Psalm 81:11-13:

"But my people did not listen to my voice;
   Israel would not submit to me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
   to follow their own counsels.
Oh, that my people would listen to me,
   that Israel would walk in my ways!”

In this passage, Asaph illustrates an important principle which runs throughout all of scripture. And, it’s one I’ve written on before.

There are times when a believer succumbs to destructive habits in his or her life and rides them out for a time. The severity varies, but most of the time the root is the same. God, at times, gives a believer up to his or her own sinful inclinations as a means of discipline. Discipline is good. Something like a parent allowing a child to get burned so they learn that it hurts.

While at times indulging our flesh feels rewarding, the underlying fact is that it is destructive and bad for us. When a believer enters a time like this, it isn’t long before they realize that they are suffering and return stronger than before.

This is why, I believe, a consistently good relationship with God won’t always look like obvious sanctification. Rather, sanctification will sometimes actually include times of serious struggle or even repetitive failure. For the believer, I believe, this is part of the sanctifying process we have to go through.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we go out in search of ways to gratify our flesh. No, we continue to seek God and seek to be like him. But when, we face times like these, we should feel encouraged. God is patient, molding and teaching us to be more like him, employing even the unexpected things we do and experience in order to meet his intentions for us.

As I have been in a season of self-examination and reconsideration, I found this quotation from the puritan author Thomas Watson (among my favorites) to be very encouraging.

“Make up your spiritual accounts daily; see how matters stand between God and your souls (Psalm 77:6). Often reckonings keep God and conscience friends. Do with your hearts as you do with you watches, wind them up every morning by prayer and at night examine whether your hearts have gone true all that  day, whether the wheels of your affections have moved swiftly toward heaven.”

Watson is encouraging us (me) to make self-examination not something that we do in seasons of change and reflection, but something we do as a regular part of our day. Much like reading scripture and prayer should be a regular discipline that we don’t grow out of, so should self-examination be something that is a disciplined part of our daily lives.

For me, this is something that I realize has always been clearly missing from my regular prayer times. Not that self-examination is something missing from my life altogether. In fact, I feel in general, I’m fairly good at it. Rather, it’s missing from my discourse with the Father.

When I pray, I pray for myself, for friends, family, social issues and anything else that may graze my mind at the time. But a conversational examination of self with God isn’t something that I habitually work into my prayer times.

I would like to see this change. And I hope that when I do, I will see me change as well.

A friend on Facebook posted this article by Cathy Young on Salon.com. The article does a good job in presenting the arguments for and against men’s rights in the case of abortion. In fact, she does it much better than I probably could. So I won’t be expanding on much. But I did have some thoughts I wanted to share.

If you read this blog on the regular, you know that I am, without a doubt, a pro-life advocate. I’m a pro-lifer less on spiritual grounds and more on scientific ones. It doesn’t take long for the fetus inside of a woman to be a real, living person. Albeit, not one that can live on it’s own yet, but then again, neither is a one year old—yet, we wouldn’t terminate those when they become a logistical problem. At least not without major legal recourse.

A big deciding factor in the argument about women’s right to an abortion is that she should be free to terminate the pregnancy if she’s not ready to be a mother (financially, mentally, or otherwise). Of course, that’s not the only reason women have abortions, but I’m betting it’s the most prominent.

As a pro-lifer, I strongly believe men and women should take responsibility for their choices. If someone makes a bad financial decision and loses everything, the government doesn’t bale them out. It’s understood that sex makes children. In fact, from a totally biological standpoint, that’s really all it does. Sure, we enjoy it, but that’s kind of a nice side effect. So, in the question of whether or not abortion should be legal, I say ‘no’, siding with the government defending the child’s right to live (as it does for all the rest of its citizens), and enforcing responsibility for actions affecting other citizens (like it might in a small claims court between a local business and a scorned customer).

But that’s not really the current legal atmosphere. While I don’t agree with it, I agree even less with the illogical imbalance that exists instead.

Women are free to abort unwanted children for pretty much any reason. The most common probably being that raising a child simply isn’t viable—or simply inconvenient. After making a choice to engage sexually with another person, a woman can later decide against the lasting consequences. And the law defends that right. Men, other the hand have no such ability.

Men who choose to engage in sex have to make the choice prior to intercourse whether or not they’re ready for a child. Whether they like it or not, they may be forced to live with the consequences of their decision (financially at least).

Granted, men don’t have to carry a child to term, they may have to surrender huge portions of their income for the next 21 years. Men working in a steam-fitting factory, for example, could probably argue that the extra work necessary to make a living is just as straining as the nine difficult months of carrying a child.

What I find the most compelling about this is that, even though it doesn’t really make that much sense, the different parties know that changing the legislation could very well be the slippery slope that leads to abortions being outlawed. If men are required to take responsibility for their decisions, why then are women not?

Cathy Young puts it this way:

“…while paternal desertion is often cited as evidence of male irresponsibility and selfishness, more than a million American women every year walk away from the burdens of motherhood.”

While I strongly disagree with the legislation that allows for millions of babies to be terminated, it adds insult to injury that the legislation doesn’t even pass its own test for logic and reason.

I’m sure you’ve read the verses in the book of James that talk about the tongue. It is a “restless evil”, says James. He compares the tongue to many things. A tiny ‘spark’ that sets a forest on fire. A small ‘rudder’ that steers a whole ship. A ‘bridal’ in a horses mouth that can be used to guide it around.

James argues that the tongue, although it is small, is the source a great deal of trouble for man.

Every teaching I’ve ever heard on this verse gives a good deal of personal application. Congregations are to control their tongue and this is an excellent argument for that.

But I’m not sure that the congregation is really who James had in mind when he wrote this bit about the tongue.

Possibly for the first time, I noticed that another frequently quoted verse is actually a tiny piece of context that puts a whole new spin on James’ message about the tongue. The very first verses in fact. James 3:1-2:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.

Why does James go directly from a word on teaching and teachers and the fact that every teacher make’s mistakes in his teaching into a discussion of bridling the tongue? I think it’s because the ‘body’ he talks about throughout the rest of the chapter is not one individual body who is guided by his own tongue, but the whole body of believers who is guided by the tongue of their teacher.

Not many should aspire to be teachers because all teachers make mistakes, and with many, many teachers comes many misconceptions and the church ends up ‘set on fire’.

Of course, I don’t think this is the only viable interpretation of this verse, but I think it makes perfect contextual sense. And perhaps it’s a concept churches who turn teaching authority over to small group ministries should consider.

This is a topic I would very much like to write about in length. Unfortunately, I haven’t collected all my thoughts about it in a concise enough manner yet. So, I’ll just spend a few minutes introducing my hatred of children’s television.

A few years back, I worked for an organization who made it their responsibility to monitor and review television content. When I arrived on the scene, my first responsibility was a children’s programming study. It mostly focused on programming that aired on networks geared for Children (i.e., Cartoon Network, Disney, Nickelodeon, etc). It also focused on Saturday morning, and after school programming on network television.

The official results of the study were unsettling. The violence content was staggering. The sexual innuendo was, not only present, but prevalent on networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Even foul language made it’s way in quite a bit. Spongebob Square Pants had an entire episode devoted to learning to “talk like a sailor”, in which they bleeped to F word somewhere around 40 times, if I remember correctly.

But, to tell you the truth, it isn’t the overt content that bothers me the most. It’s the subtle luring from “harmless” children’s programming into adult themed programming. If you’d like an example of what I mean–consider Brittany Spears, Justin Timberlake and soon, Miley Cirus. These are sex icons, and soon my nine year old niece’s role model will be one too.

What makes this so much worse, is that a parent can easily overlook the dangers in allowing their children to watch more than small doses of television, because in much of the content there isn’t anything obviously dangerous. The child may not immediately exhibit obvious signs of the television’s negative influence. So, parents may go on assuming that their kids aren’t being affected as predicted. However, it’s not the immediate affects that are dangerous, it’s the long term effects.

For example, seeing a cartoon character catch on fire for laughs likely won’t lead to the child lighting someone on fire. However, after three years of becoming attached the Drake & Josh on Nickelodeon, Josh’s sexual promiscuity–and eventual appearance on People Magazine’s monthly cover–will probably ring much louder in their memory than mom’s warning against premarital sex. Unfortunately by that time, it’s too late.

Here are a few statistics concerning children and sexual activity I’ve found as I’ve been doing my research. This came from a study at the University of Michigan.

• Most parents don’t talk to their kids about sex and relationships, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Most schools do not offer complete sex education programs. So kids get much of their information about sex from TV.
• Kids are probably not learning what their parents would like them to learn about sex from TV.
• Sexual content is a real presence on TV.  Soap operas, music videos, prime time shows and advertisements all contain lots of sexual content, but usually nothing about contraception or safer sex.
• The number of sex scenes on TV has nearly doubled since 1998, with 70% of the top 20 most-watched shows by teens including sexual content.  Fifteen percent of scenes with sexual intercourse depict characters that have just met having sex.  Of the shows with sexual content, an average of five scenes per hour involve sex.
• Watching sex on TV increases the chances a teen will have sex, and may cause teens to start having sex at younger ages.  Even viewing shows with characters talking about sex increases the risk of sexual initiation

I’m going to write more about this in the future and something parents have every reason to be concerned about.

There are a lot of Inauguration related blogs today. Makes sense of course. And, Al Mohler posted a long prayer for Obama on his blog today. I haven’t read it yet–but then again, I haven’t read anything from Mohler that I didn’t like. I’m pretty confident he’ll have said what I wanted to say, just better.

So, I thought that since other minds, more gifted than my own have already spoken, I will keep it short and simple tonight.

During my weekly prayer for President Obama, there are three basic things I always try to touch on. Here they are

1. That God would give him (and us) grace, and so change his heart, and/or,

2. That God would convict sin, and press into him his need for a savior, or else,

3. Should God choose not to answer the previous prayers, that he would by supernatural means, stay President Obama’s hand from signin the Freedom of Choice Act into law.

As I’ve developed a prayer method within my prayers for him over the past weeks, these have seemed to emerge as the most prominent themes. And, as I reflect on them, I feel they are fairly consice.

If you have not yet begun to pray for our new president, please begin tonight. If you need somewhere to start, try my guidlines to help you begin to develop your own.

My friend Ric sent me an email pointing me to this video. It’s every bit as brilliant as he said it was. While I suspect that I have some pretty deep running disagreements with the organization that put it together, it is really poignant, nonetheless. I hope I’m not stealing valuable blog-fodder from you, Ric.

It helps to read their brief intro to the video to get the point they’re making.

“Have you ever tried really hard to make a point and when people say they get it, you are just not sure they do? Sometimes it takes us seeing our world through new eyes–something that it is hard to do as believers. Sometimes a little bit of juxtaposition does the trick.

We made this video because we sometimes struggle in helping churches to truly understand the disconnection between how we do things and the people we’re trying to reach. Our thought was to showcase the visitor experience in a completely different context and in doing so, we might help churches realize how they might actually comes across to the world we are called to reach.

Sometimes it takes seeing something in a different light to really get it. With this thought, my team and I made a little video called “What if Starbucks Marketed Like the Church? A Parable.”

Again, I’m not in total agreement here, but the video should make you think. If nothing else, it’s certainly is good for a laugh.