Honoring Our Fatherland – King’s Cross Exhortation

“Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything” (Eph. 5:24). 

The Bible teaches that husbands have true authority over their wives, just as Christ is the Lord of the Church. Some Christians want to downplay this, saying things like: headship means that if there’s a disagreement, the husband has the tie-breaking vote. But if the model is Christ and the Church, this immediately becomes absurd. The authority of Christ is not merely a tie-breaking vote; it is true authority in everything. In 1 Peter 3, Sarah is identified as an ideal wife, calling her husband “lord.” This pushes back against what we might call squishy-complementarianism. 

At the same time, what Christ does with His authority is simply astonishing. He uses His authority to love His Bride, the Church, laying His life down for her, making her pure and holy and without any blemish. Christ does this and so lifts up the Church to sit with Him in heavenly places, to reign with Him. Christ invites the Church to speak, and through our prayers in particular, Christ has determined to listen and answer and so grant us true authority in the world. This pushes back against what we might call bluster-patriarchy. 

Husbands have been given true authority, and reflecting the authority of Christ, it extends to everything in the home and in his wife’s life. There is no area of marriage where a wife may say to her husband, that’s none of your business. He is responsible before God for all of it. And yet, a wise man uses that authority not to micromanage or belittle, but to love, to lead, to honor, and to lift up. We call this biblical patriarchy. 

God made the world to reflect His glory, and so it is that glory, in creation, is always reflected glory. As we glorify God, He glorifies His people. The Bible says that man is the glory of God, and woman is the glory of man. This means that one of the best ways to make sure that women are cherished and honored the most in a society is by honoring the fathers, husbands, and brothers in their lives.

Toby Sumpter – June 16, 2024

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The central thing we do is worship, but it’s important to underline what we mean. Worship is not in the first instance praise; worship is surrender. The word often translated “worship” literally means to bow down or kneel, and it is often coupled with other words that mean the same thing: “Oh come, let us worship [bow down] and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker” (Ps. 95:6). Worship acknowledges the holiness of God and trembles before Him: “Exalt the Lord our God, and worship [bow down] at His holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy” (Ps. 99:9). 

Worship means coming into the presence of the King of the Universe at His summons and laying everything that we are before Him: “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service/worship. And be not conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:1-2). In Christian worship, the King of the Universe summons His servants to appear before Him. We are beloved servants, but we are servants nevertheless. He has purchased us with His blood. All that we are, body and soul, belongs to Him. Our money is His, our time is His, our house is His, our children are His, our marriage is His, our work is His. This is what it means to call Him “Lord/Master.” We gather to hear His authoritative Word with reverence and godly fear, and we are sent out to obey. 

This is why worship is central. We are servants of the Lord Jesus. We are under orders. He rescued us from sin and death and Hell, and He is worthy. We are here this morning to acknowledge that. We are here to bow down before Him. We are here to say that we are completely at His service. So this is the Call to Worship. We’re about to kneel down in just a moment to confess our sins: do not just go through that motion. Kneel before Your Maker. Surrender everything to Him in true humility and say, like Isaiah, “here I am, send me.”

Toby Sumpter – May 5, 2024

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In a broadly Christian world, Christian virtues tend to get weaponized. We have seen this with concepts like justice and love and empathy, or the condemnation of being judgmental. Only a broadly Christian world says that being judgmental is wrong or that justice or love or empathy are good. But of course everything depends on definitions. When a judge vindicates the innocent and condemns the guilty, he is being judgmental in a good way. When someone finds a lost wallet and decides not to return it to its owner because the owner is an enemy, that’s unrighteous judgment. The Bible requires God’s people to be judgmental, but we are to judge with the standard of God’s word and remember that the measure we use to judge others will be used to measure us. 

We are required to love everyone, but love is treating others lawfully from the heart. Love is not going along with what anyone says makes them happy or caving or compromising simply because they say what you’re doing makes them feel bad. Likewise, justice is not making everyone happy. Justice is enforcing God’s law, which primarily consists of punishing evildoers. And while God does require us to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, we must also practice self-control, which means that we are not to be ruled by our feelings or the feelings of others but by God’s Word.

In one sense, the fact that everyone, even those who hate God, keep appealing to these Christian virtues tells you that we are not yet as far from our Christian roots as some would have you believe. Pure paganism doesn’t care about justice, love, or empathy. But of course, if we continue down this current dark path, apart from the grace of God, we will end up in a paganism that ceases to care about any virtue.

But all of this is why worship on the Lord’s Day is at the center of all that we do. In worship we renew covenant with our Lord. Romans 12:1 says that we accomplish this reasonable service as we offer our bodies as living sacrifices. And in the next verse, it says that we are not to be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of our minds. As we renew covenant in worship, God renews our minds, correcting, teaching, training, and changing us from glory to glory. 

Toby Sumpter – March 10, 2024

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One of the ways the heresies of egalitarianism and feminism have seeped into the church has been in our assumptions about what piety and repentance look like. Frequently, we have made feminine piety and feminine repentance the rule for what real piety and repentance are. And if a man or a boy doesn’t look like a woman or a girl while repenting, we tend to be doubtful. But when men and women put off the old man and put on the new man in Christ, they ought to do so as men and women, male and female. 

Of course repentance is fundamentally just complete humility before God and so don’t overthink it. But for example, when a man humbles himself before God and repents, he begins taking responsibility for himself and others, which in some ways will make him more assertive than he was before. Humility doesn’t mean mousiness. When a woman humbles herself before God and repents, she begins caring more about true Christian beauty and hospitality than before. But of course, you might mistake the responsible assertiveness as pride in the man, and you might mistake the concern for beauty and hospitality as vanity in the woman. Of course it could be.

But for a husband who repents, putting on Christ will mean loving his wife more like Christ loves, which is truly sacrificial and efficacious, but isn’t necessarily doing whatever his wife prefers. Likewise, when a wife repents, putting on Christ means that she respects her husband, looks up to him, admires him, praises him, and maybe when it would appear to some close friends that not a lot has changed with him. But virtue and piety and repentance are not dependent on other people changing. Putting on Christ is something each individual does before God, as a man, as a woman and so you become what God created you to be, a man, a woman, male and female in His glorious image. There certainly are common elements to repentance: true hatred of sin, true sorrow over sin, real zeal for change and new obedience. But those realities will often look different in men and women, boys and girls. As God renews His image in us, He is not renewing a sexless, androgynous image. He is renewing something radically more feminine, radically more masculine than any of us can imagine.

Toby Sumpter – February 11, 2024

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