Christ Church

Sin and the One-Two Punch (CC Troy)
Christ Church on February 17, 2025
Read Full Article


The Nature of True Discipline (Biblical Child Discipline in an Age of Therapeutic Goo #4)

Grace Sensing on

INTRODUCTION

The title of this series of messages refers to child discipline. We have come to the point where we need to define that word discipline. What do we mean by it? The English word is descended from the Latin disciplina, which refers to a course of instruction, learning, or knowledge. Discipline is necessarily teleological, meaning that it is directed toward a particular end, that end being graduation, or completion, or maturity. The discipline is both positive and negative. The positive would include being given the harder work of fourth grade, not as punishment, but rather as a reward for having done so well in third grade. The negative aspect would be getting held back from recess for having squirreled around too much during class. But both the negative and positive are aiming at the same goal. The positive inculcates, and the negative corrects. It is important not to confound discipline and punishment. Punishment simply has justice in view, while discipline has correction in view.  

THE TEXT

“Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 1:5–8; cf. Rom. 5:3-5).  

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

Our two texts are related to the two aspects of discipline, negative and positive. This text from Ecclesiastes has the duties of the civil magistrate in view, but the principles involved in it are directly applicable to the management of the home. There are three principles. The sentence must be consistent, in that this verse is true all the time, and should be remember all the time. Second, it needs to be effective (it is a sentence). And last, it needs to be prompt—no delays or postponements. Without this approach, life in the home will tend to slide toward moral disorder. 

Peter describes growth in virtue, which is the point of all godly child rearing. Now Christian virtue has to be grounded on the bedrock of grace, meaning that virtue is no substitute for gospel. Jesus died and rose for the wretched, and virtue is a downstream effect of sanctification. But with that said, you start with faith, and supplement it with virtue (2 Pet. 1:5), and the next layer puts knowledge on top of that virtue (v. 5). When the knowledge has dried, add temperance (v. 6). The next two coats are patience and godliness (v. 6). But this is not the end of it. Put brotherly kindness on top of the godliness, and love on top of that (v. 7). 

THAT WORD TELEOLOGY

I used the word teleology a moment ago. This simply means that there is a point to the whole thing. It is directed toward a certain outcome. When we are not thinking like Christians, we are tempted to treat any suffering we encounter as being pointless. “How could there be a point when we don’t understand the point?”

The point is maturity, that being a maturity in Christ. We are exhorted to be mature in our understanding (1 Cor. 14:20). But we are living in the midst of a full-scale revolt against maturity, with the result that we have sought to infantilize an entire generation. We have in a great measure succeeded, and we see signs of this kind of arrested development everywhere. 

So the contrast between a Christian community bringing up boys and girls in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and the outside world should not be understood simply as one wanting to have “good little boys and girls” while the other group allows them to be naughty. The situation is not static. Everyone, like it or not, is growing up into something. You are either growing up into Christ, or you are growing up into Gollum—diseased, malicious, and infantile. 

A FATAL SUBSTITUTION

People do not just abandon the obvious good of maturity all at one go. Such a folly must be accomplished in stages. The early American ethos used to emphasize character—honesty (Prov. 20:10), a work ethic (Prov. 26:16), competence (Prov. 22:29). But by gradual stages, we have come to substitute personality instead of character—and we have various ways of talking about how we despise the results: all hat and no cattle, all foam and no beer, all sizzle and no steak. 

But in the last generation or so, we have managed to make the whole thing far worse. It used to be that the personality-monger, all teeth and handshakes, and a glossy prospectus, would at least do her thing to you in person. But now she can be an Instagram “influencer” run through three different filters, and with her real life as hollow as a jug.

Character is built in the difficulties. Character grows when you are out in the rain, picking up rocks. Personality grows (or thinks it does) when it is being flattered, stroked, cajoled, and otherwise lied to. So if you are not preparing your children to identify and fight all those lies that the world is dedicated to telling, you are simply preparing one more tasty morsel for the world to devour and digest. If you want your daughters to grow up to be mothers in Israel, then you should not be content when they are acting like they have just enough squirrel brains to download the next Taylor Swift song. If you want your sons to grow up to be valiant in battle, you had better not coddle them when they complain to mom about how math hurts their feelings.  

Adulthood is when you become what you have been becoming all along.     

BY WHAT STANDARD?

The task set before every Christian is to grow up into Christ. Christ is the standard. He is the standard for men and women, and for every boy and every girl. This is the path we must run; this is the only curriculum. Our covenant children are in second grade, and their parents are in junior high. The grandparents are in high school, and have started to think about graduation. But this is a school where all the upper grades are called to help out the lower grades. 

“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:14–15). 

Read Full Article

A Train of Moral Excellence (Troy)

Grace Sensing on

SERMON TEXT

2 Peter 1:3-7

INTRODUCTION

In 1996, Dr. Michael Behe wrote a book called Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. In the book, he coined a new phrase to describe the complex inner workings of the bacteria flagellum; he called it Irreducible Complexity. The flagellum is a slender thread-like structure, a spinning appendage which propels the bacteria through liquid. It works similar to an outboard motor on a boat. But instead of a gearbox, an engine, and a propeller—these large objects that we can physically manipulate with a socket wrench—the flagellum is composed of proteins, tiny building blocks so small that we need an electron microscope to look at them. When the proteins combine in the flagellum, they make a driveshaft, a universal joint, a rotor, bushings, a stater, and even a clutch and braking system. Our God is an exquisite miniaturist, engineering on a scale that is truly hard to comprehend. In his book, Dr. Behe uses some analogies to explain the concept of irreducible complexity.

OUR DESTINATION

Our destination is conformity to Jesus Christ. Verse 3 says, “As we know Jesus better, his divine power gives us everything we need for living a godly life. He has called us to receive his own glory and goodness!” Ephesians 2, puts it this way, “…we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” John 15, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” And from Titus 2, “Jesus gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

CAR #1: THE LOCOMOTIVE OF FAITH

And so we’ve come to our first train car, the most important one. It is the car on which all the others depend for movement. It stands proud at the front of the train, with its fire box and smoke stack. Pure white steam billows out of the top. The turbine generator is the powerhouse strong enough to pull all the other cars. It is the locomotive of faith.

CAR #2: A LIFE OF MORAL EXCELLENCE

(To be addressed later in the sermon)

CAR #3: KNOWING GOD

Would you like to know God better? If you are a Christian and you are hesitant to answer that question in the affirmative, then it is likely that you have an idol in your tent. There is something hidden—gold, silver, a robe from Babylon—that is preventing you from growing closer to God. Isaiah 59 says, “…your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.” Proverbs 28, “If anyone turns a deaf ear to my instruction, even their prayers are detestable.” Micah 3, “Then they will cry out to the Lord, but he will not answer them. At that time he will hide his face from them because of the evil they have done. So the double-minded Christian lives in conflict within himself. He wants to know God, but on his own terms. He doesn’t like the exclusivity clause.

CAR #4: SELF-CONTROL

The command is: keep control of yourself. Putting it that way is a reminder to us all; there is something wild within us. Usually when we say, “Keep control,” it is in a certain context. “Keep control of your dog.” “Keep control of your troops.” “Keep control of your team.” The idea being that if you do not keep control, things will start to decay on their own.

CAR #5: PATIENT ENDURANCE

How many different aspects of our lives can we connect to the virtue of patient endurance? It is at the forefront of parenting, our constant witness to non-believers, beside us in suffering, sustaining us through trials. We need it in marriage, we need it to study. We need it to plant a church, to grow a church. It is our tool of great precision when people hate us, exclude us, insult us, and reject us as evil. It is our shield to block mistreatment and slander. It’s one thing to simply endure affliction. Prisoners in the penitentiary are doing that now. It is a completely different thing to endure patiently.

CAR #6: GODLINESS

To be godly is to be like Him. Hebrews 1 says, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” We have many examples of godly men in the scriptures.

CAR #7: LOVING THE SAINTS

The cargo of the train of moral excellence is love. And we are to deliver this love at various stops en route to the kingdom of heaven. Romans 12 says, “Honor one another above yourselves.”

CABOOSE: LOVING EVERYONE

The caboose is genuine love for everyone. There are different tiers of difficulty when it comes to loving non-believers. Loving your non-Christian mom is not going to be the same thing as loving the person who flips you off, ignores you, or cusses you out. So let’s jump straight to the difficult part, how do we love our enemies?

THE TRACK OF GOD’S PROMISES

The train of moral excellence is a comprehensive system that is irreducibly complex. The cars of knowing God, self-control, patient endurance, and Godliness need the locomotive of faith to pull them forward. They also are inextricably linked together, each car is dependent on the next. And the train as a whole rests upon a track, without which, it cannot move. What is this foundation that the whole train rests upon? The train finds its direction, its stability, and its understructure in the promises of God.

Read Full Article

Christmas for the Blind: A State of the Church Message

Christ Church on

INTRODUCTION

This is something of a Christmas message and end of the year State of the Church sermon all wrapped into one. But the point is that I want to meditate on the covenant curses that are raining down on us in the form of Covid-statist tyranny, the sexual promiscuity and perversion jihad, on top of abortion insanity, fiscal madness, and political imbecility. Christians find themselves caught in the middle of family and culture turmoil. What are we to do? The central thing we must do is recognize all of it as judicial blindness from the Lord. He had done this.

THE TEXT

“According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins” (2 Pet. 1:4-9).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

By His power, God has given to His people everything that they need for life and godliness through the knowledge of Christ, at all times and in all places (1:3). Having escaped the corruption of the world, Christians are to grow in holiness and godliness through God’s great and precious promises (1:4). The broad outline of that growth is listed in seven additional steps added to faith in those promises (1:5-7). With those eight virtues abounding in Christians, they cannot be barren or unfruitful in the knowledge of Jesus (1:8). But a Christian who lacks these things is blind, near-sighted, and has forgotten that he has been forgiven (1:9).

TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF JUDICIAL BLINDNESS

We know from elsewhere in the Bible, that unbelievers have a certain kind of spiritual blindness: 2 Cor. 4:3-4: “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” Likewise in Ephesians 4:18, speaking of the Gentiles, “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” That is one kind of judicial blindness. But here in 2 Peter 1, we have a different kind of blindness described, what we might call a covenantal judicial blindness. Peter is describing believers who have not progressed as far as they should have as blind and forgetful (2 Pet. 1:9). Jesus calls the church of Laodicea to repent of a similar blindness: “Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked… anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke, and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent” (Rev. 3:17-19).

COVENANT BLINDNESS & CALAMITY

This same covenantal blindness is described in the Old Testament: “If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God… all these curses shall come upon thee… The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart: and thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness…” (Dt. 28:15, 28). Likewise, in Isaiah’s commission: “Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed… But yet in it shall be a tenth, and it shall return…” (Is. 6:10, 13). So when God’s covenant people disobey and break covenant, God sends covenant curses and spiritual blindness on them for the purpose of dividing the faithful from the unfaithful: some are proven to be complete unbelievers who die in their blindness, but there are some who struck with some blindness in order to chastise them, and call them to repentance (e.g. Rev. 3:17-19, Jn. 12:37-43).

CONCLUSIONS & APPLICATIONS

While America is fast joining the post-Christian nations of the West, there is another sense in which covenanted nations do not have the luxury of forgetting their Christian past. They may forget their Christian past, but their Christian past cannot forget them. Or to be more precise, God does not forget covenants made and broken. And we have manifestly fallen under covenantal curses. We have murdered our own children, and while we have not yet stooped to eating them, we most certainly have experimented on them and used their bodies for sorcery (what we call “medical research”) (Dt. 28:53-58). We have been chased by tiny minorities of sexual madmen (Dt. 28:25, 32:30), and we have been struck with terror and diseases (Dt. 32:25, 28:59-61).

But it is perilously easy to make light of our sins in the church because they do not seem as bad as the pagans, but that is not at all the same thing as holiness, as godliness and virtue (2 Pet. 1:5-7). It’s said that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, but listen to what it says: “he that lacketh these things is blind” (2 Pet. 1:9). Do you lack any virtue, any temperance, any patience, any brotherly kindness or charity? Those “little sins” of anger, lust, envy, selfishness – they are blindness and near-sightedness. And like the church of Laodicea, we are tempted to make light of them because of how fabulously well-off we are: “knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind…?” We think we know what joy is because we have high speed internet, Instagram, and food on demand. But that isn’t joy. Joy is serving the Lord with gladness of heart for all the abundance of things (Dt. 28:47). Joy is holiness.

The only way out of this mess is if Jesus gives us eyes to see. “And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also? Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth” (Jn. 9:39-41).

Are you blind? Is our land full of the blind? Christ was born so that the blind might see.

Read Full Article