Schooling choice and the gospel

Josh Harris has some good pastoral words about schooling choices and the church! Listen in.

John Piper’s 15 Things I Learned from my Father

Here’s John Piper on learning from his father:

Since my father died on March 6, I have been looking through his papers. I found a small sheet with the following fifteen counsels, titled “Things I Have Learned.” He didn’t make most of these up. Some of them go back to his college days when he was absorbing the pithy wisdom of Bob Jones Senior. They have again confirmed the obvious: I owe my father more than I can ever remember. The comment after each one is mine.

Things I Have Learned
1. The right road always leads to the right place; therefore, get on the right road and go as far as you can on it.
My father was totally persuaded that wrong means do not lead to right ends. Or, more positively, he was persuaded that living in the right way — that is, doing the right things — are means that inevitably lead to where God wants us to be. This is why he told me, when I asked about God’s leading in my life, “Son, keep the room clean where you are, and in God’s time, the door to the next room will open.”

2. There is only one thing to do about anything; that is the right thing. Do right.
This is what one might say to a person perplexed by a difficult situation whose outcome is unknown. The person might say, “I just don’t know what to do about this.” It is not useless to be told: Do the right thing. That may not tell you exactly which good thing to do, but it does clear the air and rule out a few dozen bad ideas.

3. Happiness is not found by looking for it. You stumble over happiness on the road to duty.
My, my, my. How was John Piper born from this? I would never say this. The main reason is that the Bible commands us to pursue our joy repeatedly. “Rejoice in the Lord, and again I say rejoice.” “Delight yourself in the Lord.” I think what he meant was: 1) Joy is always in something. Joy itself is not the something. So we seek joy in Christ. Not just joy in general. 2) When duty is hard and we do not feel joy in doing it, we should still do it, and pray that in the doing it the joy would be given. But what we need to make plain is that duty cannot be contrasted with joy, because joy is a biblical duty.

4. The door to success swings on the hinges of opposition.
Remarkably, this saying implies that opposition is not just a natural accompaniment or antecedent of success, but that it is a means by which the door opens. One can think of many biblical examples. The opposition of Joseph’s brothers opened the door to his leadership in Egypt. The taxing of the empire opened the door to getting the Messiah born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth, and thus fulfilling prophecy. The betrayal of Judas opened the door to the salvation of the world.

5. God in the right place in my life fixes every other relationship of life (Matthew 6:33).
I wonder if this was tucked away in my mind so that unknown to me it controlled my analogy of the solar system to our many-faceted lives. If God is the blazing center of the solar system of our lives, then all the planets will be held in their proper orbit. But if not, everything goes awry.

…You can read the rest here.

I learned several similar things from my father along with:

1. Measure twice; cut once.
It applies to carpentering but also to just about every area of life. Take the time to prepare carefully and it saves you a whole bunch of hassle.

2. You can teach an old dog new tricks.
My father has never stopped believing that people can change and grow.

Ps. 131 anti-psalm by David Powlison

Ever feel like this:

Self,
my heart is proud (I’m absorbed in myself),
and my eyes are haughty (I look down on other people),
and I chase after things too great and too difficult for me.
So of course
I’m noisy and restless inside; it comes naturally.
like a hungry infant fussing on his mother’s lap
like a hungry infant, I’m restless with my demands and worries
I scatter my hopes onto anything and everybody all the time.

Rather we should train ourselves by the grace of Christ:

Be still, my soul, the Lord is on thy side;
bear patiently the cross of grief or pain
leave to thy God to order and provide
In every change he faithful will remain
Be still, my soul; thy best, they heavenly Friend
through thorny ways leads to a joyful end

Seeing with New Eyes by David Powlison

This is so true especially as regards ministry. We cannot change people but we can obey God. We cannot change our children but we can trust in Him.

Fighting the “Everybody does it” mentality: Hannah Montana

A pastor in Rockford, Illinois is trying to be discerning for his daughter. It’s worth reading the whole post if you are a parent. Parenting is a tough job but thinking biblically about our culture is crucial. Here’s a snippet:

Hannah Montana’s Miley Stewart Destiny Hope Cyrus’ dad, says it’s “art imitating life imitating art” (TIME). It’s almost mind-bending if you try to think about it too long.

“What my fans get, which parents have a harder time grasping, is they know who’s underneath Hannah Montana,” opines the fourteen-year-old sociological savant. “They like the girl who’s underneath.” source

In your dreams. Tween girls are too superficial to even be cognizant of the fact that there is such a place as underneath. Or, maybe we should clarify which level of “underneath” Cyrus means? Does she refer to the Miley Stewart or is she so hopelessly caught up in the euphoria of the Hannah Hurricane herself that she actually thinks that the millions of tween girls of America actually know Destiny Hope Cyrus?

And, by the way, Cyrus is in the process of legally changing her name to Miley Ray Cyrus. Is that because it was the nickname her daddy used for her or is it because she, the real person, is now attempting to tap into the idolized Miley, the fictionalized real person of Hannah Montana? I guess we’ll never know. But since she’s fourteen, I think it is naïve to assume that the line between “art” and “life” hasn’t gotten blurred somewhere. Destiny how now taken on the name of the fictional real person named Miley. Wouldn’t that now be life imitating art imitating life imitating art?

What’s wrong with reality?

I personally think that if we want to rear our children to become world-changing adults we need to teach them early to shun marketed fads that are projected on their age group exclusively, thus isolating them from their parents, more mature affections, and reality thereby giving them a sense of belonging that ultimately weakens their will to be different in the real world.

To allow our children to follow after the herd just because they’ve been branded as a particular niche in the market teaches them subconsciously that the market knows what’s best for them. It produces lemmings who are being trained to think that the only things in life that are pleasant to anyone their age are those things that were designed exclusively for their age and the only ones who know what those things are happen to be the invisible marketing gods. And this is the main problem with the Hannah Montana music….
If my daughter likes little girl things because she is a little girl that likes those things, that is one thing. But if she likes something because “showbiz hustlers” and her peers like it then she has begun the dangerous descent into the abnegation of self as a unique person created in the image of God and the quiet mutation into a bland copy of of a fickle mob. That’s why sometimes littler girls need to learn to love what daddy’s love instead.