Marriage: "What Must We Do?"

As a link I provided on my headlines above (on the same date of this piece) makes note, Rick Warren, Russell Moore and others were present at Humanum 2014 this week discussing and defending the biblical truths on marriage. The gathering is a conference convened by Pope Francis and held at the Vatican. Pastor Warren, it seems, was one of the last, if not the last, of over two dozen who spoke. His message is well worth sharing.

The video is below and is about 40 minutes long. I've summarized his main points below as well.

(Prelude: Hebrew’s 13:4 tells us that marriage is to be honored by all.)

Pastor Warren’s “action plan” for what to do on marriage:

• · Affirm the Authority of God’s Word
• Truth is still truth no matter how many people doubt it
• We don’t break God’s laws, they break us
• Believe what Jesus taught about marriage
• Mark 10:6-9 is the “owner’s manual” on marriage
• Jesus 5 convictions about marriage (unchangeable, incontrovertible, unmovable)
• Gender is God’s idea; He made us either male or female—our identity is either a man or a woman 
• Marriage is God’s idea—He defines it
• Sex was created for marriage; male and female body parts were made to fit together; sex was not created for recreation; there’s no such thing as “safe-sex”—there is no condom that can prevent a broken heart
• Marriage is a union of a man and a woman
• Marriage is for life
• Celebrate healthy marriages (especially churches): don’t simply be an opponent of what’s wrong, be a proponent of what’s right; incorporate celebrations of marriage into church services, etc.; 
• Develop small-group courses to support marriage
• Engage every media to promote marriage
• To engage the next generation, we must use social media 
• The church is being out-marketed by the opponents of marriage (a significant minority)
• Whichever side tells the best stories wins
• More entertainment that promotes healthy marriage
• Use media to question the cultural lies
• Teach the difference between love and lust: love can always wait to give, lust can never wait to take
• Face attackers with joy and winsomeness
• Are we more interested in winning an argument or making friends? 
• Our opponents in these debates are not our enemies, they’re our mission field
• Don’t be afraid to be unpopular
• The only way to always be relevant is to be eternal
• It isn’t necessary to be on the “right side of history,” we just need to be on the right side
• What we’re debating is a question of leadership: is the church going to lead or follow
•  Give people confidence (hope) that their marriage can make it; preach for faith
• Teach (he skips to “T” for lack of time) the purposes of marriage; to value something, we must understand its purpose (time, money, sexuality, marriage, etc.)
• 6 purposes of marriage:
• Elimination of loneliness
• Expression of sex
• Multiplication of the human race
• Protection and education of children
• Perfection of our character (marriage is the laboratory for learning how to love)
• Reflection of our union with Christ

I left out many interesting details. Enjoy.

In light of this, don't forget the Marriage Commitment Challenge.

Nice People or a New Creation?

Much has been made of Rick Warren’s participation in the inauguration of Barak Hussein Obama as President of the United States. Writing for Salon.com, Mike Madden asks, “How the hell did Rick Warren get inauguration tickets?” On The Huffington Post Jeffery Feldman wrote, “News that Obama invited Rick Warren to say a prayer at the inauguration is a troubling sign for a president elected to be a new kind of leader.” He added that, “Marriage equality for gays and lesbians…is the current epicenter of the civil rights movement in America.” Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal priest, called the choice of Warren “a slap in the face.”

On Obama’s choice of Warren, Time magazine’s Amy Sullivan recently wrote about the “Two Faces of Rick Warren.” I doubt, however, that he was much offended. Two-faced is probably one of the tamer insults hurled at Warren by those who were livid at the fact he was chosen to participate in the inauguration. According to Sullivan, the uglier side of Warren is “The one who proclaimed a week before the 2004 election that the five ‘non-negotiable issues’ for Christian voters were abortion, gay marriage, human cloning, euthanasia, and stem-cell research.”

She summarizes that, “In short, Warren wants to be both the universally admired pastor who speaks to the nation and the influential leader who mobilizes religious conservatives for political ends. But those are two inherently conflicting roles, and he cannot be both, no matter how hard he tries.”

All of this is very revealing. Many outside of Christianity, and many who feign to be a part of it, have an especially distorted view about what it means to be a follower of Christ. They seem eager to embrace His message of love and forgiveness, as well they should, but they easily forget His message of repentance and salvation. Also, they fail to notice that He was and is, of all things, a very controversial and divisive figure.

Consider these words or accounts of Christ: “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven (Matt. 10:32-33).” “Then Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent (Matt. 11:20).”
“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out (Mark 9:43).” When sending out His disciples He said, “But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet we wipe off against you…’ I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town (Luke 10:10-12).”

In John 14 Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him (John 14:6-7).”

Of course, the thing that got Jesus in the most trouble was putting Himself on equal footing with God. It is, after all, what got Him crucified. His miracles were done not only to help others in need; they were also meant to validate His claim as the Son of God and the Savior of the world. He not only performed miracles, but He also forgave sin and directly claimed to be the Son of God. As C.S. Lewis put it, this either makes Him Lord, liar, or lunatic, not simply some great moral teacher who did good deeds that we need to emulate.

You see, what many people seem to want out of Christianity and its followers are simply nice “do-gooders” who go about their business without causing any trouble. The greatest miracle recorded in Scripture that Christ performed was raising someone from the dead. (There are three recorded instances of this occurring.) This was not done merely out of “niceness,” only to save the lives of those who had died. They would, after all (with apologies to James Bond), “die another day.” His ultimate goal was to give them “everlasting life.”

This could be said of every miracle Christ performed. It is true that He healed, fed, and cast out demons because of His great love for those in need. However, these acts alone did not save anyone. Those healed of one disease or sickness would someday die of another. Those fed would someday be hungry again. Christ’s ultimate goal was to bring people into His Kingdom. In other words, God became man not simply to improve us, but to make us into new creatures.

“Niceness” and “good deeds” are excellent things. Jesus told His followers to “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16).” Inversely, as C.S. Lewis puts it, “When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”

Lewis continues, “We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power, to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where we all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeed in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.”

It is not cruel, or even rude, for a Christian to speak out against, or even condemn, acts such as abortion, homosexuality, lust, greed, etc. We are, after all, in a war—a spiritual one with eternal consequences. There is little time to worry whether others see us as playing “nice.”

Copyright 2009, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Obama and the “Least of These”

A few days ago when Barack Obama was “Back in the Saddle” with Rick Warren, Obama uttered what was one of the most hypocritical statements ever offered by an American politician. When Obama was asked by Warren what he thought was, “the greatest moral failure of America,” he responded with, “I think America’s greatest moral failure in my lifetime has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me…”

In describing “the least of us,” Obama mentioned poverty, racism, and sexism. Sadly, the unborn failed to make his list. This is not surprising, given Obama’s vile record on abortion. It has now been clearly demonstrated (see here for National Right to Life’s detailed account) that Obama, while a member of the Illinois state Senate, opposed multiple versions of an Illinois bill that mirrored the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA).

According to National Right to Life, BAIPA was essentially “a simple two-paragraph proposal – [that] established…for all federal law purposes, any baby who was entirely expelled from his or her mother, and who showed any of the specified signs of life, was to be regarded as a legal person for however long he or she lived, and that this applied whether or not the birth was the result of an abortion or of spontaneous premature labor.”

In 2000 the original BAIPA was passed by the U.S. House by a vote of 380 to 15. This occurred in spite of opposition by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL). Even staunch pro-abortion leaders, such as Jerrold Nadler, ignored the NARAL position and supported BAIPA. This version of BAIPA was later killed in the Senate by an objection to unanimous consent.

In 2001 the Illinois legislature took up a bill that was patterned after the federal BAIPA. Obama voted against this bill in committee. On the floor of the Illinois Senate, he later gave the only speech against the bill, saying, “I mean, it—it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an anti-abortion statute.” (What?! We need the “equal protection clause” to tell us that we shouldn’t kill our children?!)

Obama finally, and “boldly,” voted “present” on the bill, which had the same effect as voting “no.” The bill passed the Illinois senate but died in a house committee. The scene pretty much repeated itself in 2002, this time with Obama voting “no.”

In 2002 a “neutrality clause” was added to the federal BAIPA. This clause basically said that, as far as federal law was concerned, legal protection could not be construed upon a human being prior to being “born alive.” This effectively protected Roe. The bill unanimously passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Bush in 2002.

Obama is on the record saying that he would have supported the Illinois bill had it contained the neutrality clause. In October of 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported, “Obama said that had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act…”

However, in 2003 the exact language of the federal neutrality clause was added to the Illinois bill making it virtually identical to the federal BAIPA. In March of 2003, Obama chaired an Illinois Senate committee and led the Democrats on that committee to kill the amended bill.

In attempting to blunt the extremism of his abortion record, Obama has stated time and again that the lack of a neutrality clause was all that was preventing him from supporting the Illinois bill. When he was called out on the matter, Obama accused individuals and institutions of lying about his record. His campaign has since had to admit that his critics were correct about his voting record.

The hypocrisy of Obama’s “least of these” comment at Saddleback is beyond the pale. Whatever moral causes he chooses to champion, nothing compares to the helplessness of a newborn child. In other words there is nothing more “least” than an infant. Obama’s unwillingness to stand for these, along with his attempted deception in the matter, should give any voter great pause.

Copyright 2008, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com