D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Special thanks to Tammy Wynette for giving me the title for this post.

If there is a word that accurately summarizes Jesus' teaching on most subjects, its probably the word hard. As people said about another subject he taught on, "This is hard teaching. Who can accept it?" (John 6:60). Jesus is simply so stark, so unequivocal, so absolute, so hard to follow.

In our day, there is probably no subject (other than perhaps sexual morality) on which it is more difficult to proclaim Jesus' teaching than the subject of divorce. Self-identified Christians (at least according to Barna) get divorced at about the same rate as non-Christians, with 30% or so eventually walking away from their covenant partner. This is a tragedy, a demonstrable failure of discipleship of huge proportions. Listen to the Pharisees and Jesus from Mark 10:

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"

"What did Moses command you?" he replied

They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."

"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate."

When they were in the house again, his disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery."

This is hard teaching. It cuts completely across the grain of our modern culture, both in society at large and, sadly, also in parts of the church. Here's a summary:

1. Divorce occurs because repentance doesn’t. Divorce always involves sin. Often there are greater and lesser degrees of sin by the two spouses, but at the root of divorce is sinful selfishness and a declaration that “I will have my way.” There’s no such thing as loving divorce, is there? Not according to Jesus. Can a man divorce his wife? Yes. But doing so is evidence of a hardened heart toward God and that person to whom you made your vows.
2. Stop looking for loopholes. Jesus' called the Pharisees to look not just at the part of the Law that permitted divorce (Deut 24:1-4), but at the whole Law, including the part which made clear God's design for marriage (from Gen. 2). They were focused on the exceptions and "loopholes" to obeying God rather than focusing on obeying God and following his blueprint for marriage, which includes a permanent union. Though the Law permits hard-hearted people to divorce, such was never God's purpose, plan, or ideal.
   
3. Divorce and remarriage = adultery. Jesus himself recognizes adultery as legitimate grounds for divorce in Matthew 19, and in that same passage seems to say also that a person who got divorced under those circumstances can remarry without restriction or breaking God’s commandment. In the same way, Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 permits believers to divorce their unbelieving spouses who abandon them as a consequence of their commitment to Christ, though Bible teachers disagree over whether Paul allows people to remarry in such a case. But we should be careful about allowing our commitment to "interpreting Scripture with Scripture" to rob Jesus' words of their force and hardness here. I think Jesus doesn’t mention any of these exceptional circumstances for the very simple reason that he knows that we will fixate on the exceptions so as to justify our actions and never have to come face to face with our hardened, sinful hearts and actually repent and glorify God in the midst of the ups and downs of our marriages.

What would happen to us in the church, I wonder, if we actually embraced Jesus' teaching in all of its glorious hardness and tried to live it out by God's grace and with the empowerment of the Spirit?

A kiss is just a kiss...

This is simply "too good to check," as they say...

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips on the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints. Every night the maintenance man would remove them, and the next day the girls would put them back.

Finally, the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine all the yawns from the little princesses). To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

Friday Afternoon humor

Johnny's Mother looked out the window and noticed him "playing church" with their cat. He had the cat sitting quietly and he was preaching to it. She smiled and went about her work. A while later she heard loud meowing and hissing and ran back To the open window to see Johnny baptizing the cat in a tub of water.She called out, "Johnny, stop that! The cat is afraid of water!" Johnny looked up at her and said, "He should have thought about that before he joined my church."

On Hell

As a Gospel preacher, I find that one of the most uncomfortable parts of sharing Christ is telling people about hell. I'd really rather not do so, especially in the midst of a culture in which preaching about hell is considered not just unspeakably gauche, but also a big reason why evangelicals like me are regarded as intolerant, unloving bigots. Yet Jesus is certainly one of the most acerbic preachers on the topic I've ever seen. Here he is, in his own words, from Mark 9:43-48:

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where

“‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.’

If we're going to share Christ with people, we must do so as Jesus did, not merely inviting people into a life of following Christ, but also warning them out of hell. We must tell them not just the good news of Jesus sacrifice but also the "bad news" of God's holy eternal wrath against sin for which Jesus' death is the only acceptable propitiation.

I know that I am perhaps guilty of preaching to the choir on this, as this is a completely obvious truth to most of my readers. Yet I think it's a point worth making because I find even in my own heart both a deep love for non-Christians as well as a hesitancy to tell them about the full seriousness of their sinful condition. And I dare not let the latter dominate the former, lest I become an unfaithful Christ follower.

Soup Kitchens and Salvation

Christian people of my generation have "rediscovered" Christian social action. This is particularly true among a certain subset of evangelicals, most of whom describe themselves as "missional" Christians. They have become convinced that a true understanding of the Gospel, rightly applied, will inevitably lead Jesus' followers to feed the poor, clothe the naked, care for the downtrodden, etc. Moreover, a whole lot of them criticize their brethren for being too focused on mere proclamation of the Gospel itself without any accompanying relief of people's physical needs.

So far, so good, especially in a country with 17% real unemployment. But a part of me still worries. Maybe it's the amateur church historian or maybe it's the part of me which is sympathetic to warnings of the old fundamentalists like J. Gresham Machen and Lewis Sperry Chafer, but I get the distinct feeling that we in the church have been here before and the results weren't good. Please understand: I am not saying that churches shouldn't feed the poor or care for the widow and the orphan. But what I am saying is that what we define as the central and primary "mission" in all of our "missional" activity matters, and that if it isn't the spread of the Gospel which gives eternal life, then we are deeply in error. Being "missional" without being about that which Jesus defines as our central mission in Matthew 28:18-20 is to be successful at the wrong things. And church history does tell us that where the Gospel is assumed rather than actively proclaimed as the primary part of our mission, then it soon is not even assumed any more. Organizations like the YMCA and Goodwill are just two examples of formerly para-church organizations, and what used to be called the mainline denominations trod a similar path, to their own destruction.

So to my brethren who want to start soup kitchens and similar ministries, I offer this a final word: Be blessed, my friends, and save a place for me to come and serve from time to time. But don't forget that "Man does not live by bread alone." Don't forget to give the Living Water even as you offer a cup of cold water in Jesus name. And don't forget which one comes first.

Privacy

When I was growing up, as least as I remember it, much more was considered private than is today. It was considered bad manners to inquire too deeply about someone's health, their income, personal habits, politics, marital status, and such. If you were a friend (i. e., a real, rather than simply a Facebook friend) you knew most of this already. If you weren't, you didn't. And more to the point, you did not expect to. Today, of course, we live in an exhibitionist culture and our private lives are no longer all that private. Obviously, as the keeper of this humble blog, and a Facebook member besides, I am something of a contributor to that culture, even if a small one. But occasionally, I think back on the older culture, the one in which it was still possible to move somewhere new and start over fresh if your old life didn't work well, which it often didn't and still doesn't. As a believer in sin, but also in redemption, I wonder sometimes if what we have lost in our mad rush to embrace ever more technology is more than what we have gained.

Here's Peggy Noonan today, from her Wall Street Journal column, echoing my thoughts:

An odd thing is that when privacy is done away with, people don’t become more authentic, they become less so. What replaces what used not to be said is something that must be said and is usually a lie. ("The Eyes Have It," WSJ, May 21, 2010)

Read the whole thing.