March 31, 2010
Easter Week Questions For A Four-Year Old
Our 4-year old daughter Karis is good at memorizing. These are some questions we're working through this week. They are not just applicable at Easter. I'm posting them in case others might find this a good springboard for your own catechizing. The answers are admittedly a bit short and simplistic, but I figured that would make it easier for her to memorize and we can build on these concepts later. And there's a bit of repetition, which I figure will only foster better memorization. Also, each can be associated with Scripture texts, which she can also be memorizing.
Q: Who is Jesus?
A: Jesus is God’s Son.
Q: Why did Jesus come to earth?
A: God sent Jesus to live and die in the place of every sinner who would ever trust in Him, love Him, and obey Him.
Q: What do we celebrate this week?
A: The death and resurrection of Jesus.
Q: Why did Jesus die?
A: The wages of sin is death. Jesus died for the sins of other people. Jesus took their punishment. And Jesus perfectly obeyed God on their behalf.
Q: Which people did Jesus die for?
A: Every sinner who ever puts their trust in Him, loves Him, and obeys Him. To them, Jesus is a merciful Savior, Lord, and Treasure.
Q: Are you a sinner?
A: Yes. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Q: What are sins?
A: Disobeying Mommy and Daddy and not doing what I should.
Q: Was Jesus a sinner?
A: No. Jesus never sinned. Jesus rose from the dead because death had no power over Him.
Q: Do you need a Savior?
A: Yes
Q: Who is the only Savior to whom you should go?
A: Jesus, God’s Son, who lived and died on behalf of every sinner who would ever trust in Him, love Him, and obey Him.
March 28, 2010
John Piper To Take Extended Leave
I have enormous respect and affection for John Piper, not just because of his preaching, speaking, and writing abilities, but because of his tenacious pursuit of personal godliness. May God greatly bless his soul and that of his family as he takes an extended leave from May 1 through December 31. Today, he posted this letter of explanation. What makes this leave different is that Pastor John will step back from almost all his speaking engagements and from book writing:
In this leave, I intend to let go of all of it. No book-writing. No sermon preparation or preaching. No blogging. No Twitter. No articles. No reports. No papers. And no speaking engagements. There is one stateside exception—the weekend devoted to the Desiring God National Conference combined with the inaugural convocation of Bethlehem College and Seminary in October. Noël thought I should keep three international commitments. Our reasoning is that if she could go along, and if we plan it right, these could be very special times of refreshment together.Read the whole thing. And consider adding him to the list of those for whom you regularly pray.
March 27, 2010
NPR on McLaren (with Mohler, Ware, and Hamilton)
NPR gives an obviously-slanted perspective on Brian McLaren and his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, ending this 4 min 35 sec segment (which features McLaren, but also Albert Mohler, Bruce Ware, and Jim Hamilton) with this remark:
"Mohler is determined to nip any such trend in the bud. But if McLaren and surveys of young people are any guide, there seems to be an appetite for a different sort of evangelical Christianity."This is exactly the sort of trend that the 2010 Ligonier West Coast Conference was about. Painfully, NPR twice refers to McLaren as a "leading evangelical."
One disturbing statistic mentioned in the segment is from David Campbell and Robert D. Putnam's book American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives
HT: Denny Burk
2010 Ligonier West Coast Conference Round-Up
I just got back from live-blogging the 2010 Ligonier West Coast Conference. It was a great couple days of fellowship and teaching. Here's a round-up of the posts:
Session 1 - Michael Horton - The Church Cries "Uncle" ("Sam" That Is)
Session 2 - John MacArthur - Becoming a Better You
Session 3 - Q&A - Horton, MacArthur, Sproul
Session 4 - R.C. Sproul - Good News or Good Advice?
Session 5 - Peter Jones - A Gnostic Gospel
Session 6 - Q&A - Horton, Jones, Sproul
Session 7 - Michael Horton - Moralistic and Therapeutic Deism
Session 8 - R.C. Sproul - Back to Basics
March 21, 2010
HBO Mini-Series: The Pacific
HBO's new mini-series entitled The Pacific looks really good. They've posted the first episode online for free (looks like you need to sign-in).
The series is based on the memoirs of Eugene Sledge (With the Old Breed
Here is the trailer for The Pacific:
HT: JT
The End of Book Publishing?
With the rising use of the Internet, mobile applications, Facebook, and Twitter, many have speculated that book publishing will be left by the wayside -- as we saw with vinyl records soon after CDs hit the market. This cute video is effective - it begs to differ (and I agree).
HT: Michael Hyatt
Bart Stupak: How Disappointing
Wow. How could Representative Stupak be so easily duped? It is clear that Obama's executive order cannot prevent the health care legislation from being fully implemented, as written (including the public funding for abortion). But it seems that Stupak is not as strong as many of us thought. We should have known better. This video was recorded last Fall:
HT: The Corner
March 10, 2010
Q&A with C.J. Mahaney on Manhood Issues
An array of excellent, practical instruction for young men (14-19) and husbands/fathers alike on matters pertaining to manhood, humility, servant-leadership, wisdom, and character cultivation:
Q&A on Biblical Masculinity from Sovereign Grace Ministries on Vimeo.
The books CJ mentions are:
1. Derek Kidner, Proverbs
2. Ed Welch, When People Are Big and God is Small.
3. John Ensor, Doing Things Right in Matters of the Heart.
4. John Piper and Wayne Grudem, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
HT: JT
March 08, 2010
RC Sproul Interviews Stephen Meyer
Dr. Stephen Meyer (Ph.D., Cambridge) is Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute outside of Seattle, Washington. He has spend twenty years researching cosmology, biology, and metaphysics and is currently at the forefront of the "Intelligent Design" movement - a broad coalition of researchers whose findings demonstrate the mathematical improbability of a godless universe and (conversely) the rationality of believing in an Intelligent Creator. Meyer is the author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
HT: Ligonier
March 07, 2010
Loving God With All Your Mind
Gene Veith, in Loving God With All Your Mind (pp. 150-151):
[Jesus] tells us to love God with “all” our mind. In other words, everything the mind is capable of doing is to be devoted to loving God. It would seem then that if your mind can spin out complex mathematical calculations, you are to love God in mathematics. If your mind can plan a business, design a building, analyze a novel, understand a philosophical problem, or imagine a story, you are to love God in your planning, designing, analyzing, understanding, or imagining. When Jesus says “all” the mind, He is claiming every mental faculty we have.When He says “all your mind,” He is applying this claim in a very personal way. Not everyone has the same ability. Someone who is physically handicapped may not have the same physical “strength” that a star athlete does. That does not matter. Whether it means serving God from a hospital bed or from an Olympic pavilion, both are called to love God with all of their strength. In the same way, “all your mind” encompasses a wide range of talents and abilities. Some minds are gifted in the sciences, some in the arts. Some minds are oriented to academia and higher education; some are interested in more mundane spheres. No one set of talents is better than any other, and every calling is equal before the Lord. The point is, whatever our calling, God demands all that we can do and all that
we can think.The whole educational and intellectual enterprise, for a Christian, should be caught up in the desire to love God “with all your mind.” The whole process of curiosity, questioning, and discovery can be a journey, full of wonder and praise, into the mind of God, who created everything. Whatever can be studied, whether human nature or the physical universe, is what it is because God willed it and made it. To uncover the hidden laws that govern matter, to disclose the patterns of subatomic particles, to discover how human beings grow and interact, to discern an underlying pattern in history or in astronomy—all of these amount to nothing less than discovering God’s will.
March 06, 2010
Leadership, Solitude, and Multi-tasking
From a provocative lecture delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009 by William Deresiewicz. The speaker notes that many organizational leaders can be described as commonplace or ordinary:
That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.Oh, how saddening that discovery can be, and it is common in many different types of institutions and industries. He goes on:
I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years.Later he shifts gears:Finally—and I know I’m on sensitive ground here—look at what happened during the first four years of the Iraq War. We were stuck. It wasn’t the fault of the enlisted ranks or the noncoms or the junior officers. It was the fault of the senior leadership, whether military or civilian or both. We weren’t just not winning, we weren’t even changing direction.
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
HT: Matt Perman
John Piper: When Should a Doctrinal Difference Make You Leave a Church?
A good word:
Peggy Noonan on Obama Health Care
One more, and I think I'm done. Peggy Noonan, not a hyper-partisan to the say the least, writes a devastatingly clear-headed review of Obama's political failings with respect to health care legislation:
In terms of policy, his essential mistake was to choose health-care expansion over health-care reform. This at the exact moment voters were growing more anxious about the cost and reach of government. The practical mistake was that he did not include or envelop congressional Republicans from the outset, but handed the bill's creation over to a Democratic Congress that was becoming a runaway train. This at the exact moment Americans were coming to be concerned that Washington was broken, incapable of progress, frozen in partisanship.She goes on to describe the immense stubbornness and recalcitrance that Obama has displayed, even to the many who have sought to help him moderate his approach to this issue:
If you were a young progressive who'd won the presidency against the odds, you probably wouldn't see yourself as someone who lucked out, with the stars perfectly aligned for a liberal victory. And you might forget we are more or less and functionally a 50-50 country, and that you have to keep your finger very much on the pulse of the people if you're to survive and prosper.Then she unpacks two growing problems for Obama. The first is that to sell the public on the expansion of government he must continually remind us of how "bad things are", of what a "crisis we are in" (because of George W. Bush, of course), of how greedy business leaders are, etc. But this is politically dangerous because Americans want an optimistic leader, especially after a couple years of woe. Secondly, his credibility gap is now appreciable and growing:
In his speech Wednesday, demanding an "up or down" vote, the president seemed convinced and committed—but nothing he said sounded true. His bill will "bring down the cost of health care for millions," it is "fully paid for," it will lower the long term deficit by a trillion dollars.Read the whole thing.Does anyone believe this? Does anyone who knows the ways of government, the compulsions of Congress, and how history has played out in the past, believe this? Even a little? Rep. Bart Stupak said Thursday that he and several of his fellow Democrats won't vote for the Senate version of the bill because it says right there on page 2,069 that the federal government would directly subsidize abortions. The bill's proponents say this isn't so. It would be a relief to have a president who could weigh in believably and make clear what his own bill says. But he seems to devote more words to obscuring than clarifying.
March 05, 2010
Dissecting the Real Cost of ObamaCare
It was somewhat convenient that I had to grade exams most of the day when President Obama held his "Health Care Summit." I found Rep. Paul Ryan to be exceptionally incisive and in command of the data. The WSJ published the transcript of his remarks (which left the President totally befuddled). An excerpt:
The majority leader said the bill scores as reducing the deficit $131 billion over the next 10 years. First, a little bit about CBO. I work with them every single day—very good people, great professionals. They do their jobs well. But their job is to score what is placed in front of them. And what has been placed in front of them is a bill that is full of gimmicks and smoke-and-mirrors.Read the whole thing, or watch it below:Now, what do I mean when I say that? Well, first off, the bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending.
Now, what's the true 10-year cost of this bill in 10 years? That's $2.3 trillion.
[The Senate bill] does [a] couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits.
It takes $72 billion and claims money from the CLASS Act. That's the long-term care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets.
The Senate Budget Committee chairman [Kent Conrad] said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
Abortion and the President's Health Care Plan
Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life, writes an eviscerating WSJ article about President Obama's mind-boggling pattern of inconsistency on the topic of abortion funding. She briefly traces the history of broken promises, then describes in detail how his current proposal misses the mark. Excerpt:
The president's latest proposal mirrors legislation that has passed the Senate, which doesn't include a Hyde Amendment, and would inevitably establish abortion as a fundamental health-care service for the following reasons:Read the whole thing.• It would change existing law by allowing federally subsidized health-care plans to pay for abortions and could require private health-insurance plans to cover abortion.
• It would impose a first-ever abortion tax—a separate premium payment that will be used to pay for elective abortions—on enrollees in insurance plans that covers abortions through newly created government health-care exchanges.
• And it would fail to protect the rights of health-care providers to refuse to participate in abortions.
The president's plan goes further than the Senate bill on abortion by calling for spending $11 billion over five years on "community health centers," which include Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions.
HT: Denny Burk
David Powlison: The History and Context of the Biblical Counseling Movement
This looks like a fantastic, meaty (432 page) resource for pastors and counselors, and those in training to serve in those vocations. Powlison is highly qualified to write such a book, having (years ago) written a Ph.D. dissertation on Jay Adams and his contribution to the emergence of the biblical counseling movement. If you're not familiar with it, Powlison gives both praise and some constructive critiques of Adams' emphases with regard to the Bible, counseling, and the emotional life in general. Another place to get a good introduction to David Powlison is the three lectures he gave at the 2001 Desiring God Pastors Conference, available for free audio download.
Here's a brief video introduction to The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context from Dr. Powlison himself:
March 04, 2010
John Piper on the Consideration of God's Love
At a chapel message at Westmont College last week John Piper gave a repackaging of an old idea (for him). He explains:
I used to ask, How is it loving for God to make so much of himself and do everything for his glory? Now I ask: Why does God reveal his love for us in such a way that it turns out to be for his glory?Check it out:Or: I used to say: Do you feel more loved when God makes much of you or when he frees you to enjoy making much of him? Now I say, “Why does God make so much of us in a way that winds up making much of him?”
March 03, 2010
The Value of Admitting Mistakes
In my experience, apologizing to a subordinate or customer is one of the most difficult things for a person to do. Matt Perman posts the following excerpt from Jeff Jarvis's book What Would Google Do?
We are ashamed to make mistakes — as well we should be, yes? It’s our job to get things right, right? So when we make mistakes our instinct is to shrink into a ball and wish them away. Correcting errors, though necessary, is embarrassing.What's crucial here, I think, is the rationale: "Standing up and admitting your errors makes you more believable." That's point #1: It increases trust, because it is a demonstration of honesty, even a painful one. But it also "gives your audience faith that you will right your future wrongs."But the truth about truth itself is counterintuitive: Corrections do not diminish credibility. Corrections enhance credibility. Standing up and admitting your errors makes you more believable; it gives your audience faith that you will right your future wrongs.
When companies apologize for bad performance — as JetBlue did after keeping passengers on tarmacs for hours — that tells us that they know their performance wasn’t up to their standard, and we have a better idea of the standard we should expect.
The book
Co-Habitation Before Marriage Increases Divorce Rate
Sam Roberts, writing for the NY Times, breaks down a study of men and women ages 15 to 44 performed by the National Center for Health Statistics using 2002 data from the National Survey of Family Growth. The study found that cohabitation (living together with a sexual partner of the opposite gender) is now an experience of over 60% of women in their thirties. This percentage doubled from 1987 to 2002 (so it might be even higher now). Roberts reports that "half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years."
Now the logic of cohabitation prior to marriage seems to be this: You cannot "know" if the marriage will "work" unless you first establish compatibility via experience. Of course, many who cohabit later split-up. But for those who marry, are their marriages more likely to stick? No. The study found that "the likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first." Why? Dr. Albert Mohler explains:
They do not know that what they are actually doing is undoing marriage. They miss the central logic of marriage as an institution of permanence. They miss the essential wisdom of marriage -- that the commitment must come before the intimacy, that the vows must come before the shared living, that the wisdom of marriage is its permanence before its experience.I think that last sentence nails it: "having lived together with the open possibility of parting, that possibility always remains, and never leaves." Their view of marriage was heavily tilted toward personal fulfillment to begin with. When something else seems more alluring, it is more difficult to resist. A robust view of marriage is needed. Dr. Mohler is right: Permanence must come before experience. That alone brings the security and stability to sustain a marriage through thick and thin. And permanence alone displays the Christ-church dynamic which marriage was intended to display.Cohabitation weakens marriage -- even a cohabiting couple's eventual marriage -- because a temporary and transitory commitment always weakens a permanent commitment. Having lived together with the open possibility of parting, that possibility always remains, and never leaves.
Gene Veith on Immorality Often Preceding "Intellectual" Apostasy
It is often the case that moral decline paves the way for the intellectual abandonment of the Christian faith. In Loving God With All Your Mind, Gene Veith unpacks a common observation:
A young man is raised in a Christian home and has some measure of belief in Christ. He then becomes involved in some sort of overt sin. This can be any sin—pride, covetousness, addiction, dishonoring of parents, worldliness. It is often a sexual sin. He has the honesty and presence of mind to realize that this favorite sin is incompatible with the Christian faith. He has the moral sensitivity to experience guilt.There are two ways he can respond. He may repent of the sin and turn to Christ to receive full and free forgiveness. Or he may hold on to the sin, treasure it, and refuse to give it up either overtly or emotionally. He starts to center his life around the sin, to seek from it consolation, help, and escape, to find in it, in effect, the meaning of his life.
But what about the guilt? If he is not interested in repenting and being forgiven, then there is only one way to end the torment: to reject whatever it is that brands his life as evil. If what I am doing is not really wrong, then I can “feel good about myself.” If there is no objective standard of right and wrong, I can do as I please. If there is no God, then I am not a sinner.
At this point, the “pretexts” are discovered. There are many reasons not to believe in God. They become extremely persuasive to someone who does not want God to exist. The arguments with the most force become those that turn one’s own moral failures against the Judge, so that the person’s own sinfulness is projected onto God Himself: “I can never believe in God because He allows so much evil in the world.” God becomes imagined not as the source of good, but as the source of evil.
Thomas Sowell: A Conflict of Visions
Reading through Sowell's Intellectuals and Society
What Will Replace Behemoth State University?
A provocative article in Public Discourse by Dr. Robert C. Koons on the large state university model, from which many students receive their college education (and from which I received my graduate education in engineering). Koons makes the point that "New technological developments and pressing national needs suggest that the future of higher education may be one friendlier to the classical tradition of liberal education." An excerpt:
As Babbitt observed, the superficial tensions between the “two cultures” of scientific pragmatism and romantic individualism merely disguise their more fundamental affinities. Both are united in their rejection of the teleologically ordered cosmos of the classical tradition, with its finite and universal goal of happiness-through-self-restraint (eudaimonia). In its place, the moderns substitute the unbounded pursuit of infinite progress, both through the attainment of ever-greater technical power over nature (including human nature) and through the ever-novel exercise of the idyllic imagination and the ever-freer indulgence of spontaneous whim. These aspirations expressed themselves in the new college curriculum of the twentieth century, which substituted a smorgasbord of electives for a common and coherent course of studies, and replaced the scholar’s reflection and synoptic vision with the fragmentation and hyper-specialization of the professional researcher.Read the whole thing.
Koons' argument reminds me of the curious propensity of students (and faculty) of large state universities to be overwhelmingly liberal in their political orientation. As Thomas Sowell would say, they have an unconstrained worldview
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Recent Posts
- Easter Week Questions For A Four-Year Old
- John Piper To Take Extended Leave
- NPR on McLaren (with Mohler, Ware, and Hamilton)
- 2010 Ligonier West Coast Conference Round-Up
- HBO Mini-Series: The Pacific
- The End of Book Publishing?
- Bart Stupak: How Disappointing
- Q&A with C.J. Mahaney on Manhood Issues
- RC Sproul Interviews Stephen Meyer
- Loving God With All Your Mind