The apostle Paul tells TItus to rebuke and exhort with all authority (Tit. 2:15). In short, Titus is called to a fatherly role. There is the possibility of tyranny in the church, like what Diotrophes did (3 Jn. 9-11), and there is also the possibility of leaders getting walked on (1 Tim. 4:12). What is needed in the church today is a true fatherly voice. Many of our ecclesiastical troubles can be attributed to our rebellious anxieties over fathers, coupled with a desperate need for them.

I have a new book coming out this May entitled Father Hunger. I will be leaving for the Desiring God pastors' conference shortly, where I will be addressing some of these same issues. Our elders at Christ Church have approved a series of sermons on fatherhood for this spring, and we are going to have an outreach campaign revolving around that basic issue. We must never forget that Jesus came to bring us to the Father, and this is why, incidentally, the recent dust-up over the soft modalism/modalism in transition/not-quite-sure-what-it-is-exactly of T.D. Jakes was not over a bunch of nothing. Those who raised the issue, and those who are pressing it now, are quite right. We need to be brought in repentance to the Father, and surely it should matter whether or not there is one to be brought to. It is a big deal.

In Father Hunger, I describe fatherlessness as the central malady of our time. It gets into everything. A thirty-second perusal of presidential politics should make that point in the civil realm.

And here the post might take what appears to be an odd turn, but I really don't think so. One of the reasons that Nate's fiction is selling so well in the secular market is that it consistently addresses this point so pointedly.

In the midst of a bunch or other adventures, Leepike Ridge is about a fatherless boy coming to a father. The 100 Cupboards trilogy -- here, here, and here -- tells the story of a boy who (technically) has a father, but not really, coming to find his real father. And of course that theme weaves throughout the other multiple adventures that are served up. But the restoration at the end is the restoration of fatherhood. And now, in the Ashtown series (a projected five volumes), the same thing is happening again.

The protagonists are fatherless children introduced to us in The Dragon's Tooth. The second of the series -- The Drowned Vault -- is not released yet, but having read the manuscript, I am at liberty to tell you all that it is a hummer. And also that the father theme grows more pronounced, and in profound ways.

All of this is to say that one of the central ways we can speak to our generation is through our stories. Do you know any fatherless children? Do they have birthdays?

If you are convinced, as I am, that C.S. Lewis gave many tens of thousands their first taste of what Christ is really like through his Narnia stories, then this opportunity to speak of the Father through fathers to a rising and hurting generation is a prime opportunity. This is not a low-impact arena.

"But when the sun rises, it does not happen the way a light comes on in a room when you flip the switch. The sun rises slowly. At first, you don't know that anything has happened. It may be just as dark as it was a moment ago, but maybe not. And some time later, you notice that the eastern sky is not what it was. There is some kind of light there. The stars that were visible all night begin to disappear. Soon there is just one left -- the morning star, the planet Venus, the last indication that day is coming. The next event is for the sun to actually rise, for the day to come. Christ was born at night, and His birth was the arrival of the morning star" (Heaven Misplaced, p. 69).

"God does not send messengers who confuse and bamboozle his people with displays of their learning -- or their lack of it" (Murrary, How Sermons Work, p. 13).

I have said kind things about Ron Paul in the past, and I will continue say them in the future. He continues to be one of the people I could vote for when Ringling Bros. finally brings the gaudy parade to my state. But he whiffed it last night in the debate when asked how his faith would affect his behavior in office. He said that it wouldn't. Not only did he whiff it, but Santorum jacked it out of the park. Santorum said, quite rightly, that the Constitution is the how of America, and the Declaration is the why. He said that government doesn't give us our rights -- God does that -- and he said that the government's role is to protect God-given rights. This was a dead-on bull's eye.

Ron Paul's formal position is therefore secularist. Now, of course, like all secularists, he is unable to actually keep these "disparate" elements of his worldview in separate compartments. The thing is impossible. But when you think you can do it, the result is generally a lot of confusion. Now I also believe that Ron Paul is as honest as white paint, and that he has told us plainly his actual thoughts on this. But this just means that he is honestly schizophrenic on this topic. That doesn't make him lonely, it just makes him wrong. The secularist experiment is a fraud, and is lying around on the floor in a shambolic ruin.

In a breakfast discussion this morning, a friend astutely observed that this is why we probably ought to back away from our talk of constitutional rights. The Constitution was assigned to protect them; the Constitution was not given to us so that it might assign them. The Constitution was made for the rights, not the rights for the Constitution. Let's speak of God-given rights.

I really appreciated the clarity in Santorum's remarks. I appreciated the lack of confusion. God honors it when He is confessed.

"God's grace is a tsunami that will carry us away and deposit us in places we would not have anticipated -- and all of it good. We analyze this carefully and say that we want our grace to be true and pure water, just like that tsunami, but we want it to be a placid pond on a summer day that we can inch across gingerly, always keeping one pointed toe on what we think is the sure bottom of our own do-gooding morality. As the old blues song has it, everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Everyone wants to cross the Jordan, but nobody wants to get wet" (Heaven Misplaced, p. 68.).

"A man can be gifted without being called and sent, but a man cannot be called and sent without being gifted. God supplies both the calling and the gifts to fulfil that calling" (Murray, How Sermons Work, p. 13).

"We are afraid of grace getting carried away, and so we want to slap some conditions on it . . . Grace has a backbone and knows how to define itself. Grace is not the word that we are to use as the 'open, sesame' of the Church. Grace is not something we do. Grace is not something we can control. Grace is not something we can manage. And this means that we in the Church need to recognize that the guardians of grace are frequently its most dangerous enemies. Grace is God's declared intention of favor for the whole world, whether we like it or not" (Heaven Misplaced, p. 67).

"Supernatural work must be done by a supernatural power . . . This unction gives to the preacher liberty and enlargement of thought and soul -- a freedom, fullness and direction of utterance that can be secured by no other process" (Olyott, Preaching That Gets Through, pp. 22-23)

I want to expand a bit on what I said about logic and the character and nature of God.

First, the problem. If logic is external to God, and is something that He obeys or conforms to, then we are saying that there is another God, senior to Him, whose dictates He must somehow obey. That is obviously out for the orthodox, on the basis of being ridiculous.

But if we say that logic is a created thing, fashioned as a could-have-been-otherwise sort of thing by God for this world, then absolutely anything goes, and God Himself becomes absolutely unknowable. I will explain this further in a moment.

This leaves the option that the font of all logic is somehow an attribute of God, like His love, like His holiness, and so on. More on this in a moment also.

There are three foundational building blocks for logic -- the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. In brief, this means that A is A, it means that A cannot be not A, and it means that for any given assertion about A, there is no middle ground between true and false. Now a great deal of damage has been caused by those who think that these laws are something we came up with down here in this world, and that it is inappropriate or even blasphemous to apply them in any way to God. It is the other way around.

"At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. 16: 11)

The Basket Case Chronicles #61

“Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband” (1 Cor. 7:2-3).

When Paul says that it is good for a man “not to touch a woman,” he is talking about the time of “present distress” only. But even there, he is clear that while it would be tough to go through a time of persecution with a wife and kids (v. 33), it would be even tougher to go through such a time as a fornicator.

Paul knows that he has a peculiar gift, that of celibacy (v. 7). He also knows (and tells us) just how rare that gift is. In these verses, he assumes that “every” man should have his own wife. He assumes that “every” woman should have her own husband. If the occasional one-off gift of celibacy doesn’t keep Paul from saying that everybody should be married, still less would the mythical and very modern “gift of singleness” keep him from saying it. Many men who celebrate the gift of singleness are actually celebrating the luxuries of irresponsibility. Mark Driscoll says, rightly, that men are like trucks. They drive straighter and smoother when they have a load.

Paul is saying that fornication is an important thing to avoid, so much so that a man should be willing to take on a great deal of responsibility rather than fall into such sin—and I am talking about an amount of responsibility that many today with the “gift of singleness” appear to be allergic to. Such responsibility is God’s answer to computer porn. Both the husband and the wife are instructed to render themselves freely to the other, with the possible temptations of the other in mind. In a godly marriage, the existence of such temptations is not resented, but rather addressed in a very earthy and practical way. God’s solution to sexual temptation is sex, and a goodly amount of it.