Today’s guest blog comes from my good friend Mark Tubbs. Mark has taken upon himself much of the day-to-day work associated with Discerning Reader and for that I am deeply indebeted to him. Today he writes about marriage and parenting.

*****

Back in May, my wife and I attended an incredibly challenging and inspiring Paul David Tripp conference on marriage, entitled What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage (there is a excellent Crossway book of the same name). I learned so much about parenting.

Did I say parenting? Yes; I took away manifold parenting insights from this marriage conference. That’s not to say that I didn’t imbibe any marriage insights; I certainly did. I was chastened up and down regarding all the ways I superimpose my failings onto my wife. I was humbled to learn that the secret to our long and successful marriage is that we share a deep and abiding love for me (HT Jess MacCallum for that phrase).

It’s no secret that the Bible speaks to parenting, but it may be a surprise to you just how often it does so indirectly. At his conference, Tripp stated, “The Bible isn’t arranged by topic. If you go only to the “marriage” passages, you miss most of what the Bible says about marriage.” In his book, he elaborates in a section entitled “Using the Bible Biblically”:

Part of the problem is the way we use Scripture. We mistakenly treat the Bible as if it is arranged by topic – you know, the world’s best compendium of human problems and divine solutions. So when we’re thinking about marriage, we run to all the marriage passages. But the Bible isn’t an encyclopedia; it is a story, the great origin-to-destiny story of redemption. In fact, it is more than a story. It is a theologically annotated story. It is a story with God’s notes. This means that we cannot understand what the Bible has to say about marriage by looking at only the marriage passages, because there is a vast amount of biblical information about marriage not found in the marriage passages.

In fact, we could argue that to the degree that every portion of the Bible tells us things about God, about ourselves, about life in this present world, and about the nature of the human struggle and the divine solution, to that degree every passage in the Bible is a marriage passage. Every passage imparts to us insight that is vital for a proper understanding of the passages that directly address marriage, and every passage tells us what we should expect as we deal with the comprehensive relationship of marriage.

Ditto with parenting. Perhaps more so with parenting, since each addition of another person to your family multiples the number of social interactions occurring within the family grouping. Tensions, conflicts, and differences are therefore more prevalent than if it were just the two of you coasting blissfully (as if) through married life. If you are anything like my wife and I, you often feel that Sin Personified is having a heyday within your God-given family unit. Where’s the grace?

Grace in all its beauty is found where sin is displayed in all its ugliness, when – and only when – the gospel is being momentarily and actively applied to parenting and the Bible is being used biblically. To lift yet another example from Tripp: if my children wake in the wee hours, start to fight, and I respond by stomping down the hall toward their bedroom with the mantra “inconvenience, inconvenience, inconvenience” running through my head, I am reacting sinfully to their sin. Of course, it’s a fact of life that sinners tend to respond sinfully to being sinned against. “But,” as the Apostle John reminds us in his first epistle, “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1) That doesn’t only go for the one who is sinning, but for the one faced with addressing the sin. As C.J. Mahaney often says, there is never a moment in which I don’t need a Mediator. Later John goes on to say, “whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (I John 2:5). As I am traversing the corridor in the wee hours, abiding in the grace of God means my heart is softening toward my children with every step and I am choosing to view the situation as an “opportunity, opportunity, opportunity” to extend the grace of God through kindness and correction. For ultimately even the corridors and bedrooms of my own house are not my own – they are part of the kingdom of God. And in that kingdom, grace flows in all directions at all times.

To the degree that you use the Bible biblically in your parenting, the grace of the gospel of Christ will be evident to your children, operating as a “trysting place,” in Martin Luther’s words, of personal encounter between your children and your God.

*****

Mark Tubbs moonlights as a book reviewer for DiscerningReader.com and is a worship leader, care group leader, and occasional preacher at White Rock Baptist Church, near Vancouver, British Columbia. Otherwise he can be found doing his day job as a Bible college registrar. He lives with his wife Cheri and three children – Kenny, Lydia and Leo – with one more on the way, and is currently pursuing an M.Div.

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This week’s Free Stuff Fridays is sponsored by a publisher that kind of feels like an old friend (and not just because the guy who heads it up here in North America is both old and a friend). I’m speaking of Banner of Truth. Banner has a long and faithful history of providing great books to God’s people. They were Reformed long before it was cool to be Young, Restless or Reformed.

This week they are giving away five prize packages, each of which contains the following three books:

• My God Is True: Lessons Learned Along Cancer’s Dark Road by Paul Wolfe
• All Things for Good, a Puritan Paperback by Thomas Watson
• Living Faith, a Pocket Puritan by Samuel Ward

My God Is True is a book about which I’ve heard lots of good things. It is a book that deals with one Christian’s fight against cancer. Nearly everyone knows someone who has had cancer. “But do we know well the Bible’s teaching that will strengthen us in the face of it? Everyone undergoes testing and trials. But do we do so trusting firmly in the goodness, wisdom and power of God? Here is a book that will help. My God Is True! is one man’s chronicle of cancer and the lessons he learned through it. In these pages Paul Wolfe tells his story of diagnosis, treatment and survival, and he points to the glory and grace of God along the way. Above all he points to the faithfulness of God, whose promises will certainly prove true. Read this story and be reminded that there is good reason – even in the midst of suffering – to worship and rejoice.”

It comes highly praised by Alistair Begg and Sinclair Ferguson. I’ll leave you to explore the other two books, both written by Puritans.

Giveaway Rules: You may only enter the draw once. Simply fill out your name and email address to enter the draw. As soon as the winners have been chosen, all names and addresses will be immediately and permanently erased. Winners will be notified by email. The giveaway closes Saturday at noon.

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What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly saying, hooray for our side
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
- From “For What It’s Worth” by Stephen Stills

Every so often I’ve contemplated what a Saturday Night Live type of variety program might look like if the topic was “Christendom.” There’s definitely enough material. One of the recurring skits would involve some Christians from the 1400’s about to be burned at the stake. They would be visited by contemporary Christians who would thank them for their sacrifice and tell them how such a great sacrifice gained later Christians ________. You could fill in the blank with all sorts of things. “Your sacrifice has helped give us a world in which our children can learn theology from talking vegetables. Your suffering will all seem worth it when a handsome Texan with a great smile can renovate a sports stadium and broadcast feel-good, gospel-free theology to all the world. Thank you for your noble sacrifice, brother.” Tyndale might have been willing to face the stake for the sake of the Bible, but would he have faced it for a Bible-zine for girls that looks and reads like Cosmo?

I’m a writer, not a comedian, so perhaps it’s not that funny. But the point is that real people died real deaths to pass to us a heritage of the gospel. They were serious, dead serious, and weren’t in the business of printing silly bumper stickers. We evangelicals have long done a remarkable job of trivializing that heritage. Maybe this is what happens when the danger of persecution passes and we enjoy a time of safety, a time of freedom. Or maybe this is what happens when we lose sight of the seriousness of the gospel and the countless sacrifices that made it available to us, when we begin to replace theology with something else, something less.

A friend of mine became the Senior Pastor of his church in 2003, when everyone and their grandmother was writing and talking about how to make church relevant and more attractive to postmoderns. My friend had read Rick Warren and Bill Hybels but found them unsatisfying. Then in the spring of 2004 he had the opportunity to attend a 9Marks conference. He had not heard of Mark Dever and knew nothing of 9Marks but it was close to home and it seemed to him like such an event might be helpful to his ministry. It ended up being far more than that. It was life-changing.

The 9Marks conference, as it has done with so many other pastors, drew him back to the heart of what the Bible says about church, ministry and the gospel. And as a new Senior Pastor (with 23 years already behind him as an associate in the same church), it gave him a clear and renewed sense of direction for the conduct of his ministry. It pulled him out of anything-works-pragmatism and steered him toward a gospel-centered, gospel-focused, gospel-infused ministry.

Through 9Marks he was introduced to the world of what has now come to be known as the Young, Restless and Reformed (or the New Calvinism depending on who you ask). He had been a Calvinist for most of his ministry, but he had found most Calvinists he met tended toward the grumpy, the provincial. This new movement joined people like him to a Presbyterian crowd and even a Charismatic crowd. It built something that was unique, at least in our day and something that was really and objectively delightful—a people united around theology, not methodology. The church rediscovered theology that in so many circles had long since lay dormant.

His story is not at all unusual; it’s representative, perhaps, of the stories of thousands of other pastors who have revolutionized their understanding of the church, of its function and message and importance. And for every older pastor who has joyfully adapted his ministry, many more young pastors have grown into just this kind of ministry through mentors or through seminaries. All indications are that the movement continues to grow, to gain strength, to gain a prominent voice in the church even if not far beyond. And I am genuinely thrilled to see theology supplanting pragmatism at the center of the church.

So maybe this is a good time to ask, what’s next? Will we remain faithful to the gospel and look for more ways to be faithful to it? Or will we get, well, goofy?

Back to the martyr’s skit. What will we bring these guys? What will we have to show Huss and Tyndale and Cranmer and so many others like them? No doubt there will be good things to bring to the places of their sacrifice—evidence that the gospel they worked for and in some cases died for was alive and well and being passed on to another generation. Much of the theology they mined from the Bible is alive today in the Young, Restless and Reformed. But I fear that along with the good, and maybe eventually overwhelming much of the good, we’d bring our clutter, our junk, our nonsense, our bobble-heads. And there is an increasingly large pile of it waiting to be sorted through.

A friend recently told me “Slap the word Reformed on anything and I’ll buy it.” He was joking, thankfully, but he makes a point. We baptize products, people, musical styles, ministries, stores with the word Reformed to initiate them into our camp, to say that they are now part of the in-crowd. Slap the label Reformed on it and we suddenly do develop a new interest in it.

We have our Reformed celebrities. When John MacArthur speaks there is an immediate dissection of his words to see if he is tacitly critiquing someone or something. Mark Dever calls paedobaptism a sin and the headlines blare. When John Piper sneezes, the blogosphere is abuzz. Taken in isolation these may not mean very much at all. Taken together they start to sound like a Reformed edition of People magazine. Are we about the gospel here? Or are we about the people, the leaders, the voices? Want to hear some gossip about why a famous pastor took a sabbatical? Check the back pages of Reformed People.

I’ve got nothing against Edwards t-shirts or Luther bobble-heads or Calvin rally towels. Put it all together, though, throw it all into a box or lay it all out in a bookstore table, and it starts to come into focus. We’re always in danger of becoming a parody of ourselves, a deformed version of the very movements we have come out of. We could so easily become as much about the stuff as the theology, as much about the swag as the doctrine. If it happened to them it could happen to us, right?

I love the word Reformed; it has a long and noble heritage. And yet somehow it seems that Reformed has transitioned from a kind of theological short-hand, a useful way of describing a lot of theology in just one word, and has instead become an identity, a flag which I run up a flagpole as a means of self-identification. Reformed used to be a terse and convenient short-hand to express “I believe in the doctrines of grace, I believe in God’s total sovereignty, I adhere to certain creeds and confessions, and so on.” In one word we could summarize an entire theological position. Today, though, I fear that it is associated far more with names and personalities than theology. Reformed means “I listen to this pastor, I read these books, I go to these conferences.” But my theology may be vastly different from the Reformed guy beside me. It is an identity, not a theology, a connection to a group, not a belief. It’s a pass card, credentials allowing admittance into a community, an experience. And as such it generates swag, it generates junk, it generates all of that stuff like talking vegetables, Bible superheroes and Bible-zines.

We will need to work hard to prevent Reformed from becoming a mere fad. Fads come and fads go and usually they go on for just a bit too long. By the time they disappear we are glad to see them go since they’ve long since outlived their usefulness or their enjoyment. Rickrolling was funny for three days but lasted for six months; WWJD made a few people think over the course of a few weeks but stuck around for years. But both were fads and both eventually died an inevitable death. No one shed a tear for either one. We need to be all about the gospel lest we become yet another passing fad, a puff of smoke in the wind.

Up the street a little way sits a small Baptist Church that must subscribe to a newsletter for the world’s worst church sign slogans—things like like “Become an Organ Donor—Give Your Heart to Jesus.” Quality stuff. I drive by there often and, while fighting to keep my car from running it down “by accident,” I wonder if anyone takes them seriously. How could they? It’s a sharp display of the way the Gospel can be trivialized. “Prayer—Wireless Access to God with No Roaming Fee.”

I know that kind of nonsense has been going on for decades. But are we next? Could this Reformed movement become a parody of itself? I hope and pray that it’s not but I can’t deny that it’s beginning to show some hints that it could become that way. Sure it’s fun and inspiring even, but am I the only one who is starting to feel that if we aren’t careful we will just become “a thousand people in the street, singing songs and carrying signs, mostly saying, Hooray for our side.” I think it’s time that we paused to consider whether we’re all about the gospel, all about what the Bible commands us to believe, or if we’re increasingly becoming about who we are. The difference between the two is immeasurable.

It certainly wouldn’t hurt us to stop, hey, what’s that sound, and everybody look what’s going down.

*****

Thanks to my friend Peter Bogert for help with writing this one…

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Have you ever considered what it must have been like for Adam and Eve to walk and talk with God in the Garden of Eden? Have you thought of the things you might say to God if you were to hear his footsteps today? What Christian hasn’t experienced a pang of jealousy when he reads “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” And what Christian hasn’t experienced a little pang of remorse when he reads how Adam and Eve squandered that unique privilege. There was God, walking in the garden as he had done before. Adam and Eve recognized the sound of his footsteps, for they knew their God. But this time, instead of rushing to him and rejoicing in his presence, they fled and they hid themselves. They had sinned and they knew that there were consequences for such tyranny. For the first time they feared their Maker.

Ever since this fall into sin, the history of God’s people has been a history of mediation. Mediation is a concept we encounter quite often today. We hear of sports contracts being settled by mediation; we hear of lawyers becoming involved in mediation between divorcing couples; we hear of strikes being settled by a mediator who stands between the workers and the corporation and handles communications between them. These ideas all hint at mediation as we understand it from the Bible. In rejecting God’s goodness and benevolence and in putting himself in place of God, Adam erected a barrier between himself and God. The close communion that had once existed was ruptured and destroyed. No longer would God come walking to them in the cool of the day; no longer would he allow them to stay in his Garden. He forced them out and barred the way so they could not return. The very next passage of Scripture relates humanity’s first murder. History had taken a drastic, horrifying turn for the worse. The direct lines of communication were shattered.

From that time, God no longer allowed people to commune with him in the same way. From that point on, man could no longer approach God as they had in the Garden. They had to approach God through a mediator. When we think of mediators we may think first of Moses, a man to whom God revealed himself and a man whose task it was to then make the will of God known to the Israelites. After Moses was Joshua, and after Joshua were judges and prophets. There were priests to stand between God and man, offering to God sacrifices on behalf of the people and bestowing God’s blessings and curses on his behalf. Always there were mediators, always there were people standing between God and man. Always people must have realized their inability to approach God as they were. Always they must have wondered, “how can we approach God directly?”

There are some words whose meaning we understand without difficulty and some that seem to require a little more work. When we think of the word immature we understand that the prefix -im is equivalent to -un or not. A person who is immature is a person who is not mature—he displays a lack of maturity. But a similar word, immediate does not often strike us in the same way. If we break off the prefix it begins to make sense. Im-mediate harkens back to an older and perhaps less common understanding of that word. The American Heritage Dictionary defines immediate as “acting or occurring without the interposition of another agency or object; direct.” Immediate indicates access that does not require mediation. It is immediate access to God that we so wish to have, but that we cannot have.

Since man’s fall into sin, we have longed to be able to approach God directly. And well we should, for God made us to enjoy this unbroken communion with him. We were made in the image of God and were made to know God. We long to enjoy an unmediated relationship. But even today, even in this New Testament era, we still rely on mediated revelation. God has been gracious in giving us his Word and his Spirit to communicate truth to us. But even this is mediated truth, truth mediated through the Spirit.

God sent a better mediator in Jesus Christ—a mediator that was better than Moses and better than the priesthood, judges and prophets. 1 Timothy 2:5 says, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the mediator of a new and better covenant.

Jonathan Edwards says this about this great mediator:

The redeemed are dependent on God for all. All that we have—wisdom, the pardon of sin, deliverance, acceptance in God’s favor, grace, holiness, true comfort and happiness, eternal life and glory—we have from God by a Mediator; and this Mediator is God. God not only gives us the Mediator, and accepts His mediation, and of His power and grace bestows the things purchased by the Mediator, but He is the Mediator. Our blessings are what we have by purchase; and the purchase is made of God; the blessings are purchased of Him; and not only so, but God is the purchaser. Yes, God is both the purchaser and the price; for Christ, who is God, purchased these blessings by offering Himself as the price of our salvation.

We rejoice that God has accepted the mediation of his Son. We rejoice that we can approach the throne of God. But still we realize that there is a mediator. To speak to the Father, we speak through the Son. To hear from the Father, we rely on the Spirit. Still we need someone to stand between. Still we long for the im-mediate. We long to see God as he is. We long to approach him directly. We long to have the relationship fully and finally restored. We look in that dim mirror, always wishing we might see face-to-face.

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This week, while reading Richard Sibbes’ The Bruised Reed, I came across a quote I wanted to share with you. Here Sibbes offers a sharp warning against anyone who would resist Christ’s mercy. There are not too many people today who will preach what he teaches here.

There are those who take it on themselves to cast water on those sparks which Christ labors to kindle in them, because they will not be troubled with the light of them. Such must know that the Lamb can be angry, and that they who will not come under his scepter of mercy shall be crushed in pieces by his scepter of power (Psa. 2:9). Though he will graciously tend and maintain the least spark of true grace, yet where he finds not the spark of grace but opposition to his Spirit striving with them, his wrath, once kindled, shall burn to hell. There is no more just provocation than when kindness is churlishly refused.

When God would have cured Babylon, and she would not be cured, then she was given up to destruction (Jer. 51:9). When Jerusalem would not be gathered under the wing of Christ, then their habitation is left desolate (Matt. 23:37,38). When wisdom stretches out her hand and men refuse, then wisdom will laugh at men’s destruction (Prow. 1:26). Salvation itself will not save those that spill the medicine and cast away the plaster. It is a pitiful case, when this merciful Saviour shall delight in destruction; when he that made men shall have no mercy on them (Isa. 27:11).

Oh, say the rebels of the time, God has not made us to damn us. Yes, if you will not meet Christ in the ways of his mercy, it is fitting that you should ‘eat of the fruit of your own way, and be filled with your own devices’ (Prow. 1:31). This will be the hell of hell, when men shall think that they have loved their sins more than their souls; when they shall think what love and mercy has been enforced upon them, and yet they would perish. The more accessory we are in pulling a judgment upon ourselves, the more the conscience will be confounded in itself. Then they shall acknowledge Christ to be without any blame, themselves without any excuse.

If men appeal to their own consciences, they will tell them that the Holy Spirit has often knocked at their hearts, as willing to have kindled some holy desires in them. How else can they be said to resist the Holy Ghost, but that the Spirit was readier to draw them to a further degree of goodness than was consistent with their own wills? Therefore those in the church that are damned are self condemned before. So that here we need not rise to higher causes, when men carry sufficient cause in their own bosoms.

Harsh words? Yes, they are. But necessarily so.

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