this really would be a judgment on a society. But it has nothing to do with — for example — Elizabethan England, one of the most masculine societies our civilization has ever produced. Whatever was going on in that day, Isaiah 3:12 wasn’t in the mix.
Because a husband is the head of his wife, for a wife to rule in the household inverts God’s order. But this does not mean that a wife cannot ever rule a household. In Acts 16, Lydia is very clearly the head of her household. This means that she had no husband, but without a husband, the household was her household. Given her status as a wealthy merchant, and the average size of that kind of household back in the day, she probably had a couple hundred people serving in that household.
But Scripture is silent on the numbers, so let me use a contemporary example. Suppose we have a husband and wife who are very wealthy. They have expansive grounds, and several lucrative businesses. He passes away, and she inherits all of it. After life gets back to normal, does she have the authority to tell the male gardener what to do? Can she tell the factory foreman, who is also male, what he should do? Can she exercise authority over full-grown men? You bet she can. There is nothing in the least disordered about it. Bring it down to a smaller scale. She owns a restaurant that she inherited from her husband. She is the manager. Can she tell the twenty-one-year-old dishwasher to step it up a bit, paco? Can she tell the hashslinger to sling hash a little faster? Of course. To argue otherwise is to fall into the fatal trap that feminists fall into all the time — they insist on getting into arguments with reality. They love arguing with the way things are.
Because men don’t usually all die at the same time, and because they are the heads of their homes, most businesses will be run by men. Most corporations will be run by men. Most societies will be run by men. This is as it should be, and I find nothing to complain about. Who is complaining? Not me, said the little black duck. But when the weird circumstance comes along and a male senator dies, and the party installs his widow in his place, I find nothing to complain about there either. Here and there this kind of thing happens, and I don’t care.
Of course I do care when a woman has been running for president since kindergarten. That is unseemly, but let us not mention names. But it is hardly better when a guy does it.
This kind of normal anomaly is exactly what we find in Scripture in the case of Deborah. This is obviously an unusual circumstance, but there is nothing in the text to suggest that it was unusual because of all the wimpy men. Deborah was a mother in Israel (Judg. 5:7), and she was married to Lapidoth (Judg. 4:4). She authoritatively summoned Barak and told him what he needed to do with his armies (Judg. 4:6). He refused to go unless she went with him. She responded that because of his conditions, the glory of killing Sisera would go to a woman, not a man. And that was fulfilled in the heroic actions of Jael the wife of Heber.
But notice what this means. Barak lost glory that was coming to him because he did not just simply obey the word fo the Lord that came to him. Talking back to a prophet, and setting conditions on your obedience, is not the way to go. That was the problem. Barak forfeited honor because he did not obey a woman.
Deborah did not say that the glory of Sisera’s death would go to a woman because Barak had obeyed her first summons. She did not say that there was any problem whatever with him functioning as a general under a female leader in Israel. She did not say, nor does the text say, that there was anything wrong with what she was doing. The text does not breathe a hint of disapproval, and I would suggest that it is dangerous for us to treat this as anything other than what it appears to be in the text — a curious but lawful exception to the way things usually go.
St. Paul bars women from rule in the church. So should we. Paul teaches that men are head over their wives. So should we. Luke teaches that a woman can function in a household without a head over her. So should we. The writer of Judges, without blinking, tells us of the faithful rule of Deborah, a mother in Israel. We shouldn’t blink either, not if we begin and end, where we should, with the Bible.
The third issue is the number of Sarah Palin’s kids, and their ages. This is the one that has the most compelling weight, at least in my thinking. How can she possibly discharge her responsibilities in the home and in the office of vice-presidency simultaneously? It is a very good question and, were I her pastor, it is one that I would have pressed on Palins in all sincerity. It is not an irrational question, but I don’t really think I would have had to press it. In fact, it is so obvious that I have trouble believing that Todd and Sarah Palin didn’t spend long hours talking about what they would do if this, and if that. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how well or how poorly they are going to arrange it. We shall see. I honestly don’t know how they will do, although the signs appear to me to be at least somewhat hopeful. Despite their problems, the family appears to be tightly-knit. Their oldest son is now in the army, and off on his own. Their second is going to be married soon. That leaves three.
In that context, I need to say that I am not quite sure how to bring up the next point. Americans are uncomfortable with “aristocracy,” with those who can afford servants. But if she is elected, like it or not, Sarah Palin will then be in that class. As she made apparent in her speech last night, when she told us how she let the cook go so that she, the governor, could cook the meals instead, she probably won’t like having servants around any more than a bunch of her critics like her having them around. But she will still have them, and if she organizes her life with her priorities remaining with her family, as she ought to, then it is not necessary to hold dogmatically that the family has to turn out a train wreck because of this. Could be, but we don’t know yet, and we can’t know without a good more information.
Think that is enough for now? But there will be more later

Not Gonna Bow!

Well it's official...If Obama gets elected then we're in the last days...The Lord is returning (or taking office if you're a dem). My daughter Anna is all tied up in knots because she's heard this from several people who she looks up to. I remember the same fears getting their nasty hooks in my soul when I was her age only the culprit then was all communists not just Obama. Little ears heard adults talk about Christians being tortured in the U.S.S.R. & they are sure that this fate will be theirs before school lets out that year. I had a talk with Anna and tried to help her think through her fear, find the holes, & sleep sweet & secure in Jesus (who's coming back with or without Obama's presidency)


On the other side of the coin, all our evangelical leaders & followers (blind?) have just finished being disgusted with the lib's fawning all over their 'Savior' Obama & they are doing the same thing with Palin. She's the answer, a pitbull with lipstick, the Savior in a dress (again).


Can I throw up now?


Isaiah 31:1 says it well, "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help And rely on horses, And trust in chariots because they are many And in horsemen because they are very strong, But they do not look to the Holy One of Israel, nor seek the LORD!"


I believe it is a believer's privilege & duty to do ALL WE CAN to stem the tide of evil & to respect & elect our Civil leaders. HOWEVER, David didn't say in the 121st Psalm, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the White House, from whence commeth my help?" Do you know why they say that Politics & Religion don't mix? Because they tend to be mutually exclusive gods. To my fellow saints, Idols come in many forms & parties. The second we look to our elected servants as THE ANSWER, we have drunk the kool-aide & bowed the knee to the golden calf. As I recall, God wasn't too pleased with the golden calf party...the discipline was deadly.


I am voting this November so save that response. I am still not sure for who yet but I am sure who I'm not voting for as the right to life is the main issue in my mind & on my heart.

I agree with Churchill when he said, "All that it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing"
That is not an option for me & I hope it isn't an option for you. What is also not an option is to make the deadly error of turning the Duty of election into deadly idolatry.
I will pull that lever this November but I will never bow my knee to a party, politician or a platform.

Palin: Politics or Principles?

I am still scratching my head on this one. I'm still trying to process the implications of Mrs. Palin as the Vice President, and one heartbeat away from being the President, of these United States of America. Not that my opinion matters except in November but it matters to God & that is where my struggle lies. I preach against 'Clintonizing' morality. Compartmentalizing life into sectors where in-congruent values are justified by fuzzy logic. IE - I can abuse my power as President & have an 'inappropriate' relationship with an intern yet that has no bearing whatsoever on my ability to be the President..."Clintonizing".
That offends me at my core and yet...I find that is exactly what I'm doing when it comes to the good Governor of Alaska. Setting aside core values of complimentarianism, God given distinct roles for men & women, for pragmatic political gain and the ultimate moral mortar to shore up the disintegrating moral foundation of this once great nation.
Is this a classic case of "The end justifying the means" or "The lesser of two evils"? Or is there more to it? Is there a biblical case, albeit not the norm, for a woman rising to civil power to lead a nation? Is my Theology forming my Worldview or is my Worldview forming my Theology?

If only the answers were that clear. Let me break it down and then see if I can wed my politics & principles without a shotgun.

Politics: The choice of Palin was initially a brilliant move by McCain. A woman & a conservative who is pro-life & pro limited government! What a balance to the liberal leaning McCain. He threw a bone to his conservative base & they are loving it...for now. Does the Palin choice have enough gas to take him to November and ultimately to the White House? I doubt it. Conservative America will tire of its new pet Palin & any boost McCain gets now will probably have long leveled out by November. But for now, She's been a boon for McCain & a bit of a slap in the face to the libs.

Principle: Can I pull the lever and give my tacit approval for a Mom putting government & career before her primary calling as a keeper of her home? I don't know. I look to scripture & see the norms and I preach & teach them regularly to our congregation. Motherhood is a sacred calling. Keepers of their homes are honored and blessed. Embrace your calling and don't chase after the carrot of culture. Is there anything I haven't considered scripturally? I discussed it with my family & they actually had some interesting light to shed on Mrs. Palin.

When I asked my older sons their thoughts, they had much the same struggles as I. I guess the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree. Paul Jr. brought up the Judge Deborah in Judges 4. Zack immediately saw the tension between my politics & my preaching.

Anna surprised me. She is 12 & is sometimes wise beyond her years. When asked about her thoughts on the good governess Anna said, "I don't know...but Dad, God has set her in this place for a reason" Anna reminded me of all of my lessons to her on the complete sovereignty of God over EVERYTHING. It also reminded me of another strong woman who dangerously left her 'place' to save her 'people'...Esther. As her aged Uncle reminded her, "And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?" Is there any room in my narrow mind for this to be true? Would God EVER work out side the norm to attain his purposes?

My dear wife Elizabeth gave me one of the best answers when she said, "It wouldn't be the first time God used a woman to upstage a guy named Barak" Hmmmmmm. She also reminded me that the decision for her career was biblically between her & her husband. Sometimes we tend to trample one principle in order to exalt another.

Well Dzed (my pet name for me) what will it be? Which one will dominate - your Politics or your Principles? Or is there room in the plan of God to teach the Men of this nation a lesson through the leadership of a self proclaimed daughter of His? Can there be a wedding here of Politics & Principles? Stay tuned...we'll have to see how the pre marriage counselling goes.