Is baptism necessary?

When you read the book of Acts, you see a simple thing over and over: the apostles take the Gospel to new people, bringing them to confess faith in Jesus Christ and be baptized. Taking this as a cue, therefore, you would naturally think that baptism is a vital, normal, essential part of the process of Christianizing people. And you would be right.

Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be right for the right reason and the people who disagree with you wouldn’t be wrong for the right reason either.

See, there are several sorts of arguments which commonly arise over the place of baptism in the Christian faith. People argue about whether one can be a “real” Christian without being baptized. People argue about who is “authorized” to perform a genuine baptism. People argue about whether baptism is symbolic or sacramental. And people argue (endlessly) about what particular details are essential to a proper baptism. Sadly, although these questions make wonderful discussion topics, those discussions wind up being most successful only at leading the participants away from the truth for the simple reason that they miss the whole point.

In Matthew, there is a very famous passage called the Great Commission, where we are instructed to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that [Jesus] commanded [us].” One of the more common observations about this passage is that we are told to “make disciples” and not mere converts.” A disciple, we are then usually told, is a “serious” Christian who “really commits” to following Jesus by studying the Bible and obeying God’s commands. This is a fine observation cautioning against a real problem of one-night stand evangelisms which leave abandoned newborns strewn about the sidewalk. But it again misses the big point staring readers right in the face.

Why does this passage (along with all the events in Acts) connect discipling so closely with baptism? Not because of what discipling means, but because of what baptism is. The problem is that baptism isn’t about water or what words get said or by whom or even the metaphysical reality underlying it (or not). Instead, baptism is the rite of indoctrinating a new believer into a support and identity structure which Christians call a church. Baptism makes you part of the family. Not in a vague sense or part of some general family, but in a very specific sense and part of a very particular family: the one which surrounds you as you are baptized.

Just as children are born into a family, newly born-again Christians are baptized into a church. And when you start to think of baptism this way, you suddenly realize what’s really going on in both the book of Acts and in the Great Commission. The point about disciples is that they differ from “mere converts” not by sincerity or knowledge but instead by the fact that they can only become fully mature and healthy Christians by being part of a discipling community. And whereas for us baptism has all-too-often come to mean some individualistic ceremony, baptism for the early Christians (and for most of the centuries of Christians after them) meant incorporation (literally “to make part of a body”) into a particular group of the faithful.

That’s why I have to laugh a bit at the mischief I intended in selecting the title for this thought. The people who read it probably assumed I was going to offer some semi-definitive answer about whether baptism saves or not. Perhaps, already armed with their own answer to that question, they hoped I would finally align myself with them (or else with those they can safely dismiss as heretics). Shouldn’t the recognition of such impulses alone concern you?

The fact that we are inclined to take such an essential feature of Christianity and turn it into a pretext for theological squabbling should serve to reveal the big problem we should really be addressing: our concept of Christian salvation itself as an individual matter. We want to know which particular mechanisms or tests to perform so that “I” can know that “I” am saved or that “he” is not when a much better view would notice that the Bible is saturated with the notion of “us” being a holy community, “a city on a hill” if you will, who (as a group) will show that we are Jesus’s disciples by our love one for another.

So is baptism necessary?

Of course.

For what?

For the fulfillment of God’s basic purpose for all human beings: being tightly connected to Him and to each other as bundles of loving interaction, bearing burdens, sharing treasure, and functioning as an organism (or body or house) rather than as bits and pieces of random Christian flesh distended from each other by the thought-habits of a culture virtually incapable of thinking about human nature communitatively.

And lest some of you reading this develop a false sense of comfort from the fact that you “attend” church regularly or even “belong” to a congregation, allow me to notice that these are not the Biblical standards at all. Family is what family does, not just the shared name on legal forms or an address held in common. Family involves service and heartbreak and intimacy and proximity and interaction and history and a whole host of other things that offer a comparative test by which far too many “churched” Christians seem far more similar to the “unchurched” than they do to truly integrated members of a Biblical community.

Can a person be a Christian without being baptized? The question you should instead ask is whether a person can be a Christian by himself, to which the Bible gives a resounding denial. And if you think salvation entails anything less than membership in a robustly flourishing community of believers glorifying God by their society rather than merely their individuality, you have been sold a line of theology so thin it will barely hold the weight of even the most miniature Bible.

That’s why I say that baptism is necessary for salvation, neither for the reasons you normally hear nor in refutation of the denials you often encounter, but because of what baptism fundamentally is and how it fits Biblically with the entirety of the Christian message about God’s plan and purposes for humanity.

What is brave?

I recently watched for the very first time an extremely famous Western, “The Magnificent Seven.” It was excellent from beginning to end, but, as those who’ve seen the film (most of you, I expect) it is precisely the ending which both infuriates the audience and makes the film so special.

See, after they heroes talk themselves into going back into town to help the peasants and kill the bandits, Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen ride off into the sunset, leaving the town. What’s frustrating about this is that only minutes before they had both been vowing to give up their gun-slinging and settle down in the town as farmers themselves. It was this dream which seemed to motivate their odds-defying reengagement with the bad guys. So why the course reversal?

Well, one answer is that in the end, these “real men” realized they were just that, masculine archetypes who know at some level that they are unfit for the effeminate domesticity of farming and will never be fully satisfied outside a good fight. So the one temporary (and dubious) member of their posse returns to his agricultural roots and settles down, the four others die fighting, and these two ride off to further future do-goodery. “After all,” the audience is invited to wonder, “aren’t their services going to be wanted elsewhere? The world needs good cops, right?” But this interpretation misses the entire point of the movie and woefully demeans it in the process.

Who in this movie is a hero? Who is brave? Who is a man?

Although the answer seems obvious, it turns out to be exactly the opposite of what it would appear. And this isn’t idle speculation by some film critic me. Embedded within the movie is everything we need to solve the riddle, and solve it we must or risk seeing this as merely another reluctant-American-warrior-saves-the-day epic.

At one vital point in the film, the three young boys who (not coincidentally) have settled on Charles Bronson as their masculine idol come to him bemoaning their sad fate as the children of cowards. Their fathers, you see, have decided to cut a deal with the bandits in exchange for avoiding the risk of an all-out gun battle whose outcome is uncertain but will inevitably mean many peasant casualties. And so the boys want Bronson (the real man) to take them away from such a humiliating society. His response to their plea is swift and stern.

He smacks them around and adjures them to never call their fathers cowards, and then launches into a soliloquy contrasting the apparent courage of gun-fighting with the true courage of fatherhood. Their fathers, he explains, are the truly brave ones who make themselves vulnerable to the needs and the tremendous responsibilities of caring for their families. Gunslingers by contrast are cowards who neither attach themselves to anyone nor make themselves responsible for anyone. “You think I am brave because I carry a gun? Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility! For you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do this because they love you and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage! Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee [that anything] will come of it. This is bravery. That’s why I never even started anything like that. That’s why I never will.”

The clear implication is that the men who decide to lay down arms and swallow the bitter pill of looking weak or cowardly because it is the prudent thing to do are in fact the brave ones. Reinforcing this point is the earlier speech Brynner makes when Horst Buchholz tries to duel him in the bar, saying that it is the foolish pride of young men that leads them to die so frequently over matters of honor. Clearly, the pride of the Magnificent Seven isn’t much better in the end, and all the fine speechmaking about settling down in town afterwards was merely a persuasive ruse toughs use on themselves to reenter the fray. They would rather die (which most of them do) than run away and live to fight (or farm) another day. That their ego-drivenness happens to benefit the villagers in this case is mere good fortune.

So in the end, this is a film which actually inverts the standard thinking about machismo in an entirely Christian and family-values sort of way, even daring to reveal the adrenalin thrill-seeking behind the thin veil of faux heroism. In this way, the Magnificent Seven is in a far subtler precursor to something like “The Hurt Locker” than to any of the less honest modern “hero” films.

But having seen all of this, one significant question lingers for me…a question which isn’t just about which way to come down on assessing a historically important film. The question, if the film’s embedded morality is true, is whether all those men (and women) who deliberately refrain from having children, for all their sincere-and-responsible-sounding reasons, aren’t at heart just cowards unwilling to participate in the world’s oldest and most terrifying mission of courage: parenthood.

Say what?

As most of you know, I’m pretty good at giving people the benefit of the doubt whenever that’s possible. It’s an essential part of approaching others with charity and humility, in addition to being an obvious implication of the Golden Rule. But sometimes, well, there just isn’t enough room to do anything other than describe a massive problem.

Yes, I’m talking about yesterday’s daily White House press conference wherein Jay Carney now infamously claimed the Bible says, “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” which it doesn’t. But Jay Carney isn’t the story. The fact that one staffer, even such a prominent one, would attribute an aphorism from Ben Franklin to Scripture is purely uninteresting, precisely the sort of blunder we are in fact called to overlook or forgive. Besides, it’s probably the most common erroneous attribution people make to the Bible, so the fact that Jay did so doesn’t bother me a bit.

What flabbergasted me was the fact that the entire White House press corps didn’t catch the error. It took Politico several hours later to notice that the White House transcript issued for the event had noted the error. That means that there wasn’t a single reporter in that room yesterday with enough exposure to Christian teaching to recognize Carney’s mistake on the spot and call him on it.

See, Evangelicals pretty regularly complain that the media or the leaders of culture don’t really get us. Sometimes that’s a fair complaint and sometimes not. But in this particular instance, I know I could go to any Evangelical church in the country and expect at least half of the attendees to correctly know this particular piece of religious urban legendry. So what I’m guessing half of all Evangelicals know, not a single major news reporter in a room of a hundred knows. And for a group of people who generally will pounce like piranha on even the most minor gaffe, their silence symbolizes a tremendous disconnect.

The good news, such as it is, is that the White House itself made the correction. They may have been prodded by outside sources, but a self-effacing government is always better than the alternative. But the White House hinting at its own errors is still quite some distance from a coalition of major news sources first admitting and then rectifying their vast ignorance of mainstream American religion.

What is mine?

Due to the blessings of ridiculously generous relatives, our boys are regularly showered with gifts and money for Christmas, birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Presidents Day, Valentine’s Day, and “Third Tuesday Fest” which I don’t even think is a real thing. Ever the diligent family accountant, my wife keeps close track of each boy’s individual bank balance whenever they go out shopping for toys. Well, an interesting problem has started cropping up.

Whereas Spencer and Ethan (7 and 5, respectively) always have consumer appetites which exceed their savings, Sage (3) has the reverse problem. As the beneficiary of two older brothers’ toys (and a dubiously grown-up father with some lingering childhood artifacts), Sage luxuriates in a continuous toy surplus. Having no real needs, the result is that Dani never has anything to buy for him with his money. Since the others will always be older and passing their former toys down to him, this problem seems likely never to fade. But it raises an interesting philosophical-economic question.

If the flow of toys is all Sage’s way but the dispersal of money is equal to all three, why shouldn’t some of that money go to benefit the undersubsidized desires of Spencer and Ethan? To put the matter more politically, Sage is the undeserving beneficiary of our family’s societal infrastructure the creation of which was not due to any merit on his part. So, even though the gift money is his, it seems only fair to spread it back up the inheritance chain a bit.

Now, I understand that a country is not the same thing as a family, and I understand that confusion over this distinction is near the heart of most of the mistakes of modern liberalism. That being said, isn’t there something here to support the idea that maybe some factions of our current political landscape are slightly excessive in their demand that citizens of a long-established society unequivocally deserve to keep every last scrap of anything that comes to them?

The gold-digger in me

No one likes to see his own flaws. This is what makes Christianity so fascinating. On the one hand it says your flaws don’t matter so long as you have Christ, but on the other hand it then entices you to look unabashedly at those flaws and eradicate every last one of them. The beautiful importance of this process should be obvious since even a casual survey of common human practice reveals a robust set of tactics for hiding our ugliness from ourselves.

Consider what I’ll call defense mechanism number 84, in which we soothe away the awareness of our own moral decay by finding a more extreme version of ourselves, labeling it as a special category of evil, and then castigating it as some unimaginably sub-human horror. Today’s case study: the “gold-digger.”

This woman is despised by society because she marries entirely (or even mostly) for the purpose of financial security, perhaps hoping (with enough age disparity) to become a surrogate heir to an existing male fortune. Evil, right? Sure. But for clarity’s sake, let’s rephrase. Described less pejoratively, isn’t she really marrying for the purpose of getting something from her spouse that she wants? The problem is that she wants something from him rather than wanting him.

But when you put it that way, it seems rather ordinary for the simple reason that we all marry for this reason. We marry in hopes of sexual pleasure. We marry to get entertaining companionship. We marry because our beloved is pretty, or accomplished, or appealing in some other way and thus an effective proof to others (and ourselves) that we are the sort of people who can bag off such a trophy. To put it bluntly, don’t we all marry primarily for the most selfish of reasons?

Oh, sure, we love the other person, but would we marry them if they were uglier, stupider, meaner, and more irresponsible? We may say “for poorer…in sickness…and in bad times,” but we don’t cherish those possibilities, and we strive valiantly to date around them. So unless I’m performing logic poorly, this means we’re all basically gold-diggers at heart, a conclusion our security in Christ permits us to face without the risk of psychological self-destruction. But there’s a silver lining to this precious metals analogy. None of this is a surprise to God. In fact, one might even suppose He knew it some time ago. And in response, He crafted the institution of marriage.

Now as anyone knows, marriage has a funny way of exposing your flaws and then cultivating your undeveloped virtues. You see, although she might resist it, I suspect that even the schemingest gold-digging sexpot discovers during the course of her matrimony that this man is worthy of love and that she cares for him as a man rather than as a means. That’s just what marriage does to you. And although I may have married for what I would get from my wife, over the years I have learned how to gain the most joy from being married for what I can give to her. Yes, it’s a practice I am still learning, but I learn it every day from the God whose pattern I am following and in whose marital health club for the soul I am growing.

Going down in history?

It has long seemed to me that one of the great challenges of fully Christianizing ourselves is seeking out, discovering, and then removing every vestige of worldliness in our thinking. For my own part, one example of this has been learning not to care very much about fame or getting credit for the things I might do.

Although most intellectuals care very deeply that they be properly attributed, I have learned to simply be happy if the ideas I generate are adopted and perpetuated by others, regardless if my name is attached to them. My reason? The God I serve knows full well what I do, and I trust Him to give me any compensation I might need, including being “known” for such things. I don’t need history to remember me if God forgets nothing.

But this morning I had a different sort of question arise. Some coworkers were discussing the roots of World War II and naturally Neville Chamberlain came up, being famous for his policy of appeasement toward the expansionism of Hitler. And that’s when it hit me. Everyone knows who Neville Chamberlain was precisely because he made such a fabulous blunder in not grasping Hitler’s true intentions. And to this day, he serves as the iconic example of how not to respond to a tyrant. In that way, he is a tremendously useful example from history, and his knownness to students of history is extremely high.

Now, naturally it’s better to avoid blunders and the horrific consequences which can flow from them, such as in this case. That being said, I started wondering whether I would feel satisfied if my own life could be as historically useful a source of guidance as Neville Chamberlain’s was. And in the end, I realized that if I’m really dedicated to teaching people to be wise, there are many far less vivid ways to fulfill that goal than the one which befell him.

So would I choose to be historically significant in the manner of Chamberlain? It’s certainly not my first choice, but if God sees fit to guide people even through my ignominy, shouldn’t I be satisfied with that? If He is pleased with me being hated by history but remembered usefully by her, well, isn’t the sacrifice of infamy even greater than the sacrifice of anonymity?

The real cost of "good deals"

As someone who just unloaded two moving trucks worth of accumulated living paraphernalia, I would say I’m freshly open to the advice of motivational author Brian Tracy: “Pay twice as much for your clothes, and buy half as many. Expensive clothes are cheaper because you wear them more often.”

Although this proverb seems superficially counterintuitive, the underlying idea is brilliantly vital. Because we must wear something every day, the correct way to approach buying a shirt, for instance, isn’t by thinking primarily about purchase price, but about the number of “wears” you will get out of it. As anyone who has bought both expensive and cheap clothes knows, you wind up wearing the costly ones far more frequently for the simple reason that you like them much better. Although well-made clothes may also last longer, this isn’t the real issue he’s getting at.

In my closet, I have numerous shirts which I paid little for but almost never wear. In addition to taking up space and time, they represent an investment which was easy to make because each outlay was small. But since I rarely wear them and since I’ve over time bought so many of them, they represent an aggregate waste of money, plus the time and effort of storing, ignoring, and moving them.

The real measure of the cost of a shirt is thus the price divided by the number of times you’ll wear it. And since we tend to wear clothes we like many times more often than the others, Brian Tracy’s advice doesn’t even go far enough. In reality, I think that clothes which cost twice as much bring you perhaps twenty or more times as much value because of how much better you feel in them and how much more often you don them.

Now, for someone like me who almost exclusively buys clothes secondhand, all my clothes cost very little. But the principle still applies. I should only buy ones I like well enough to pay more for and know for sure I will wear a lot instead of the ones I like just enough to pay such a low price for.

As a friend of mine used to say, “Some things are so cheap they aren’t worth buying.” I would add that some things cost you the most only after you buy them.

And just to be sure it isn’t missed for not being said overtly, this way of thinking surely applies to any other personal possession as well.

What is a sin of omission?

Some examples of things you will probably never hear people say:

“One of these days, I think I’d like to be an alcoholic.”
“I’m going to do whatever it takes to become part of an embarrassing sex scandal.”
“You know, I’ve finally decided to take up chain smoking.”
“What I’d really like to do is put on another 30-40 pounds.”
“Hopefully, if everything works out, I can have a terrible marriage.”
“Eventually my goal is to be so deep in debt that bankruptcy seems like a good idea.”

At least, I know I’ve never heard anyone say any of these things, and I suspect none of you have either. But if we can agree that no one ever says any of these things (presumably because no one ever sets out to achieve any of these results), then what are we to make of the relatively obvious fact that lots and lots of people do in fact wind up at precisely these destinations?

The answer, I think, is relatively obvious. These and a myriad of other highly undesirable conditions are never arrived at suddenly or even deliberately. Instead, they are gradually chosen over the course of numerous minor decisions to behave the same way a person who actually held such absurd goals would. And not to put the matter too finely, but many of these minor transitions are not even choices at all. Rather, they are merely failures to behave deliberately in the opposite direction.

One might say, perhaps, that only the worst kind of art paints itself.

What atheists get right.

Who is closer to having good theology, legalists or atheists?

Although this sounds like an absurd question, consider what they both have in common. Both legalists and atheists (generally) have almost the exact same false view of God, in which He is a petty, vindictive, self-aggrandizing, and judgmental brat, condemning anyone and everyone who does not precisely conform to His peculiar and exacting standards. The legalists, of course, celebrate this heretically one-dimensional view of God whereas atheists reject it.

But why do atheists reject it? Because they say a God like that would not be a God worth worshipping. Their complaint is that such a God is not at all a God of love, but instead the most evil archetype of villainy. In other words, they deny the existence of this God because He is not good enough, not loving enough. The great irony, then, is that in rejecting the false theology of legalists, atheist are actually standing up in defense of the character of God. Therefore, their denial of God’s existence actually turns out to be celebration of the true God, whose loving Nature and Honor they inadvertently defend. When they say, “This God does not exist, and if He does, is not worth worshipping,” we Christians should shout, “Agreed!”

But we Christians don’t worship this false God. Our God so loved us that in spite of His Holiness and His absolute right to Divine judgment, He chose to completely humiliate Himself in order to get us who did not deserve it. He cared so little about His reputation that He went so far as to let it be tarnished on the Cross and continuously slandered by both legalists masquerading as Christians and atheists alike throughout subsequent history. He is a God which no self-respecting man would ever emulate, for precisely the reason that other-love rather than self-respect are at the very core of His character. And it is this utter lack of self-centeredness that the atheist holds aright in rejecting the false God of legalism.

And so when atheists say they would never be willing to believe in a God who would send people to hell for their petty indiscretions, ask them whether they would believe in a God who would sacrifice His dignity, His reputation, and even His very life in order to rescue people from such a horrific fate. Perhaps they will then reject God because He is too loving, but only someone who has never understood the Gospel would ever reject God because He’s too self-centered and tyrannical.

On foolishness?

Imagine a man enjoying what he thinks is a relatively prosperous marriage. He treats his wife well, provides for her needs, and is a good father to their children. Every day, he goes off to work, excited most about returning home to spend time with them.

Then one day, he starts to sense that something has changed. As his fears grow, he eventually overhears his wife having a barely guarded conversation with another man, clearly indicating she has been unfaithful to him. He confronts her and she admits it, but refuses to stop. In fact, over the next few days, she becomes even more bold, telling anyone that she is cheating on her husband and even deliberately announcing her rendezvous at home. He is ashamed and frustrated and furious, but he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Finally, at a large party they throw every year at their house, with dozens of their friends and neighbors attending, she has the audacity to invite her lover, and he shows up. The crowd is stunned and buzzes about the outrage of it all. In response, the husband leaves the party for a little while, only to return an hour later, a mysterious development which has everyone eager and also a bit nervous to see what will happen next.

Then, after what seems like an unbearably long time, the husband turns down the music and calls for everyone’s attention. To the utter amazement of everyone present, he walks over to his wife, who is standing with her lover. But just as the crowd is expecting the worst, he bends down on one knee, pulls out a stunningly extravagant diamond necklace, and offers it to her, saying, “I still love you, darling. Won’t you please return to me so we can continue the life we promised to build together?”

What diversity shows

I have a theory. And I’m serious that at the moment this is only a theory, but nevertheless, here goes.

If you’ve ever noticed, when people become ardent fans of something, that fandom causes them to conform toward a standard set by whatever they love. For instance, musical fans don’t merely often dress alike, speak alike, and even have similar hair styles. This is why it’s relatively easy to tell Grateful Dead fans from Bieber fans from Metallica fans. To put it in more theological language, idolizing something like a musical group reshapes the idolater in the image of the idol, causing a kind of external (and perhaps internal) convergence toward that thing.

So, even though people may feel they are being very independent or “expressing themselves” in their choice of worship, the end reality is that they actually sacrifice their own individuality in conforming to the thing they follow. This makes sense because any human idol in this sense only has the power to reproduce itself, a single unvaried thing, in others. To put the matter in a different, very uncharitable way, cults always eliminate diversity among their members.

In contrast, when people conform to God, what I’ve discovered is that rather than becoming highly similar to each other, they actually seem to grow ever more divergent, at least in external things. It’s almost as if the inherent variety in God (which we see manifested for instance in the creation all around us) is just as potent in having created each of us individually unique from all others. And when we press ever closer to Him, rather than turning us into second-rate versions of each other, we become first-rate versions of ourselves.

Now I’ll admit that it is not always so. When you visit many religious groups, for instance, you may quickly get the sense that they are not as I have described. In fact, their appearance may much more closely resemble the fans of a particular musical idol than the sort of wild but harmonious variety I’m describing. Some may actually even pride themselves on this sort of sub-cultural homogeneity.

And if that’s often the case, I’m beginning to wonder whether that may itself be a rough indicator of whether the group in question truly has hold of the God of infinite wonder described in the Bible or merely has hold of a god of limitation which they have inadvertently settled for or, worse yet, substituted for Him.

Natural harmony requires similarity, and hence natural human association will both preselect for and reinforce this. In contrast, supernatural harmony reveals itself perhaps nowhere more potently than in its ability to exist despite…and because of…vast diversity.

What isn't a sermon?

Let me begin this observation with a caveat. I am not a pastor.

Although I have preached a handful of sermons, I believe firmly in the idea that one should be cautious when offering a criticism of anyone who does for a long time what I have only done a few times.

That being said, I have a bother which has developed into a frustration and has now grown into a full-fledged lament.

I’ve heard a lot of sermons in my life, beginning with my own father’s Sunday discourses. I’ve heard sermons by fiery preachers and soft preachers, eloquent preachers and stumbling preachers. I’ve heard Southern accents, British accents, Nigerian accents, and even some sermons in standard American dialect (Midwestern in case you didn’t know). Some preachers are arrogant, others are tender. Some are self-deprecating, others seem to not even have a sense of humor. Some sermons are topical, others are exegetical, and a handful are what one might generously call improvisational, perhaps meant as a way of inducing the Holy Spirit to show up. In short, I’ve heard a lot of sermons.

Putting aside sermons from so-called “liberal” churches, all the preachers I’ve heard would describe their sermons as being Biblically based. These are men who really love Christianity and deeply believe what they are doing is bringing the Bible more fully into people’s lives. I don’t for a moment doubt their sincerity, nor do I doubt they are trying to preach the Bible the best they know how.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough. And the sense in which it’s not enough winds up becoming the sense in which it’s not even really the Bible, either.

In my experience, you see, the most common way to preach is take a Bible passage (or Bible topic), and use it to disclose or distill a helpful bit of instruction about how the congregation should live. In other words, preaching is a matter of giving people good advice. “Go forth and sin no more,” might be the concluding line of any American sermon. And lest you beat a hasty retreat from taking me seriously, let me say that this is not a problem “those other” churches have. It’s been true in virtually every non-denominational, Evangelical, or Bible church I’ve ever visited. Even the ones I would otherwise describe as fairly solid.

The problem is that Christian preaching is not about giving advice, even if it’s sound advice. Christianity is about proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it is concealed in Scripture to be revealed by the preacher for the spiritual nourishment of the disciple. Every sermon, yes every sermon, is thus meant to be the culminating act of worship pressing people ever more fully into the Presence of Christ by stoking the embers of awe we all as believers supernaturally feel at the Gospel of our Savior. This (and only this) will truly transform people and bring God the glory He so richly deserves.

Failing to grasp this as the central purpose of a sermon (and the central point of every part of the Bible), many sermons never even really address the Gospel or It’s uniquely life-changing power. Sometimes, something called “the Gospel” is added on “after” the sermon, like a misplaced appendage. Sometimes it’s not there at all. But when preaching is properly understood (and practiced), the entire agenda of the thing is to bring us into Christ’s embrace by showing how He and He alone is the solution to all our problems and the resolution to every Biblical plotline. And although small drops of God’s Grace can seep out through anyone who presents anything related to God regardless of how ineptly it’s done, full-fledged preaching of this sort opens wide the floodgates of God’s transformative Grace. And it saddens me every time I see it not happen. Every time. Again and again. And it is this supreme sadness that motivates me to write today.

To put the matter in the bluntest of terms, there is preaching the Gospel, preaching Christ, and preaching the Bible. If you aren’t doing all three, then you aren’t really doing any of them at all. You may be lecturing, moralizing, or even giving useful advice. But you aren’t preaching, even if you’re basically doing what everyone else is doing…especially if that is so.

And again, speaking as someone who has tried to do this tremendous task only a few times, I can say from experience that it is magnificently hard to do right and remarkably easy to do wrong. May God grant all of us who at least sometimes communicate the Gospel the grace to do it better more often. And may we all be earnestly praying the same for all preachers everywhere. For this and many other things, our pastors deeply need our prayerful support and encouragement.

What motivates me?

I like looking at attractive women.

A lot.

Despite what the culture would have me believe, I do not consider this a virtue.

I spent all my younger years hunting hot women with my eyes, a sport my culture, my friends, my television, and my subscription to Playboy all strongly encouraged me in and trained me at.

Upon becoming a Christian, I learned that the lust behind such eye-hunting is wrong for a variety of reasons, and I have been trying ever since to unlearn the skill. Sometimes I do pretty well at not looking. Sometimes I even enjoy a few brief hours of being uninterested in looking. Most times I am a spectacular failure.

But the other day, I had an insight that ever since has been useful for me, and I thought I’d share it in the hopes it might be so for you as well.

I was walking through a parking lot, and I caught myself looking at a pretty woman. Well, actually, I caught myself looking away from her just at the moment I thought she might turn and see me ogling her from a distance. Such finely-tuned reflexes are common for eye-hunters. We don’t want the quarry to notice us hunting them, you see.

But why not?

Because I would feel very ashamed and embarrassed to let a sexy woman actually see me looking at her this way. She would almost certainly dislike it, an understandable reaction to someone visually assaulting you. And as a result of not wanting to actually be discovered in my lusting, I have just enough cowardice to try to hide it from her.

That’s when it struck me.

If the passing opinion of a complete stranger is enough to motivate me to behave properly with my eyes, why isn’t the eternal opinion of my most dearly Beloved Companion sufficient as well? Shouldn’t the sadness of my Father be more meaningful to me than the unspoken contempt of an objectified woman daring to look back at me?

All I know is that since that moment, I have found it relatively easy to not look as I should not. This current triumph may not last, as past experience shows. But at least for the moment, there’s something effective about knowing that God is on my side, wanting my holiness and helping me remember that He alone is the one I should be cognizant of in everything I do.

When more means less.

We hear an awful lot these days about the duties the rich have toward the poor or society or “to pay their fair share.” The funny thing about this expression is that their “fair share” always seems to actually mean “quite a lot more than anyone else.” If they only paid the same percentage as everyone else (a flat tax), they would still be paying a lot more. But since we have a “progressive” tax system, they actually pay a higher percentage, meaning they pay exponentially more than others. At least that’s the idea.

Now, the reality is that high income earners often are in a position to manipulate their earnings in such a way as to wind up paying a much lower percentage than the simple system would indicate. This is a very legitimate practical part of any meaningful tax discussion and is essentially what Warren Buffett recently wrote about in the New York Times.

Nevertheless, people seem completely satisfied with the underlying notion that in a perfectly just world, we would first solve such practical defects and then proceed to impose not just a higher tax bill, but an exponentially higher tax bill, on the rich. And the exact value of that exponent should always be either slightly or substantially higher than whatever it currently is, at least if you consult the average person. In defense of this view, they will often say something to the effect of, “The rich owe more to society because they have so much.”

But this proceeds from a fundamental error about the nature of money.

Money, you see, is nothing but a measure of how much good you have done for other people. Oh, to be sure, a great many good things we do for others don’t receive any payment, and there are also nefarious ways to acquire money, the bulk of which we make illegal. But the basic idea of money is that I give it to you when you give me something I value more than that money’s capacity to buy something else. In other words, at that moment, you’re offering me what I consider to be the best value for my currency available in my society. Thus the reason you acquire it is the same reason I held it before you: you benefitted me after I benefitted another.

So when a man has a higher income than someone else, the money he earns is evidence he has done more for society. And when he earns a lot, it means he has done a lot for people who voluntarily proved the evaluation by paying you for whatever he did. Thus, a high income is the most basic evidence of a high social contribution. Again, other forms of contribution may go uncompensated and some compensation comes from not truly contributing, but the basic idea of money is as I’ve described.

That’s why the principle of taxing the high income earners is so self-contradictory. On the one hand, high incomes prove a much higher-than-average social contribution. But on the other hand, they prove a lower-than-expected social contribution. Advocates of progressive taxation thus seem to think a high income simultaneously proves you’ve done much more than most for others and yet also not nearly enough for them.

Now, I’m very much in favor of the well-off using their resources charitably. But to say to them that the proof of their social failure is the very evidence of their social success completely baffles me.