This article was adapted from a talk entitled ‘A Christian Man Gives Spiritual Leadership’, delivered at a Katoomba Men’s Convention.
Some men spend their lives waiting for the approval of their fathers, or trying to walk in their footsteps. But perhaps we need to learn the lesson that the Pharisees never learnt: to be satisfied with the approval of our Father in heaven.
For over a century now, belief in the devil has seemed to be on the way out. The toothy red imp with the tail and the trident has become a secular figure of fun, while Protestant theologians generally have banished the personal devil of the Bible to the lumber-room reserved for broken-down myths. No doubt this state of affairs is just what the devil has been working for, since it allows him to operate now on the grandest scale without being either detected or opposed. Nor has he wasted his chances. During the past hundred years, he has engineered a world-wide collapse of evangelicalism in all the older Protestant denominations. The present spineless, powerless, unevangelical state of these churches, as compared with what they were a century ago, gives heart-breaking proof of the skill and thoroughness with which he has done his job. The Bible is no longer fully believed, the gospel is no longer thoroughly preached, and post-Christian paganism sweeps through the world like wildfire. Not for centuries has Satan won such a victory.
We evangelicals ought to face fairly and squarely the uncomfortable truth that we are not good at disagreeing with one another.
How do you feel when the alarm clock rings on Monday morning? Do you jump out of bed eager to start another working week? Not likely! Many of us spend 40, 50, 60+ hours a week at work. I am thinking of both paid and unpaid work, work at home and away from home. That’s about half of our waking hours especially if you have travel time. Work is sometimes enjoyable and sometimes satisfying. But sometimes it’s dead boring, sometimes it’s difficult, frustrating and stressful—definitely a health hazard!—and other times it’s so mundane, so insignificant. When I left school I was employed as a ‘gofer’ (a person who ‘goes for’ things) on a building site. My main job was to test concrete. After each pour I placed a sample in a steel cylinder. I had to fill it in 3 layers and prod each layer 25 times with a steel bar. It was so boring. It seemed so mundane. I thought I was going to go crazy! I was glad it only lasted 2 months.
No, there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do…
Jim Croce must have had me in mind when he wrote Time in a Bottle. It’s the story of my life—ideas to chase through, books to read, people to see, and letters to reply to. And some day, I promise myself, I’ll learn how to chip and putt. I even have an ‘ideas’ book in which I jot down all the things that I want to do. Reading back through it is a depressing experience. It is a catalogue of unfinished schemes and dreams.
At the end our last article (Briefing #180), the picture regarding work was still fairly grim. Adam’s sin had lead to mankind’s loss of dominion in the world, with the result that work—which was an expression of his dominion—had become painful, difficult and frustrated. It was toil. (more…)
One of the biggest struggles for many Christians is balancing the demands of work, family and ministry. It can seem impossible to balance the pressures of all three. The common and tempting solution is to simply neglect, or at least accept mediocrity, in one or even two of these areas of our lives.
When we come to the Bible with questions about life we can do so in two ways. Firstly, we can look up all the words in the Bible that relate to our query, and try to collate the results. In this case, we could look up ‘work’, ‘toil’, ‘labour’, and so on—but this is by no means as easy as it sounds.
The scene remains vivid in my memory, though it is nearly 20 years ago now.
I am sitting in my bedroom at the side of our big old farmhouse, a teenager, listless at that time of the evening when anything is better than homework. It is a warm summer night and the cicadas are belting out their chorus like an army of protesters with whistles. Into my little Sanyo cassette player I insert a tape borrowed from a friend. The latest Christian singer-songwriter—well, ‘latest’ as far as Lismore was concerned anyway— Keith Green.
As a proud didgeridoo player, I am keenly aware of the attraction of pagan worship forms.
There is nothing quite like sitting peacefully in the bush blowing intensly down a long hollowed log. The earthy sound of the didg, combined with the backup vocals of the kookuburras, and the hyperventilation of circular breathing, creates a kind of spiritual experience in a matter of minutes. It is no wonder Aborigines traditionally believe that the didgeridoo is a religious instrument; that it rouses the spirit world.
Prayer is a universal phenomenon amongst mankind. Men and women have always prayed everywhere. It is a natural consequence of believing in God. Humanity, by nature, believes in the existence of deity, that is, in a super-human, powerful, eternal being or beings with whom we are related and on whom, in some way, we depend. It is a concept congruous with our knowledge of ourselves and of the world. And so prayer is a natural activity. It springs out of our sense of need and of God’s relationship to us and his ability to help.
It really couldn’t be simpler. “Love your neighbour as yourself”. The words appear nine times throughout Scripture. They are part of the law of Moses (Lev 19:18). Jesus quoted this commandment as the second of the two great commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets (Matt 22:36-40; Mark 12:28-34). When a teacher of the law tried to limit the impact of this, Jesus explained its power with what is probably his most well-known parable (Luke 10:25-37).
When we first married, my husband kept telling his young single friends that a man was only half a man until he married. Shortly after tying the knot, we left for our duties as the only missionaries on an isolated Aboriginal mission settlement in the Northern Territory. The starry-eyed approach to marriage faded and we became the persons we really were in our relationships. Falling in love was not a sufficient resource to meet the demands of our new life together. Now we were to show that we were ‘one flesh’.
“Being brought up in a Christian home is hard on a child.”
I have heard variations on this comment at various times and it has set me thinking. In fact, I have begun to feel somewhat bitter towards my parents, who gave me a thoroughly Christian upbringing.