Month: October 2013

Do Sovereignty of God & Free Will Fit Together?

Philip K. Dick was arguably the most influential science fiction writer of the late twentieth century. Several of his works, adapted as screenplays, explore the concept of free will. In Blade Runner we are brought face to face with the tension between genetic control and genuine feeling. The Adjustment Bureau pits choice against fate, as Matt Damon’s character attempts to alter the master plan for his life.

It all brings up an interesting, age-old question: Is it possible for there to be a sovereign God and for humans to have free will?

The stakes are high in this debate. If we surrender free will, life becomes bleak and hopeless. If God possesses exclusive control over our destinies, why should we do anything? What difference does anything make if life is all mapped out? If we surrender divine sovereignty, life loses transcendent meaning and purpose. We exist and then we die. The better the choices we make, the more apt we are to survive the race of the fittest, but for what—the mere propagation of our species? On the one hand we are left with unfeeling determinism, and on the other, a free-falling individualism.

Millions of people view the Bible as a source for knowing God. What does the Bible have to say on the topic of will?

Read the rest at ExploreGod.com

What Parenting Method is Best? (Pt 1)

Every new mom or dad feels the daunting nature of the task—parenting. Questions fill your mind. Am I ready? What makes for a good dad or mom? How should we discipline? What kind of schedule should we follow? Is a schedule important? How do you raise an eternal soul? Nervous and excited, I piled up the books! I read everything on parenting from Psychology to Theology to Methodology. I also met with fathers whom I respected and asked them lots of questions on how to be a good dad. I even formed a group of other soon-to-be dads, so we could get together to pray for our kids and encourage one another.

There’s nothing like becoming a parent to freak you out. Expecting mothers freak out too. They get so freaked out, they devour blogs, join mom groups, buy lots of baby stuff they think their baby can’t live without. When we had our first child, we received a wet wipe warmer, seriously. All of a sudden all your conversations bend towards being a mom, raising kids, pregnancy. It’s easy for a lot of other stuff to get pushed out. Then there’s the birthing and parenting methods. In America, we get obsessed about this. We gravitate to books like What To Expect When you Are Expecting because we have to know what to expect! I wonder where faith is in all of this preparation?

Raising Kids is Hard & Great

I’m a seventeen-year-old parent (if you add my kids ages up), and I still don’t know what to expect. New stages bring new challenges. Diapers, potty training, schooling, friends, birds and the bees, puberty, culture, college, marriage, and so on. Working through education for our kids is one thing, but once they are in school its a whole different thing. Parenting can be daunting. Children require constant attention, even when they sleep! We watch them breathe at 2am. And even when they are not around, they are still in our thoughts. And for some reason they like doing the opposite of what we ask them to do! Raising kids is demanding, but it also delightful.

I love being a father. We get to experience unprecedented joy as we watch our children grow, change, eat, walk, talk, learn, sing, play, pray, and laugh. You get to roll around with them on the floor, and marvel at what they say. This week we were at the breakfast table and Owen just whipped out the Pledge of Allegiance, reciting it from memory. Ellie put on a black, curly, Halloween fro and, holding up her finger, said: “Don’t laugh!”.

6 Parenting Methods 

What methods do you follow? Some of us go for touchy-feely (Brazelton). Others lean into attachment parenting (Sears). You like the family bed. Others of you are freaked out by the idea of a family bed, so you schedule every second of your child’s life and then do it “God’s Way” (Ezzo) meanwhile abandoning worship, community, and mission (incredibly formative things for the soul). Or there’s Parenting by the Book (John Rosemond), who apparently figured out exactly how to raise children according to the Bible. It’s funny. In the midst of eternity, we clamor for temporal methods. Anxious about the safety, performance, health, and future of our children, we put faith in our methods, not in Christ.

Secular parents are realizing the futility of method-driven parenting. As a result, confessional parenting has become popular. Confessional parenting allows imperfect parents to be imperfect. Moms can confess to their various parental “sins” online, like faking an illness just to get some time alone. The problem with confessional parenting, is that while it might remove your guilt, it doesn’t raise your children.

Enter Slow Parenting, pretty popular in Austin. Slow Parenting replaces the experts, who told us what a good parent worries about, with experts who now tell us that a good parent doesn’t worry so much. Chill out. Take is easy. Don’t run your kids or yourself all over town to make sure they are in the right activities. Family, Family. Family. Do I detect a idol?

Attachment parenting, scheduled parenting, Christian parenting, and Slow parenting. We soothe our anxieties by staying up with the latest research and banking on our methods. But as a recent article in Time tells us, parents are wearing thin. Discouragement sets in. There’s a word for this. It’s called “nurture shock”, what happens when the mythical fountain of parenting knowledge fails us. We become over-informed, unsatisfied, anxious parents. Placing our faith in methods will drive us crazy, and kids don’t do so well with crazy parents.

3 Shortcomings of Method-Driven Parenting

In his foundational work God, Marriage, and Family, Andreas Kostenberger lists several shortcomings of methods-centered parenting:

1.     Method driven parenting focuses on practices not the person.

2.     It provides parents with a false sense of confidence.

3.     It is not sensitive enough to the uniqueness of each child.

I’m growing up with my kids, and I’m learning that that’s okay. God designed it like that, probably because he knows our kids need parents of faith more than parents of methods. Most parenting books miss the most important part of our children–their souls. Overwhelmed with the ordinary struggles, we can easily jettison eternity and latch onto the best crutch we can find, our parenting methods. If we keep a nap schedule, give them organic food, make sure they are having a “well-rounded” childhood (=putting your kids in everything imaginable and neglecting the most important things), then we can be confident. Maybe this methodology thing is more about us being confident and less about our kids being parented well. We can be so focused on finding the right parenting “method” or “educational philosophy” that we miss the most important part of parenting.

In the next post, we will consider a child-centered approach alongside gospel-centered parenting.

The Fundamental Mistake of Questioning God

We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop into church from time to time to see what is going on with God. We indulge in an occasional sunset of symphony to cultivate a feeling of reverence for God.

But that is not the reality of our lives with God. Long before we ever got around to asking questions about God, God had been questioning us. Long before we got interested in the subject of God, God subjected us to the most intensive and searching knowledge. Before it ever crossed our minds that God might be important, God singled us out as important. Before we were formed in the womb, God knew us. We are known before we know.

This realization has a practical result: no longer do we run here and there panicked and anxious, searching for the answers to life. Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops…We enter a world we didn’t create. We grow into a life already provided for us…If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God…

My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God.

I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.

~ Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses

What 40 Years of Marriage Can Do for Kids

We piled into the small suv with my brother, Luke, and sister-in-law, Miranda. The “in-law” part feels artificial when you really are family. We pointed the car east, to Aggieland, for a rendezvous with my other brother and sister-in-law, Ben and Megan, and my parents. The Saturday afternoon laid open before us, like an unfurling map, winding our way through conversation, high and low, blind to our surroundings. A few conversational lulls afforded my the opportunity to rehearse my speech. I really wanted these words to count, to land in the heart.

We all converged, from the east and the west, at Madden’s casual gourmet. Open wooden rafters, well-worn wood plank floors, and twenty foot ceilings. Ben, Megan, Mom, and Dad were already there, at the table, waiting for us. After a barrage of hugs and smiles we all sat down to celebrate my parent’s 40th wedding anniversary. Conversation zipped along the runway and we were off, traveling the airways of children, parenting, theology, church, and marriage.

We paused in the gaiety to reflect on the grace flowing from my parents’ four decade commitment. Parental marriages carry incalculable influence. I knew it was photoimpossible to estimate the impact of their mutual, spilling over love, but I had to get some of it out. Growing up, you have no idea how much your parent’s relationship affects you. You take it for granted. Occasionally you will compare or contrast it to others, but very often it is simply the water you swim in. You take in the good and the bad and just keep swimming. Upon reflection, I knew there were things I needed to surface with them.

First, thank you for your fidelity and friendship for forty years. We have watched your marital love and commitment strengthen, through thick and thin, and we have benefited. I have carried the example right into my own marriage. My wife is my best friend. My parents love life. They enjoy European culture, love struggling souls through deep brokenness, and give from a place of generous, mutual love. This love has been tested. We watched them fight as we grew. It wasn’t a plastic marriage with flaws hidden, it was real, deep, and always moving towards the Redeemer. Many people can’t look to their parents as an example of fidelity and friendship, but I can, and I am grateful.

Second, thank you for loving the church as a family when the church was hard to love. Growing up we had some weird and good church experiences, but one thing that is fixed in my memory is that church went beyond the walls, walked beyond the Sunday service, and ate leisurely together. Looking back, I realize that I have a foundation for church as a family from my parents pursuit of people outside of programs, events, groups, and services. They loved their friends. We would drive out into the country and enjoy home-cooking, run the rural fields, go fishing, all on a Sunday afternoon, with the church, with people who were utterly changed by Jesus. My parents could have understandably turned their backs on “the church”; they were hurt, snubbed, misunderstood, but deep down they knew that is all part of being an imperfect family, and that the galvanizing element isn’t mutual love but a singular love, the outpouring of the life and grace of Christ.

Third, thank you for praying this for each of your children for years and years: 

I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. (3 John 4)

Man, did I test that prayer request. We all did in our own ways–struggles with greed, skepticism, and sex. The deceitful siren call wooed us more than once, and I walked pretty far from the truth, from enjoying the love and grace of my Savior more than any other love or grace in this world. But they prayed me through. My parents plead with God that their son would leave the pig sty and come home, and they were there, every single time, running to meet me in the street, arms wide open. I dirtied their clothes in my embrace, and they didn’t even care. They were just happy their lost son had come home, that God the Father had answered their prayer, their son, now a very imperfect but committed disciple, is walking the truth, the truth of the gospel of God’s marvelous grace.

Thank you Mom and Dad, for praying us all into the truth, into Christ. We love you. We carry an intuitive inheritance of marital friendship, fidelity, and more than I realized, a model for loving the church as a family. There are more riches here than we will ever know. We stand on a heap of refined gold, may we follow your generous gift, may each of our children walk in the truth, may the graces cascade even more, from the Father, Son, and Spirit, through our marriages, onto our children, through the church, and out into the world.