Grace, The Heart, and Our Children

The church service this morning was full of spiritual meat. God is so gracious to reveal sin and point our straying hearts back to the cross. In straying, my tendency is too often to “white-knuckle” my way through life. I somehow think that if I try harder at following Christ my holiness increases—this is not grace. But I was blessed pierced, convicted, and brought to repentance this morning. The last song in the service was “Oh Great God of Highest Heaven” by Bob Kauflin. I was only going to put the last verse down but couldn’t help myself:

O great God of highest heaven
Occupy my lowly heart
Own it all and reign supreme
Conquer every rebel power
Let no vice or sin remain
That resists Your holy war
You have loved and purchased me
Make me Yours forevermore

I was blinded by my sin
Had no ears to hear Your voice
Did not know Your love within
Had no taste for heaven’s joys
Then Your Spirit gave me life
Opened up Your Word to me
Through the gospel of Your Son
Gave me endless hope and peace

Help me now to live a life
That’s dependent on your grace
Keep my heart and guard my soul
From the evils that I face
For You are worthy to be praised
With my every thought and deed
Oh great God of highest heaven
Glorify Your Name in me

The antithesis of everything natural (sinful) that resides in me is to live in God’s grace by the Spirit. I feel so prone to slip into the mindset that I am somehow a benefactor of God, as though I could give something to Him. Rather, as the last verse states, even my life lived unto God—for His glory—is a result of divine grace.

After the service I went to Bethlehem’s bookstore to look around, and Emily wanted me to check out Shepherding a Child’s Heart. So I did. And after purchasing it and reading through the first 10-12 pages, I am very pleased. Ted Tripp makes it clear from the beginning that children need heart changes and not simply behavioral fixes. Obedience from children is not an end in itself, but parents ought to seek obedience only as it reflects a heart that hopes in Christ. Christ is the goal.

This is how Tripp puts it:

God is concerned with the heart—the well-spring of life (Proverbs 4:23). Parents tend to focus on the externals of behavior rather than the internal overflow of the heart. We tend to worry more about the “what of behavior than the “why”…

When we miss the heart, we miss the subtle idols of the heart. Romans 1 makes it clear that all human beings are worshipers; either we worship and serve God, or we make an exchange and worship and serve substitutes for God—created things rather than the Creator (Romans 1:18-25). When parenting short-circuits to behavior we miss the opportunity to help our kids understand that straying behavior displays a straying heart. Our kids are always serving something, either God or a substitute for God—an idol of the heart.

When we miss the heart, we miss the gospel. If the goal of parenting is no more profound than securing appropriate behavior, we will never help our children understand the internal things, the heart issues, that push and pull behavior. Those internal issues: self-love, rebellion, anger, bitterness, envy, and pride of the heart show our children how profoundly they need grace…

When we miss the heart, we miss the glory of God. The need of children (or adults) who have fallen into various forms of personal idolatry is not only to tear down the high places of the alien gods, but to enthrone God. Children are spring-loaded for worship. One of the most important callings God has given parents is to display the greatness, goodness, and glory of the God for whom they are made. Parents have the opportunity, through word and deed, to show children the one true object of worship—the God of the Bible. (This was in his Preface to the Second Edition, pg. xi, xii).

As we anxiously await the birth of our little boy, our prayer is that God will continually point our hearts back to the Gospel, so that we depend on His grace more, living a life of faithfulness and praise because of Christ’s incomparable worth—and in so doing that all of our children might see the worth of Christ as all-glorious, counting everything else as garbage that they might gain Him.

John Piper on TV and Movies

John Piper recently wrote an excellent article on his stance regarding television and movies. I have known for some time that he does not own a TV, but because he makes a point to never condemn television watching this is the most I've seen or heard him write on the topic. Here's a large chunk of the article:

I can’t give an answer for what Mark (Driscoll) means by “buy extra DVRs,” but I can tell you why my advice sounds different. I suspect that Mark and I would not agree on the degree to which the average pastor needs to be movie-savvy in order to be relevant, and the degree to which we should expose ourselves to the world’s entertainment.

I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.

There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).

Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

May we all think of the glory of Jesus in everything that passes before our eyes.