Bad Charity

Bad Charity - This article from TIME shows once again that not all aid sent to Africa is at all helpful. If that’s news to you, you need to read When Helping Hurts.

When Should My Child Be Baptized?

Excellent article from Tim Challies:

Every Christian parent longs for his children to trust in Christ and to make this profession public. In Baptist churches such a profession is made public through baptism. One of the ongoing discussions among Baptists relates to the age at which children can or should be baptized. Many children raised in a Christian home—perhaps even most of them—profess faith at a young age. Many parents then ask, Should my child be immediately baptized? Here is my attempt to answer this question.

Defining Baptism

Baptism is an ordinance of God given to the New Testament church. It symbolizes that the recipient has been buried and resurrected with Christ and serves as public profession of faith and admission into the local church community. It precedes both membership and partaking of the Lord’s Supper, and as such, is the gateway to full participation in the life of the church.

Three Premises

Here are three premises related to the age of baptism.

Premise #1 - Those who make a credible profession of faith are to be baptized.
Without exception, the New Testament pattern for baptism is that it follows a credible profession of faith (see Acts 8:12, Acts 9:36, Acts 16:29-34). What makes a profession of faith credible? I look for credibility to be displayed in knowledge and maturity.

Knowledge. For a person’s profession of faith to be credible, he must display at least a basic knowledge of the gospel and of the meaning of baptism. Baptism is not a rite performed upon a person, but an ordinance in which he is a full participant. Therefore the one who is baptized must have knowledge of what is being done and why.

Maturity. Maturity displays itself in autonomy and in counting the cost. The mature person is autonomous in that he has the ability to make independent decisions. He is also one who counts the cost, who has seen some of what a decision may cost him in terms of relationship, prestige or suffering, yet still desires to proceed.

Premise #2 - Children may, and often do, become believers at a young age.
We must be careful never to communicate to children that they are too young to understand the gospel or respond to it. Jesus said, “Let the little children come unto me.” God calls us to share the gospel with our children and to call them to repentance and faith. God graciously allows many children to come to a saving faith, even at a very young age. For this reason every member of a church ought to be active in sharing the gospel with every child in that church, calling on them to respond to it and trusting that God does work in the hearts of young children.

Premise #3 - This is a matter of wisdom and conscience.
The New Testament contains no clear example of a child receiving baptism; neither does it contain a clear example of a child being refused baptism. In the absence of clear commands, the leaders of each church must prayerfully exercise charity and wisdom as they seek to determine whether or not they will make it their practice to baptize children who profess faith.

The Age of Baptism

With these premises in mind, I believe there is wisdom in waiting until children are older before baptizing them. My reasoning is primarily grounded in the second test of credibility: maturity.

At some stage children are too young to make a credible profession of faith.
Imagine that you are listening in while a father has a conversation with his two-year-old son:

Dad: “Do you love Jesus, Johnny?
Boy: “Da!” (That’s his sound for “yes.”)
Dad: “Do you trust Him with all your heart?”
Boy: “Da!”
Dad: Do you think your sins make you bad?”
Boy: “Da!”
Dad: “Do you give Jesus your whole life?”
Boy: “Da!”

Is it possible that God just saved that boy? Absolutely! Can we have any degree of certainty that this is a genuine conversion? No, we can’t. The age of that child calls into question his ability to understand and respond to the gospel. His cognitive abilities and his self-awareness have not yet developed to the point where we can be certain that he can understand what it is that he is agreeing to. It is not unlikely that the same boy would answer “Yes,” when asked if storks deliver babies and if Santa Claus delivers gifts.

I use this illustration to display what all Christians affirm: There is evidently an age at which a child is too young to make a credible profession of faith. Though that child may be genuinely saved, he lacks the maturity, the autonomy and the ability to count the cost that will give us confidence that his profession is credible. Therefore, it would be unwise of us to baptize him until we can establish the validity of his profession. The question is, When does a child reach that level of maturity?

It is wise to wait to baptize a child until he has reached a certain level of maturity.
I believe that a person should be baptized when the credibility of his conversion becomes naturally evident to the church community. This will normally be when the child has begun to mature toward adulthood and is beginning to live more self-consciously as an individual. At this time he is able to understand that there will be a cost to being a Christian; he is able to anticipate this and to count it all joy. At this time he is also developing autonomy. In the process of leaving behind his child-like dependence on his parents he begins to make more and more of his own choices. Such independence and maturity will allow him to relate to the church directly and as an individual rather than being primarily under the authority of his parents. I believe that such criteria typically correspond to the teen years, and more typically, the mid-to-late teen years.

Delaying baptism does not mean we should consider childhood conversions or baptisms invalid.
While I believe it is best to delay baptism until a child’s knowledge and maturity offer substantial evidence of true conversion, this by no means negates the possibility or likelihood of childhood conversions. Neither does it render invalid the baptisms of those who are baptized as young, believing children.

Pastors ought to take every opportunity to meet with children to speak to them about their souls.
Even if it is not a pastor’s practice to baptize young children, he should always thrilled to meet with children to speak to them about their souls. When a child expresses a desire to be baptized, it presents a pastor a wonderful opportunity to spend time with that child, to hear how the Lord has been working in his life, and to encourage him to continue to seek the Lord.

What are the benefits of waiting to baptize children?
Delaying the baptism of children who profess faith offers several benefits:

1. It allows membership in the church to proceed logically from baptism so that every baptized believer can immediately serve as a fully-functioning member of the church. This avoids the confusion of whether young children can be members of the church or whether they can be baptized but not members.
2. It accounts for the uncertainty that may attend childhood conversions. Often a child professes faith, then retracts or doubts his profession, and then affirms it again. This model allows the child to proceed through much of this turbulence before he is baptized, thus preventing doubt about whether he was truly saved before his baptism.
3. It calls on parents to lead their children and to understand that their children are not being disobedient in waiting for baptism. Their obedience in this area comes in submitting to their parents and the elders of the church.
4. It esteems baptism as a one-time act to be anticipated as a public, credible, mature profession of faith.

Five Questions to Ask of a Book

From Tim Challies:

A reader of this site recently asked me to explain how I determine whether a book is good and worthy of recommendation or whether it is not. That is a fair question and I was surprised to find that I had not addressed it in the past. I will take on that challenge today. It will be helpful to assume that the book in question is meant to address the Christian life, falling under the broad categories of Christian Living or Spiritual Growth or something similar (I would have very different questions to ask of a general market book or of a Christian biography).

Here are five questions, plus a bonus, that I ask myself as I read.

Does It Draw Its Truth from Scripture?

First and foremost, a good book will have a heavy dependency upon Scripture. Whatever truth it seeks to teach will be ultimately drawn from God through the Bible rather than from any kind of human wisdom or experience. In the Bible God gives us the great privilege of seeing the world through his eyes and seeing life from his perspective. Therefore, whatever we teach about living the Christian life ought to depend heavily upon his wisdom.

This is the key difference between Randy Alcorn’s Heaven and Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven—the first is utterly dependent upon Scripture while the second ignores Scripture in favor of experience. It is the great difference between Kent Hughes’ Disciplines of a Godly Man and John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart—the first teaches manhood from Scripture while the other teaches it from human wisdom and experience. This is not to say that there is absolutely nothing right or good in 90 Minutes in Heaven and Wild at Heart; however, they are innately inferior because they do not consistent lead the reader back to God as he reveals himself in the Bible.

Is It Faithful to the Bible?

Of course not all books that attempt to draw truth from Scripture do it well, so the second criteria is that the books are consistently faithful to Scripture. There are many books that attempt to show what the Bible teaches but do a poor job of it. The authors do not handle the Bible faithfully or they look too narrowly, depending upon isolated verses rather than the grand sweep of Scripture. Consider The Purpose Driven Life, a book that contains a good deal of wisdom but which draws from Scripture haphazardly, and compare it to Sinclair Ferguson’sTaking the Christian Life Seriously. Both are guidebooks to life, but one is far more consistently faithful to Scripture than the other.

Does It Have a Gospel Focus?

Many books written by and for Christians teach how to live the Christian life under law instead of under grace. Instead of teaching true Christian living, they teach law and moralisms. A good book will be dependent upon the joy and freedom of living as those who have been set free from law and will ultimately point people to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ from which we gain the desire and ability and power to live this Christian life. Stephen Artberburn’s Every Man’s Battle is grounded in morality, not gospel; it may be that following rules may help a man overcome an addiction to lust and pornography, but it is far better to point to the gospel, which is exactly what I attempted to do in Sexual Detox.

Does It Lead To Other Sound Teaching?

There are times when an author has good, wise or helpful things to say, but does so while depending upon teachers who do not consistently draw truth from Scripture and who are not consistently faithful to Scripture. I tend to hesitate to recommend the works of such authors. Books are not isolated literary islands, but are part of a wider, ongoing discussion; any book will inevitably lead its readers to the people who have influenced its author. By definition, if you identify with an author and love what she teaches, you will want to find out who has influenced her, perhaps not knowing when those influencers are unsound. Here I would list Richard Foster’s A Celebration of Discipline, a book containing much that is useful, yet which shows a dependence upon the Roman Catholic mystical tradition that may prove unhelpful and even dangerous for those who go looking for his mentors.

Is It Well-Written?

The Lord is honored not only by our expression of ideas, but by the skillful expression of those ideas. For this reason, I place far more value on books that display literary merit over those that are purely utilitarian. When an author expresses profound truth through a skilled grasp of language, he has combined two very different skillsets and has glorified God in both of them. Here is part of the reason I value writers like Carl Trueman and Russell Moore, authors who combine powerful content with a powerful pen.

Let me add one bonus question; this is not a question that separates good books from bad, but it may separate a book that is worth reading now from one that is not.

Does It Advance a Discussion?

In general, a good book will not simply repeat what others have said before, but it will somehow advance the discussion, either by bringing truth to bear in a new way or by taking into account contemporary issues or emphases. For example, there have been many good books on marriage over the church’s history while marriage itself has not changed one bit. A contemporary book can be especially useful if it engages some of the underlying contemporary beliefs and assumptions on marriage that the church has absorbed from the culture around it. If a book does not advance a discussion, but simply restates truth that others have taught, you may do better to read the older book or to read on another topic.

Visual Theology: The Atonement

Tim Challies continues to produce excellent graphics in his series he is calling Visual Theology. His latest installment is on The Atonement.

Sanctification

J.C. Ryle’s Holiness is a classic work that bears repeated readings. Recently I returned to his chapter on sanctification, a term that he defines as “an inward spiritual work which the Lord Jesus Christ works in a man by the Holy Ghost, when He calls him to be a true believer.” After defining the term, he lays out the differences between true and false sanctification, first saying what it is not and then saying what it is.

Sanctification Is Not

True sanctification is not:

1. Talk about religion. “People hear so much of Gospel truth that they contract an unholy familiarity with its words and phrases, and sometimes talk so fluently about its doctrines that you might think them true Christians. … [But] the tongue is not the only member that Christ bids us give to his service.”
2. Temporary religious feelings. “Reaction, after false religious excitement, is a most deadly disease of soul. When the devil is only temporarily cast out of a man in the heat of a revival, and by and by returns to his house, the last state becomes worse than the first.”
3. Outward formalism and external devoutness. “In many cases, this externalreligiousness is made a substitute for inward holiness; and I am quite certain that it falls utterly short of sanctification of heart!”
4. Retirement from our place in life or renunciation of social duties. “It is not the man who hides himself in a cave, but the man who glorifies God as master or servant, parent or child, in the family and in the street, in business and in trade, who is the Scriptural type of a sanctified man.”
5. Occasional performance of right actions. “[Sanctification] is not like a pump, which only sends forth water when worked upon from without, but like a perpetual fountain, from which a stream is ever flowing spontaneously and naturally.”

Sanctification Is

True sanctification shows itself in:

1. Habitual respect to God’s law and habitual effort to live in obedience to it as the rule of life. “The same Holy Spirit who convinces the believer of sin by the law, and leads him to Christ for justification, will always lead him to a spiritual use of the law, as a friendly guide, in the pursuit of sanctification.”
2. Habitual endeavour to do Christ’s will and to live by his practical precepts. “He who supposes [that Christ’s precepts as recorded in the Gospels] were spoken without the intention of promoting holiness, and that a Christian need not attend to them in his daily life, is really little better than a lunatic, and at any rate is a grossly ignorant person.”
3. Habitual desire to live up to the standard with St. Paul sets before the churches in his writings. “I defy anyone to read Paul’s writings carefully, without finding in them a large quantity of plain, practical directions about the Christian’s duty in every relation of life, and about our daily habits, temper and behavior to one another.”
4. Habitual attention to the active graces which our Lord so beautifully exemplified, and especially to the grace of charity (love). “A sanctified man will try to do good in the world, and to lessen the sorrow and increase the happiness of all around him. He will aim to be like his Master, full of kindness and love to everyone … by deeds and actions and self-denying work, according as he has opportunity.”
5. Habitual attention to the passive graces of Christianity (those graces which are especially shown in submission to the will of God, and in bearing and forbearing towards one another). “Of one thing I feel very sure—it is nonsense to pretend to sanctification unless we follow after the meekness, gentleness, patience and forgiveness of which the Bible makes so much. People who are habitually giving way to peevish and cross tempers in daily life, and are constantly sharp with their tongues, and disagreeable to all around them—spiteful people, vindictive people, revengeful people, malicious people—of whom, alas, the world is only too full!—all such know little, as they should know, about sanctification.”

I Went To Heaven

In the past few years, books describing trips to heaven after death have become very popular, including one of someone who went to hell. There are those who put great trust in these accounts saying, "See! The Bible is true! This guy's story proves it!"

I have my doubts and when I have expressed them, people usually point to John's account in Revelation, Isaiah's view of the throneroom in Isaiah 6 and Paul in 2 Corinthians. Do these Scriptures really say the same thing as these books? Are they similar accounts? What about Lazarus being raised from the dead?

Tim Challies has a great response in this article.

Here's the kicker:

What I can say with confidence is that I am under no obligation to trust in the validity of such experiences and neither am I under any obligation to change the way I live or to change what I believe on the basis of them. What I know of heaven through the Bible is infinitely more precious to me than anything I may learn from another man’s experience.

Keep Reading...

Marriage is...

8 Bullet Points about marriage from Tim Challies:

According to the Bible, marriage is…

…Instituted by God, Uniting One Man and One Woman

Matthew 19:4-6 - “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Genesis 2:24]? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

…A Portrait of Christ and His Bride, the Church

Ephesians 5:31-32 - “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Genesis 2:24]. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

…To Be Honored

Hebrews 13:4 - “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

…A Source of Trouble, Divided Interests, and Anxiety

1 Corinthians 7:28, 33-34 - “But if you do marry, you have not sinned, and if a betrothed woman marries, she has not sinned. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. … But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.”

…Not Every Person’s Calling

1 Corinthians 7:7-8 - “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am.”

…Meant to Be Permanent in This Life

Mark 10:11-12 - “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” (cf. Luke 16:18; Matthew 19:8-9; Romans 7:2-3)

…Impermanent in Eternity

Matthew 22:30 - “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” (cf. Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35-36)

…Fulfilled In Christ’s Return

Revelation 19:6-9 -

“Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

‘Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure’—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’ And he said to me, ‘These are the true words of God.’”

Visual Theology: The Tabernacle

Today’s graphic looks to the Old Testament tabernacle. Every item in the tabernacle was given by God to display truth and here we’ve tried to show what each item proclaims about the sinner’s need, God’s provision, and the ultimate fulfillment in the coming Messiah.

Visual Theology: Phil 2:5-11

Today’s graphic is a visual representation of one of my favorite texts: Philippians 2:5-11. This text challenges us to grasp the extent to which Jesus went in glorifying his Father.

Visual Theology: The Trinity

Too bad some people did not have this graphic recently. With all the drama associated with recent high profile individuals and their understanding of the Trinity, this recent visual theology graphic from Tim Challies would have been very informative.

http://www.challies.com/resources/visual-theology-the-trinity

Never Waste A Good Crisis

From Tim Challies:

You never want to waste a good crisis. That is true in politics and religion and any other field that values ideology, that values one thing over another or one thing in place of another. As Christians we know that the Lord often uses times of crisis to call people to himself, that when people are weak, he remains strong and reveals himself as strong. Of course if God uses crisis, so must Satan. In those times of intense difficulty we may be more aware than ever of the cosmic battle that wages around and inside us.

I have been thinking of the value of crisis as I have watched Americans grapple with President Obama’s recent mandate that demands that almost all employers and health insurance companies provide free contraceptives, up to and including contraceptives that cause (or can cause) abortions. The outrage to this mandate is multi-faceted. On the one hand it forces employers and insurance companies to violate conscience in providing contraceptives for those who are opposed to all forms of birth control, or abortifacient birth control for those who have no objection to preventive contraceptives. In either case, it ignores the separation of church and state that is so integral to America; with this mandate government forces violation of religious conscience.

This is a true crisis and I feel great sympathy for Americans as they wrestle with the implications and call for this bill to be abandoned. I would do the same if I lived south of the border.

As my friends to the south deal with this crisis, I want to offer a word of advice or encouragement: Please do not forget that there are many people who will seek to take advantage of this crisis in order to advance their agenda. Please keep fighting against this injustice, but do be careful how you fight and who it is you fight with.

I was not surprised that one of the first and loudest objections came from Charles Colson. He is, after all, a cultural commentator and a leader within evangelicalism. He and Timothy George worked together to pen a piece for Christianity Today they titled First They Came for the Catholics. Acknowledging that this crisis was first advanced against the Roman Catholic Church and their hard [official] stance against contraception, Colson and George said, “We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.” They are right, of course, that violating the religious liberty of one group violates the religious liberty of all. But note their underlying assumption that Roman Catholics are brothers and sisters. Rick Warren offered a very similar note via Twitter: “I’m not a Catholic but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers and sisters to practice their belief against government pressure.”

The solutions Colson and George propose revolves around The Manhattan Declaration, a document that has already been much debated since its 2009 release. This document was framed around three cultural and biblical issues: the sanctity of life, the meaning of marriage, and religious liberty. It has been a while since most of us have thought of the Declaration, but a crisis like this one brings it right back to the forefront. After all, today’s crisis treads upon two of those three issues: the sanctity of life and religious liberty. It is exactly the kind of crisis that make that Declaration appear relevant and necessary.

Yet that Declaration is dangerous, and particularly so in the way it does damage to the gospel. You may want to revisit R.C. Sproul’s article Why Didn’t R.C. Sproul Sign the Manhattan Declaration?. The heart of his objection is this: “The Manhattan Declaration confuses common grace and special grace by combining them. While I would march with the bishop of Rome and an Orthodox prelate to resist the slaughter of innocents in the womb, I could never ground that cobelligerency on the assumption that we share a common faith and a unified understanding of the gospel.” John MacArthur’s reasoning is much the same: “Support for The Manhattan Declaration would not only contradict the stance I have taken since long before the original ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ document was issued; it would also tacitly relegate the very essence of gospel truth to the level of a secondary issue.” Whatever was true of that Declaration in 2009 is true today.

I cannot speak of the motives of Colson and George, not without some speculation, but I do know that we do well to be alert. Their desire to lower the wall between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics—the wall of the gospel of salvation by grace through faith alone—is well-documented. Don’t think that they will allow today’s crisis to go to waste. There may be times for cobelligerency, to fight side-by-side with people who are on the other side of the gospel divide. This may even be such a time. But please remember that these are times to be more careful than ever, to continue to preach those gospel truths to yourself, and to ensure that the gospel is never, ever minimized or compromised. The more we labor with people on the other side of that gospel divide, the more we are prone to allow our similarities on non-gospel issues to blur our differences on the gospel itself.

I know that in times like this many Christians look for leadership, they look for trusted leaders to help them think through the issues so they know what to do. My encouragement is to take your cues from a few trusted individuals, people who have earned the right to be heard. In times like this so many of us turn to men like John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul and ask their help. These are men who have a long history of ensuring that the gospel remains central, men who have always valued truth over popularity, who have been willing to stand firm on truth. If this crisis continues without quick and happy resolution, I hope we will hear from men like MacArthur and Sproul who are specially gifted to help us interpret this time and help us know how to act.

For now, tread carefully, pray earnestly, hold tightly to the gospel, and remind yourself that no one wants to waste a good crisis. Through it all, know that Christ has already conquered and even this is under his complete and total sovereignty. In some way, at some time, he will glorify himself in it and through it.

Visual Theology Part 2

From Tim Challies:

Today I have the second infographic in the series, one that focuses in on the attributes of God.

When we talk about God’s attributes we do so to answer questions like Who is God? and What is God like? It is the way we seek to wrap our minds around just little fragments of who this God is.

We have sought to represent some of that in this graphic (which, incidentally, would probably make quite a nice desktop background).

Keep Reading...

Visual Theology

From Tim Challies:

Today I’ve got an infographic for you, and one that I is going to kick off a series called “Visual Theology”—an attempt to display theology using a combination of words and pictures. I have asked one designer to take a shot at displaying the ordo salutis, which is to say, the order of salvation, which refers to the sequence of conceptual steps involved in the salvation of the Christian. I will let the graphic explain it from here.

Keep Reading...

How to Know the Will of God

This is the beginning of an excellent series of articles by Tim Challies.

How To Know The Will Of God

How Does God Speak To Me Today?

God's Will For Your Life

How Do I Make Decisions That Please God?