Parenting Tip: Now or Later

It’s Friday evening, and you’re coming home from work looking forward to a fun time with the family. As you come through the door you hear your five-year old speaking in a disrespectful tone to your wife. Body language, tone, content, it’s all wrong. So what do you do?

1. Excuse it. “It’s just a phase he’s going through. He’ll grow out of it.”
2. Hope your wife will deal with it. “I’ve had a long day, I deserve a little rest.”
3. Ignore it. “Want a fun evening. It’ll be hard to do that if I discipline him.”
4. Blow your top and shout at him. “If I can terrify him with my anger, it will teach him not to talk that way. I’ll shout at him and put a good scare into him.”
5. Threaten/Promise, but don’t act on it. “If I hear that again, I’m going to paddle your bottom.”
6. Deal with it biblically. “Hey, buddy! I just heard what you said to mommy, and it was downright disrespectful! What do you think Jesus would say about that? I think we need to go to your room and have a little talk.”

One of the keys to a family that honors Christ is biblical discipline that begins very early in the life of your child. It involves teaching, reproof, correction, and training. Your children need to be taught what God says—by YOU—right out of the Bible, and your teaching needs to be backed up with properly applied parental discipline. The model of discipline the Scripture most frequently provides is spanking: “The rod and reproof give wisdom, But a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother” (Proverbs 29:15). If you doubt this, look up the occurrences of “rod” in Proverbs—most of the time it is speaking of a properly administered spanking.

Biblical discipline is hard to do, it is time-consuming, it’s often heart-breaking for us as parents, it’s not fun, and it often brings as great a conviction of sin on the parent as it does the child. As I discipline my child for how he/she spoke to my spouse, I am convicted of my own sinful speech as well.

But if you spend the sweat equity to teach them now, you will honor Christ, and you’ll enjoy the fruit of an obedient, peaceful household as they grow older: “Correct your son, and he will give you comfort; He will also delight your soul” (Proverbs 29:17) .

Your efforts to “preserve peace” in the short-term by neglecting discipline, however, will yield long-term heartache and grief. “A foolish son is a grief to his father, And bitterness to her who bore him” (Proverbs 17:25). Putting off discipline is a bad bargain: discipline your children now, while there is hope of correction!

Book review: Warrior Soul

Warrior Soul is the memoir of Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer, a true account of his training, experiences and exploits. I read it as research for my own novel, Falcon Strike. It’s always difficult to review a book whose content concerns a matter the reviewer has never personally experienced. I believe the book is authentic and honest, but only another SEAL is really qualified to make such judgments.

I grew to like the author as I got to know him through his own words. Pfarrer is a man with clay feet, but refreshingly he does not seem inclined to hide it. His indiscretions and mistakes get the same treatment as do his acts of valor, probably because after all he’s been through and accomplished he simply does not care about my judgment, or yours.

The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with his training at BUD/S and beyond, and then eases into actual operations. The second deals with his deployment with SEAL Team Four to Beirut and the massive truck bomb that killed 220 men of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in 1983. Bitterness and anger seep through every page of this portion, and it infects the reader as well. Perhaps it had been better for America if that truck bomb had taken out 220 of our politicians or top brass instead of the marines [my observation, not his]. Idiotic rules of engagement and a military command structure that had apparently learned little since the days of the Ardennes consumed men in place rather than preserving their operational value by rotating them off the line periodically. Our recent attempts at nation-building make it apparent that the political leadership (both liberal and conservative) aren’t able to tell a SEAL platoon from the Peace Corps.

That anger spills into part 3 as Pfarrer recounts the change in leadership of SEAL Team Four, and his difficulty returning from Beirut. Pfarrer applies for and receives a coveted spot on the secretive SEAL Team Six’s training team, the “Green Team,” and passes the brutal training regime, ultimately winning the command of a platoon in the black ops group.

One of the things I take away from this book is the almost super-human edge to which the SEALs are trained. That training regime, their strict performance standards, their meticulous planning, and the indomitable will of the individual operators is what accounts for the amazing record of success enjoyed by these elite units.

The quality of Pfarrer’s writing is outstanding. At no point in the book was I bored. And he’s not some soulless shooter; he’s a deep, honest, and at times profound thinker. His literary craft is excellent. For example, Pfarrer opens the book with an account that he does not complete until the end of the book, creating a bookend structure that is delightful. It’s a neat literary arrangement. A warning is in order, however: there’s a great deal of bad language in the book.

Warrior Soul is a great book, a large picture window into a world most of us can not even imagine. On the one hand I am thankful for the men who are willing to sacrifice so much to keep the bad guys at bay. On the other, it makes me disgusted with the political figures and the political generals and admirals who misuse our armed forces and task them with rules of engagement in operations better given to the Boy Scouts than the SEALs.

Psalms studies snippet

One of the members of my church emailed me with a question, "Do you know how old David was when he wrote Psalm 23?"

Here is my answer, which might provide a few useful snippets of information to you as you read the psalms:

No. One of the more speculative parts of Psalm studies is attempting to discover what theologians call the sitz-im-leben, a term that means "situation in life."  These speculations have led to all sorts of fanciful ideas not anchored in Scripture. Occasionally we will get some help from the caption, or superscription. In our English bibles, the caption is the small type at the very beginning of the psalm, and it is usually not in italics. The superscription of Psalm 23 is "A Psalm of David." Not much help there locating the psalm in a situation. But take a look at Psalm 18 - it has an extended caption that provides some background, not only of the situation, but of how the psalm was to be used: "For the choir director."

The captions are actually in the original manuscripts, and they are part of verse one. For example, the Hebrew text of Psalm 90 has "A prayer of Moses, the man of God" as the opening words of the psalm.

Most conservative scholars believe there is a reason why the psalms are so hard to pin down to a specific life situation: it enables the reader to identify with and apply the psalm regardless of his situation.

Review: The Exemplary Husband

Stuart Scott's The Exemplary Husband is available on Amazon, here.

This is as good a text on a husband’s responsibility in marriage as I have ever read. It is divided into four major parts, each part making an important contribution to the whole. He alliterates the part titles, something I’m not in favor of as it tends to produce strained points. But his aren’t too bad. Part One deals with “A Husband’s Recognitions” and covers the basics of the Gospel, spiritual life, and marriage. Part Two, “A Husband’s Responsibilities,” cover the fundamental responsibilities that a husband has in marriage, making the worship of Christ first priority, then love, leadership, physical intimacy and stewardship. “A Husband’s Resolves” are next, which Scott identifies as humility and service, sensitivity, helping your wife deal with sin, communications, and conflict resolution. The final part has to do with “A Husband’s Regrets,” anger, anxiety and fear, and lust.

Scott does a great job with each of these, lays an adequate biblical foundation, provides examples, and then provides practical tips for putting each point into practice. He covers vitally important marriage skills, like repentance/confession, and forgiveness with biblical faithfulness.

About the only place I have some disagreement is in his understanding of what it means for love to “cover” sin, and I don't see this as a major issue.

This is an terrific resource that can be used on its own, or in a group or counseling setting. With this volume you have gathered in one place a biblical toolbox for men. It’s an outstanding book.

Windshield Washer Wars

Have you ever been driving down the Interstate in tight traffic when the guy in front of you decides to wash his windshield (usually on a cloudless, sunny day)? Suddenly arcing over his car is a spray so thick you can see rainbows in it, and it all falls on your windshield, so you get to wash yours, too. Some vengeful people will actually speed up, go around Mr. Inverted Niagra, and return the favor.

I, of course, have never done that! It wouldn’t be sanctified. And besides, my windshield washer behaves more like a cheap squirt-gun on empty. Not only will it not shoot over my windshield, it hardly dribbles. I spit more preaching than that thing does when it’s going full-bore. Oh, that was too much info, wasn’t it? Sorry.

Anyway, Doris comes home on Wednesday—we are one hour from leaving for Iowa for Thanksgiving—and announces that the windshield washer has quit even its spittin’ and would I please fix it? Hope against hope, I check the reservoir. Maybe it will be empty, and I can heal the bloomin’ thing by simply filling it up. No such luck. It was full to the brim. Well, there goes Monday. . . .

Monday—that would be today—was now scheduled with an impossible task: fixing the windshield washer thingy. I am neither a mechanic nor the son of a mechanic, although I do possess a relatively unique mechanical skill: I can stretch a 30 minute, one-screwdriver job into a deep-level excavation requiring all day and every socket, wrench, hammer and crowbar that I own. Knowing of my unique skill set, I hope fervently that today will be my lucky day. If I am really lucky, I start and finish on the same day. If I am not really lucky, I am walking to work tomorrow.

What I do best is talk, so I decided this morning to start with a little counseling. I sat down with the Vue, and in a kind, non-threatening, non-judgmental way tried to convince the car to resume dispensing windshield washer fluid. Just start the fluid coming again, and nobody gets hurt.

Might as well have been speaking to a dumb post. Out come the tools. Oh, my, there’s this thingy connected to that thingy, and this bundle of things is in the way, and . . . . 

If you’ve not been under the hood of a modern automobile, it’s kind of like this: to work on anything more complex than fueling the automobile, you need hands the size of a two-year-old attached to arms the length an NBA center's, and possessing the strength of a WWF wrestler. Actually, you need about four of those hand/arm/strength assemblies, plus a normal guy to hold the flashlight.

 

Working on a car is really good for my prayer life, because I pray like crazy that I’ll remember to reconnect everything to the proper connection. So, I start praying and removing parts. It does not matter what you want to remove, something else is in the way. So when you try to remove the something else, then there’s a new something else in the way. You pretty much need to disassemble the entire vehicle. 

I was accumulating a good sized pile of parts, and was wishing I could pray in tongues because I didn’t know what to call the widgets I was removing from the automobile, and even if I did know, I'd be unable to pronounce their names.

Meanwhile, time is moving on. Finally, sometime in the afternoon, I unearth the windshield washer reservoir (this is after I drained it all over the floor). The battery is now out of the car, and disconnected. The coolant overflow reservoir is now mostly unassembled, and almost out of the car. Hoses A through M have been disconnected, and, Oh, Lord, help me to remember to reconnect Hose G with Pipe G, and not Tank H!

Ah. The offending widget – the windshield washer pump – or, I suppose, the automatic transmission fluid pump, although I hope not.

 I drop the offending part in my pocket, and head for the auto parts store, confident that I can buy the part and finish this job in a mere six hours.

Not so fast, Speedy Gonzales. The parts store does not have the part and cannot get it. Okay, where can I get it? The kind parts man gets on the phone and starts dialing around. Advance Auto can order it and have it here by 4PM. I’ll take it. I come back at 4PM. It’s not here yet, maybe 6PM. Fine, the day is already wasted, what’s another two hours? I come back at 6PM, and the part is there as promised.

Have a good day, the nice auto parts man says. Thanks, I says, I will if I can finish this big job. Big job, he asks, looking at my little windshield washer pump. He’s trying hard not to chuckle. Well, yeah, I says, you’ve got to move all this stuff out of the way, the battery, the overflow, the . . . . I trail off, suddenly realizing that these guys are mechanics and that my big job would take them, maybe, ten minutes. Big jobs to these people are the ones where after you’ve removed the engine, overhauled it, and resized the piston bore, you install a new transmission kind of thing. Those big jobs take ‘em maybe thirty minutes. 

Having thoroughly embarrassed myself, I beat a hasty retreat. I get home and open the box of my brand new pump and find that the instrucciones are not much help.

 It is now dark in my garage, so I put a halogen work light on top of the engine to give me enough light. I wrap the extension cord around the license plate, so that I don’t accidentally pull the lamp off of the engine.

 I am reinstalling the whatzit and connecting it to the somthing-er-other, and sustain a devastating injury to my hands. Doris manages to convince me that I won’t bleed out for another sixty years at the current rate of hemorrhage. I ask her to kiss it and make it better, but she wants no part of it. Ah, my suffering. . . .

 At long last I am able to close the hood of my automobile without sitting on it, and figure that I must have everything back in place. An optimist, I decide I better back out of the garage before I try out my newly installed inverted Niagra windshield washer. As I am backing out of the garage, I notice with some bemusement that my halogen work light is following me out of the garage. Oh, boy. Forgot about that.

Now, if someday I am following close behind you on the Interstate in my Saturn Vue, go ahead. Try your windshield washer. Make my day.

And a little more Tozer!

Lost in today’s religious world is the radical antithesis between the redeemed and the unregenerate. “Coming to church” has become the test of faith, rather than joyful belief in and submission to the pure, unadulterated message of the Gospel. But “coming to church” is a duty attended to by all the world’s religions, and no more makes one a Christian than a visit to a clinic makes one a medical doctor.

Christianity is first and last a relationship with a real, living Person—Jesus Christ, a relationship possible only when one has been regenerated, brought from a state of spiritual death to life. It is not wrapped up in the confession of a concept, the reciting of a creed, the joining of a church, or warm religious feelings. Jesus Christ is the Living God—which means He actually exists as a real person, a thinking, choosing, volitional, emotional Being. He exists wholly independently from creation, from people, from human consciousness. He was before all things, and by Him all things exist.

Any religious sensibility that names Jesus and confesses to love and admire Him yet falls short of a genuine redemptive relationship with Him as a real, living Person is in no way Christian. Tozer’s comments on this sort of “Christianity”—which is essentially unchanged by an encounter with Christ and feels equally comfortable with the world and the Church—are helpful.

It is no more than a religious platitude to say that the trouble with us today is that we have tried to bridge the gulf between two opposites, the world and the Church, and have performed an illicit marriage for which there is no biblical authority. Actually no real union between the world and the Church is possible. When the Church joins up with the world it is the true Church no longer but only a pitiful hybrid thing, an object of smiling contempt to the world and an abomination to the Lord.

The twilight in which many (or should we say most?) believers walk today is not caused by any vagueness on the part of the Bible. Nothing could be clearer than the pronouncements of the Scriptures on the Christian’s relation to the world. The confusion which gathers around this matter results from the unwillingness of professing Christians to take the Word of the Lord seriously. Christianity is so entangled with the world that millions never guess how radically they have missed the New Testament pattern. Compromise is everywhere. The world is whitewashed just enough to pass inspection by blind men posing as believers, and those same believers are everlastingly seeking to gain acceptance with the world. By mutual concessions men who call themselves Christians manage to get on with men who have for the things of God nothing but quiet contempt.

This whole thing is spiritual in its essence. A Christian is what he is not by ecclesiastical manipulation but by the new birth. He is a Christian because of a Spirit which dwells in him. Only that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The flesh can never be converted into spirit, no matter how many church dignitaries work on it. Confirmation, baptism, holy communion, confession of faith—none of these nor all of them together can turn flesh into spirit nor make a son of Adam a son of God [Tozer, ThePursuit of Man, pp 115-7].

More Tozer

The true Christian has a passion and love for truth, and feels not at all uncomfortable with the imperialistic, exclusive nature of truth. And yet if that passion for truth is not regulated by warm love for our neighbor, we are to the lost but frowning, bitter advocates of something the world finds to be foolish. Truth riding on the crest of love is appealing, but mired in the muck of pride it can be disgusting. In the nature of God these two great forces are never in tension: "Lovingkindness and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other" (Ps. 85:10). Not so in man. If we are not trained by humility, we will attempt to wield truth as a battering ram with which we try to bludgeon our neighbors, our children, and our spouse into submission.

As Tozer focuses on the Holy Spirit in the last third of his book, The Pursuit of Man, he speaks about love and truth:

The blight of the Pharisee's heart in olden times was doctrine without love. With the teachings of the Pharisees Christ had little quarrel, but with the pharisaic spirit He carried on unceasing warfare to the end. It was religion that put Christ on the cross, religion without the indwelling Spirit. It is no use to deny that Christ was crucified by persons who today would be called fundamentalists. This should prove most disquieting if not downright distressing to us who pride ourselves on our orthodoxy. An unblessed soul filled with the letter of truth may actually be worse off than a pagan kneeling before a fetish. We are safe only when the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, only when our intellects are indwelt by the loving Fire that came at Pentecost. For the Holy Spirit is not a luxury, not something added now and again to produce a deluxe type of Christian once in a generation. No, He is for every child of God a vital necessity, and that He fill and indwell His people is more than a languid hope. It is rather an inescapable imperative [A. W. Tozer, 106].

Nowhere is this human, fallen, and wholly unnecessary contradiction between love and truth seen so clearly as in our communications on the Internet. Our flame wars do little more than demonstrate how little the truth has changed us, and I am as guilty as the next. We are like the sons of thunder, who in the face of rejection asked Jesus, "Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). Jesus' response to James and John is one we still need to heed today: "But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:55-56, while there is a textual issue with His precise words, there is none with the fact of His rebuke).

May God invade us with His Holy Spirit, that our stand for truth would be unyielding but bathed in warm-hearted love and respect for those who do not yet know the Truth, Whom to know aright is life eternal.

Tozer: Victory through defeat

On Facebook I've been posting excerpts from A. W. Tozer's The Pursuit of Man. I'm continuing that series here. The following is from chapter 4: Victory through Defeat. Tozer's basic point in this chapter is that we must be conquered by the cross and know death thereon, before we can truly know life.

We might well pray for God to invade and conquer us, for until He does we remain in peril from a thousand foes. We bear within us the seeds of our own disintegration. Our moral imprudence puts us always in danger of accidental or reckless self-destruction. The strength of our flesh is an ever present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life. Safety and peace come only after we have been forced to our knees. God rescues us by breaking us, by shattering our strength and wiping out our resistance. Then He invades our natures with that ancient and eternal life which is from the beginning. So He conquers us and by that benign conquest saves us for Himself.

With this open secret awaiting easy discovery, why do we in almost all our busy activities work in another direction from this? Why do we build our churches on human flesh? Why do we set such store by that which the Lord has long ago repudiated and despise those things which God holds in such high esteem? For we teach men not to die with Christ but to live in the strength of their dying manhood. We boast not in our weakness but in our strength. Values which Christ has declared to be false are brought back into evangelical favor and promoted as the very life and substance of the Christian way. How eagerly do we seek the approval of this or that man of worldly reputation. How shamefully do we exploit the converted celebrity. Anyone will do to take away the reproach of obscurity from our publicity-hungry leaders: famous athletes, congressmen, world travelers, rich industrialists; before such we bow with obsequious smiles and honor them in our public meetings and in the religious press. Thus we glorify men to enhance the standing of the Church of God, and the glory of the Prince of Life is made to hang upon the transient fame of a man who shall die. . . .

. . . The loss, the rejection, the shame, both belong to Christ and to all who in very truth are His. The cross that saves them also slays them them, and anything short of this is pseudo-faith and not true faith at all. . . . How can we face Him who was crucified and slain when we see His followers accepted and praised? . . .

. . . [I]f I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a bright new ornament upon the bosom of self-assured and carnal Christianity whose hands are indeed the hands of Abel, but whose voice is the voice of Cain. The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter. The flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the cross; before the cross it bows  and toward the cross it points with carefully staged histrionics--but upon that cross it will not die, and the reproach of that cross it stubbornly refuses to bear. . . .

. . . The life that halts short of the cross is but a fugitive and condemned thing, doomed at last to be beyond recovery. That life which goes to the cross and loses itself there to rise again with Christ is a divine and breathless treasure. Over it death hath no more dominion. . . .

Our President

President Obama stumbles from scandal to crisis. The unifying theme is that each is self-inflicted. The high-flying rhetoric is freighted with too much duplicity to get airborne. The hubris has come home to roost. Mocked abroad, distrusted at home, a disappointment to his supporters, a lawless Chicago con to his detractors, there's not a great deal he can do for an encore.

He is, in my opinion, a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic. Under Obama we have lost the rule of law and transitioned to the rule of something that bears more resemblence to a monarchy (to put the best light on it) than that of a chief executive beholden to a constitution and a tripartite division of federal power. Under Obama, the federal government now has a collective integrity that approximates something between pre-Katrina Louisiana and New Jersey.

The Justice Department has become the chief threat to justice, the EPA is a regulatory monster, the Education Department is the main obstacle to providing a real education in our schools (okay, hold the phone on that charge, that's been true in every administration), the IRS has been transformed into a political club with which to beat opponents of the President, the NSA has all the trappings of the prelude to a police state, and the Constitution has become the deadest "living document" you can imagine. And that's not even mentioning the confusion, uncertainty, and destruction he has wrought on American healthcare, nor the devastation his policies have worked on our economy. I suppose that the one thing I can say about him is that he is quite thorough.

And now he's driven his golf-cart into a box canyon called Syria, and there's no way out. As Victor Davis Hanson says, he has no good options. Some men make history by their leadership through the crises of their times. President Obama is about to make history, but unfortunately it will not be skilled leadership for which he will be remembered.

Book Review: The Facts on Roman Catholicism

John Ankerberg's The Facts on Roman Catholicism, is part of Ankerberg’s series on various religions and religious topics. It is very readable, very brief (86 pages of text, not including footnotes), and very well documented. The bad reviews it receives on Amazon are primarily from Catholics, who object to--and in some cases, demonstrate--the points that Ankerberg makes.

Ankerberg compares and contrasts the Bible and the official beliefs of Roman Catholicism in five sections: Divine Revelation and Authority, Introduction to Roman Catholicism, Salvation and Justification, the Roles of the Bible, the Pope, and Mary, and a Conclusion.

In each section, Ankerberg cites official Roman Catholic documents to establish the Catholic position, and then compares it to the Bible. Central to his argument, especially the section on Justification, is the charge that while Protestants and Catholics share the the same terminology—such as “justification”—what they mean by those terms is entirely different. Ankerberg clearly shows that the Catholic notion of salvation is wrapped up in works and personal (albeit, “infused”) righteousness.

This is a good, brief resource for those seeking clarification about Catholic beliefs, especially as they contrast with biblical teaching.