J. Gresham Machen once wrote of the force of seeing this total solar eclipse:

When I viewed the spectacle of the total eclipse of the sun at New Haven on the twenty-fourth of January 1925, I was confirmed in my theism. Such phenomena make us conscious of the wonderful mechanism of the universe, as we ought to be conscious of it every day; at such moments anything like materialism seems to be but a very pitiful and very unreasonable thing. I am no astronomer, but of one thing I was certain: when the strange, slow-moving shadow was gone, and the world was bathed again in the wholesome light of day, I knew that the sun, despite its vastness, was made for us personal beings and not we for the sun, and that it was made for us personal beings by the living God.

How shall I, how shall society, find healing and Purification within? Let me answer by reminding you of what they did at Chicago.

In all the world there was no river more stagnant and fetid than was Chicago River. Its sluggish stream received the sweepings of the watercraft and the offal of the city, and there was no current to carry the detritus away. There it settled, and bred miasma and fever.

At last it was suggested that, by cutting through the low ridge between the city and the Des Plaines River, the current could be set running in the opposite direction, and drainage could be secured into the Illinois River and the great Mississippi. At a cost of fifteen millions of dollars the cut was made, and now all the water of Lake Michigan can be relied upon to cleanse that turbid stream.

What the Chicago River could never do for itself, the great lake now does for it. So no human soul can purge itself of its sin; and what the individual cannot do, humanity at large is powerless to accomplish.

Sin has dominion over us, and we are foul to the very depths of our being, until with the help of God we break through the barrier of our self-will, and let the floods of Christ’s purifying life flow into us. Then, in an hour, more is done to renew, than all our efforts for years had effected. Thus humanity is saved, individual by individual, not by philosophy, or philanthropy, or self-development, or self-reformation, but simply by joining itself to Jesus Christ, and by being filled in Him with all the fulness of God.

Elyse Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus, page 120:

We want our kids to know the one good story so well that when they see Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Anne of Green Gables, Ariel, or Sleeping Beauty, they can recognize the strands of truth and deception in them.

God does not care about sports in themselves. God cares about the people who play them.

God cares about the people who watch and enjoy sports and whose lives are affected by sports.  And God works through sports, as God works through all things, for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

Training the body is, or can be, a profound and necessary school for the spirit.  And in today’s age, when so many Christians live lives of comfortable complacency, when the rigor and striving of faith have been so terribly deemphasized, sports can serve an important role in reminding us of the importance of discipline and collective sacrifice in the pursuit of a greater goal.

So if sports can help us grow closer to God and more mature in our faith — and they can — then yes, God cares about sports for what can be accomplished through them.

As many of you have probably already guessed, most of my blogging work will now be focused there. I am greatly honored to be a part of the incredible DG team here in Minneapolis, focusing my energy on helping to curate, resurface, and spread John Piper’s 30-years-and-running gospel preaching legacy.

[Hyperventilation.]

What that means is the Miscellanies blog (a little blog I started in 2006 to fill a ministry lag), will still be used but only for occasional posts, perhaps once a week or so. If you’d like to follow me, you can always do that more effectively via Twitter or Facebook. I’ll be using both of these channels concurrently to point to my work online, my travels, quotes and quips from mostly dead guys, and of course pictures of stuff I point my iPhone at.

Thank you for reading and following this blog. Because you come here, ministry opportunities have been opened for me (like book writing). So thank you!

Tony

John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, page 37:

God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.

A transcribed excerpt from Friday morning’s DG staff devotional with John Piper:

Philippians 3:17 shows us four generations of imitation: you ➔ those ➔ us ➔ Christ. So that clearly implies God wants us to find good examples, to watch them, and to be encouraged and inspired.

Yes, it can be sinful and dangerous. And it can be wonderful.

Anytime a preacher is a draw, two things are happening.

(1) There is a carnal attraction to Apollos-like eloquence, or logic, or turns of phrase, or personality that people like. And they don’t go through it. They don’t go through it to God. They don’t go through it to Jesus. They don’t through it to the Holy Spirit, to be broken by him and have their lives turned upside down, so if that pastor died they would have Jesus, and he would mean everything to them. No. They just stop with the preacher. That’s carnal.

(2) But there are other people. A word lands, for whatever reason, that person meets Jesus, and God condescends to make that sermon on that day a miracle. The sinner in the pulpit has miraculously been made the instrument of grace (1 Cor. 3:6-7).

And there is no way to weed that out ahead of time. You cannot put a sign on the church door: “All of you who are coming here for carnal reasons, stay away. All of you who are coming here because you meet God here, come.”

Therefore, it behooves elders watch that leader, rebuke, counsel, and correct, hedge in, and protect that leader from himself. And it behooves the pastor to be reminded that the Day will disclose his work (1 Cor. 3:13).

But don’t be afraid to have heroes. I think that’s why Hebrews 11 is in the Bible. …

The worship of the primitive Church at every point took it back to the coming of Christ, the Christ-event. So it is the good news of the gospel that constitutes the real centre of her services of worship. The Word of Jesus Christ must have its course, said Luther, in the German Mass. It must dwell amongst us richly, declared Paul (Col. 3.16; cf. 1.27). So it came about that the prophecies and histories of the OT were read and expounded; the sermon set forth the mighty acts of God in the fulness of time (Acts 13.15 ff.); the correspondence of the apostles, new and old alike, the epistles, which are very much like sermons when read to the congregations, these were read and so, with their message, their thanksgivings and doxologies, helped to bring out the full meaning of Christian worship.

But Christian worship was ‘also’, most certainly, a service to the world. Yet the primitive Church did not serve mankind in solemn rites and cultic practices, in pious instructions and edifying spirituality. Christian worship rooted men out of their self-centred individualism into an extra nos — away from all that is subjective — up to that which is simply objective. This was its service to humanity. It summoned the nations to worship the crucified.

When the people of ancient Uruk complained about Gilgamesh’s oppression, the gods fashioned Enkidu, a wild man every whit equal to Gilgamesh. First rivals, then allies, the two heroes embark on a series of adventures and battles.

Goddesses appear in the epic of Gilgamesh, and Enkidu is civilized by a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Having fulfilled her function, she disappears from the story, and women elsewhere play minor roles as willing or unwilling sexual partners. Gilgamesh’s companion-in-arms has to be male because, for ancient Mesopotamians, ruling the world is a man’s work.

The Bible presents a radically different picture. When Adam needs a helper in his work of caring for the garden and ruling the creatures of land and sea, God constructs a woman. Sexuality is caught up in the public and political project of subduing creation. So is family life. So are women.

These ancients texts remain deeply relevant. Europeans mock Americans for our obsession with political sex scandals. We should grow up, they tell us, and let sex stay in the boudoir where it belongs. Prudery and prurience, sometimes both together, play their roles in American sexual mores. But our willingness to judge a man’s suitability for public office by his sexual faithfulness is also a residue of biblical consciousness, and a sign of social health.

G. K. Chesterton, in his defense of humility, concludes this way:

Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are—of immeasurable stature.

That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.

Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small.

Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to him as is the life of the infusoria [minute aquatic creatures] to a man without a microscope. He rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, and forget them; he may discover fresh universes, and learn to despise them. But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are—the gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars—all this colossal vision shall perish with the last of the humble.

It is neither the tyranny, nor the troublesomeness of sin in a believer, that doth eclipse the beauty of Christ, or the favor of God to the soul. Our standing is not founded upon the subduing of our sins, but upon that foundation that never fails; and that is Christ himself, upon his faithfulness and truth. … Though there be ebbings and flowings of the outward man, nay, of the inward man, in the business of sanctification; yet this is certainly true, “That believers are kept by the mighty power of God, through faith, unto salvation.” They are kept in holiness, sincerity, simplicity of heart; but all this hath nothing to do with the peace of his soul, and the salvation and justification thereof: Christ is he that justifies the ungodly; Christ is he that is the peace-maker; and as Christ is the peace-maker, so all this peace depends upon Christ alone. Beloved, if you will fetch your peace from any thing in the world but Christ, you will fetch it from where it is not. …

While your acts, in respect of filthiness, proclaim nothing but war, Christ alone, and his blood, proclaim nothing but peace. Therefore, I give this hint by the way, when I speak of the power of Christ subduing sin; because, from the power of it in men, they are apt to think their peace depends upon this subduing of sin. If their sins be subdued, then they may have peace; and if they cannot be subdued, then no peace: fetch peace where it is to be had; let alone subduing sin for peace; let Christ have that which is his due; it is he alone that speaks peace.

Few passages are more commonly misread, or simply avoided, than Hebrew 13:17:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this passage often goes avoided. This is bound to happen in a culture where postmodernism rejects all claims of authority and where examples of abuses of authority are not hard to find in the news.

To make matters worse, a surface reading of this passage seems to sanction some form of authoritarianism, an unqualified obedience and submission to pastors in all matters. But that’s not the message of this passage, as we will see.

What follows are a few important thoughts on this passage, beginning with a closer look at the idea of “obeying.”

Here is how W. E. Vine defines the Greek word “obey” (πείθο):

In Hebrews 13:17, believers are commanded to obey their leaders. The word used is peithō which has the usual meaning of “convince” or “persuade.” The “obedience” suggested is not by submission to authority, but resulting from persuasion. Peithō and pisteuō, “to trust,” are closely related etymologically; the difference in meaning is that the former implies the obedience that is produced by the latter.

Peithō, “to persuade, to win over,” in the passive and middle voices, “to be persuaded, to listen to, to obey,” is so used with this meaning, in the middle voice, e.g., in Acts 5:36-37 (in v. 40, passive voice, “they agreed”); Rom. 2:8; Gal. 5:7; Heb. 13:17; Jas. 3:3.

The “obedience” suggested is not by submission to authority, but resulting from persuasion. Peithō and pisteuo, ‘to trust,’ are closely related etymologically; the difference in meaning is that the former implies the obedience that is produced by the latter.

In other words, when “one allows oneself to be convinced by someone: one follows and obeys him” (EDNT).

Paul Benware applies this point well in an article ["Leadership Authority in the Church," Conservative Theological Journal 3.8 (1989), pp. 10-12]:

The emphasis here [Heb. 13:17] is on an obedience that comes from being persuaded that something is true. In this case, it would be the truth of the Word of God that is in view. Here they are being called upon to persuade the people that follow them with the truth of the Word of God… The elders are not to say “Do it because I say so”, but rather “Do what I show you from God’s Word.” …

Leadership authority in the church, then, is the power granted to men to lead the flock of God according to the Word of God, guiding, protecting and feeding them for their benefit and God’s glory. This kind of leadership authority will persuade believers from the scriptures resulting in obedience and submission to Christ the one and only head of the church.

John Loftness, the senior pastor of Solid Rock Church [Sovereign Grace Ministries], recently explained this point in a helpful sermon. Here’s a transcribed excerpt from his sermon ["Hebrews 13" (11/20/11)]:

“Obey your leaders and submit to them” (Heb. 13:17a).

This translation is puzzling. The major 20th century English translations all translate this “obey your leaders.” Same with the KJV. But the word “obey” (πείθο) is different from the word that speaks of obedience. In fact if you look back to 5:9, there’s a different word used for obey: “And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey (ὑπακούω) him.” This is a different word.

[In 13:17] “obey” means to put confidence in, to trust, and by implication — because you trust someone or are confident in that person — you do what he says. It means to be persuaded. The same word is used in the next verse: “Pray for us, for we are sure (πείθο) that we have a clear conscience” (Heb. 13:18). The word translated “are sure” is the same as the one for “obey” [in 13:17]. So we should listen to our leaders, let them persuade us, let them speak God’s word to us, let them teach us so that we get such confidence in God’s word that we do what they say.

What kind of leaders should you listen to? Who are the kind of leaders you should submit to?

First, submit to those who are “keeping watch over your souls” (Heb. 13:17b). When they’re asking you to submit they are asking you to submit to God. I have no authority in your life apart from the clear teaching of Scripture. I can’t say, “I’m the senior pastor of this church. Ben, the car’s kinda dirty, can you wash it right away?” No, that’s not how it works. You want to follow a teacher whose concern is for your soul, who wants you to see and follow Jesus, and not stray into strange teachings (see Heb. 13:9). So there is an authority that your teachers carry but it’s authority grounded and founded in God’s Word. That’s the kind of teacher — he’s looking out for your soul and trying to make specific application of Scripture so that you will follow Jesus.

Second, you want to obey teachers who are aware that one day they will have to answer to Jesus for what they taught you. That’s what it says: “as those who will have to give an account” (Heb. 13:17c). I am deeply aware — and now that I’ve done this for decades — I’m aware of points where I’ve gotten it wrong, things I’ve missed. Why am I aware of that? Because one day I’m going to stand before Jesus Christ — just like you. But I’m not just going to have to answer for my own life, I will answer for my influence on you. I’m going to have to answer for how I taught you. If that was driven by selfishness and pride or laziness, unwilling to dig into the text to explain it accurately, I will stand before God and his judgment and I will give an account.

That’s the kind of leader you want to follow: someone whose first concern is your prosperity in God. And secondly, he’s aware that he will give an account for what he taught.

So this is not a call to do whatever your pastors tell you to do, it’s a call to submit to the teaching they bring you because it’s grounded in the Bible. A teacher’s function in the church is to bring you the Word of God so you can put your faith in Jesus and obey Him. And they should do this in a persuasive way, they should teach and lead so that you have confidence in the teaching. And then, submission becomes much easier, and it makes much more sense.

John Owen says much the same in his commentary on Hebrews 13:17:

1st. It is not a blind, implicit obedience and subjection, that is here prescribed. A pretence hereof hath been abused to the ruin of the souls of men: but there is nothing more contrary to the whole nature of gospel obedience, which is our “reasonable service;” and in particular, it is that which would frustrate all the rules and directions given unto believers in this epistle itself, as well as elsewhere, about all the duties that are required of them. For to what purpose are they used, if no more be required but that men give up themselves, by an implicit credulity, to obey the dictates of others?

2dly. It hath respect unto them in their office only. If those who suppose themselves in office do teach and enjoin things that belong not unto their office, there is no obedience due unto them by virtue of this command. So is it with the guides of the church of Rome, who, under a pretence of their office, give commands in secular things, no way belonging unto the ministry of the gospel.

3dly. It is their duty so to obey whilst they teach the things which the Lord Christ hath appointed them to teach; for unto them is their commission limited, Matt. 28:20: and to submit unto their rule whilst it is exercised in the name of Christ, according to his institution, and by the rule of the word, and not otherwise. When they depart from these, there is neither obedience nor submission due unto them.

Finally, Matthew Henry, in his old (and under-appreciated) commentary, offers this pointed one-sentence summary:

Christians must submit to be instructed by their ministers, and not think themselves too wise, too good, or too great, to learn from them; and, when they find that ministerial instructions are agreeable to the written word, they must obey them.

Ultimately pastoral ministry centers on Christ and His Message, not on the pastor and his role as messenger. And so to obey and submit to our pastors is a call to esteem and respect and obey the Word of God. This is why it can be said that “an elder with no Bible is an elder with no authority” (Mark Lauterbach).

Hebrews 13:17 is beautifully balanced and stabilizing for Christians who live in a culture suspicious of all authority. It encourages our biblical discernment. It encourages us to find a solid church where the Bible is taught clearly and persuasively. It moves our attention off autonomous human authority. It focuses our attention on the weightiness of Scripture. And it encourages humble submission of our lives to the faithful preaching and counsel we receive from our still-fallible pastors. It is a passage that helps us see the faithfully preached word for what it is — an authoritative message from God to be obeyed.

The following excerpt is taken from a book written for women, but one I find very helpful as a husband. The quote reminds me that my wife is called to exercise her own biblical discernment in relation to the decisions I make (or fail to make). My wife is not called to follow me into foolishness or sin. She knows this, and knowing that she knows this keeps me on my toes. I first read this excerpt around Christmas, and I’ve come back a few times since to dwell on the implications for me. What follows is the quote taken from Nancy Wilson’s book, Building Her House: Commonsensical Wisdom for Christian Women (Canon Press, 2006), pages 44–45:

The commands of submission and obedience are only difficult when we disagree with our husbands. If we agree with them and do what they say, it can hardly be called submission. Submission comes into play when we differ with them over an issue, but we defer to them and willingly give way.

But what about when the husband is in sin? This is a very important issue. What if the husband has adopted a wrong attitude and is heading in the wrong direction? Is a wife obligated to go along? It all depends. I have often been saddened that we don’t see more Abigails in the church today. She was not afraid to call her husband a fool and make arrangements behind his back without his permission [1 Sam. 25]. God blessed her abundantly for intervening in this way. She did not stay home and wait for David to attack her household while calling herself a submissive wife. She recognized that her husband was acting the part of a fool, and she exercised wisdom and prudence by going to King David herself.

If a man is acting foolishly, a woman is foolish to go along quietly. Of course this requires great wisdom. I am not advocating giving wives license to disobey in a willy-nilly fashion; that is what I am objecting to in the paragraphs above. But there are times when a godly wife should beseech her husband not to act in a foolish manner. It may involve doctrine. Perhaps she is alarmed that he is being attracted to heretical ideas, whether it is “openness theology” or Roman Catholicism. She should speak to him respectfully about this and let him know she cannot follow him there. If she belongs to a godly church, her elders would support her in this.

Perhaps he is plotting to create some kind of stink in the church. Abigail would not stand for it. A good Christian wife should go to the elders and ask them how she can be a good church member and a good wife at the same time. She should not simply stand by, hoping that her husband will do the right thing. Nor should she just accept anything her husband does as though he is infallible. If a husband is bad-mouthing his elders, his pastor, or his friends, a godly woman should refuse to go along. She should speak to him privately first, but if he is not receptive, she should go to her pastor or elders and seek their advice. This same pattern should be followed if a husband is violent, if he has a temper, if he is cheating on his income taxes, if he is not providing for the household, or if he is being sexually unfaithful in any way—and this is not an exhaustive list.

A wife is to be a helper to her husband, not a blind follower, and this sometimes involves going past him to get help. God blessed Abigail when she did this. In her case it was abundantly clear what was necessary. In other cases it might require pastoral input and oversight. But obedience and submission to a mere man is never absolute. God governs all of us. We demonstrate that we serve Him above all others when we realize that our submission and obedience to our husbands is always to be lived out within the boundaries God has wisely set for us.

We have to recover a proper understanding of the role of fatherhood in the church, and I don’t just mean your familial fathers, the fathers of the families that come to church. I’m talking about fathers for the church.

First Corinthians 4:15–16 says this: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me.”

Notice what Paul says, I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. So the father here that Paul is being, the role he is playing here, does not interfere with the gospel, it is the instrument by which God brought the gospel to them.

One of the fundamental qualifications given for church leadership in the New Testament is that we must have men who know what it means to be a father (1 Timothy 3:4–5). If we continue to ignore the obvious it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly because we don’t understand how imitation governs the world. We have neglected one of the fundamental realities: we are supposed to imitate. As a result everything downstream from that goes to pieces. …

Churches need fathers to govern them, but unfortunately today’s church appears to show all the signs of being managed by the ecclesiastical equivalent of single moms. Paul requires that the church be governed by road-tested fathers. …

Now this also explains why the controversy over women’s ordination is not going to go away anytime soon. The issue is not exegesis, the issue is not what the text says. For several centuries we’ve exalted some very feminine virtues to the highest place in the church, and we have demanded that men conform to those standards. … Unfortunately, if those are the standards — if we don’t know what masculine piety looks like anymore, and we have enshrined feminine virtues in the church — then we are stuck. If those are the standards, women would do a better job at being women-pastors than men would do as women-pastors. If we must have women-pastors, then women will be better at it, it would seem to me.

I believe honestly we’re scared by masculine piety. It’s not very easy to control. It’s unsettling. So we’d rather have sweet virtues, we’d rather have feminine virtues in place, and then ask the men to conform. …

It’s not a coincidence that the requirement that bishops be road-tested family men, fathers who rule their families well, is a requirement that immediately follows the prohibition of women in ministry (1 Timothy 2:12). Because we have neglected the qualification that you must be a reliable father, we have patched together some other characteristics that we think would be “nice.” Thus we have come to demand essentially feminine virtues of our ministers, but we are stuck with this arbitrary line from the Bible that keeps the most qualified members of the church, as far as being sweet goes, out.

I really appreciate how J. C. Ryle connects personal assurance to bold mission. Ryle writes this in Startling Questions (NYC: 1853), pages 328-29:

Faith is life. How great the blessing! Who can tell the gulf between life and death? Yet life may be weak, sickly, unhealthy, painful, trying, anxious, worn, burdensome, joyless, smileless, to the last.

Assurance is more than life. It is health, strength, power, vigor, activity, energy, manliness, beauty. … Assurance is, after all, no more than a full-grown faith; a masculine faith that grasps Christ’s promise with both hands.

Notice how this two-handed assurance is connected to two-handed mission. He writes in The Upper Room (London: 1888), pages 78-79:

We want throughout Christendom a return to the old paths of the early Christians. The first followers of the Apostles, no doubt, were, like their teachers, “unlearned and ignorant men.” They had no printed books. They had short creeds, and very simple forms of worship. I doubt much if they could have stood an examination in the Thirty-nine Articles, or the Creed of Athanasius, or even in the Church Catechism.

But what they knew they knew thoroughly, believed intensely, and propagated unhesitatingly, with a burning enthusiasm. They grasped with both hands, and not with finger and thumb, the Personality, the Deity, the offices, the mediation, the atoning work, the free and full grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the inseparable necessity of repentance, faith, and a Christlike life of holiness, self-denial, and charity. On these truths they lived, and for them they were ready to die.

Armed with these truths, without gold to bribe or the sword to compel assent, they turned the world upside down, confounded the Greek and Roman philosophers, and altered in two or three centuries the whole face of Society.

Can we mend these “old paths”? Can we improve them after eighteen centuries? Does human nature require any different medicine? I believe the bones of the oldest human skeleton that ever was unearthed are just like the bones of men in these days, and I believe the moral nature and hearts of men, after the lapse of ages, are just the same. We had better ask for the ‘old paths.’

I am richly blessed by a set of incredible set of friends, a fact that I am especially reminded of whenever I attend a conference like this one (DG pastors conference, Minneapolis). Each of my wise and godly friends are grace gifts from God. But I am especially thankful for Christ, my Super-Friend, to borrow a term from Ray Ortlund’s forthcoming commentary Proverbs: Wisdom That Works (Crossway: March, 2012). It is one of those “must-reads” of 2012.

Here’s what Ortlund writes:

You might have many pseudo-friends who will let you down, even when everything is on the line. But you can also have one Super-Friend who sticks closer than a brother. When the Apostle Paul was put on trial before Caesar, all his friends hightailed it. But it was okay with Paul. He was not even angry. Why? “The Lord stood by me and strengthened me” (2 Timothy 4:17). Proverbs 18:24 is saying, real friends are not found in quantity but in quality. And no one offers us higher quality friendship than Jesus Christ.

When he laid down his life for his friends at the cross, he was forsaken, though he was loyal, so that we would never be forsaken, though we are disloyal. He was the offended brother, but he opened the castle of his heart. We put our feet frequently in his house, but he never wishes we would go away.

C. S. Lewis, in his essay on friendship, says that a new friendship starts out like this: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” Friends do not need to be alike. They just discover how much they have in common.

Guess what you have in common with Christ? Everything you care about the most.

He cares about you.

He cares about your sin.

He cares about your future.

He thinks about you.

He understands you.

He loves you.

You are not alone.

He is here.

You can receive him now.

Will you let the eternal friendship begin for you today?

As the father of two spirited boys, aged 10 and 4, I chuckled at these excerpts from the letters of C. S. Lewis, writing as a 55-year-old “crusted old bachelor.” (There’s some fine parenting advice mixed in here, too.)

December 21, 1953 [Letters, 3:389–390]:

We have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons aged 9 1/2 and 8. I now know what we celibates are shielded from. I will never laugh at parents again. Not that the boys weren’t a delight: but a delight like surf-bathing which leaves one breathless and aching. The energy, the tempo, is what kills.

I have now perceived (what I always suspected from memories of our childhood) that the way to a child’s heart is quite simple: treat them with seriousness and ordinary civility — they ask no more. What they can’t stand (quite rightly) is the common adult assumption that everything they say should be twisted into a kind of jocularity.

December 23, 1953 [Letters, 3:394]:

We have not much news here; the chief event has been that last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively. Can you imagine two crusted old bachelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing.

This pair thought nothing of a four-mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, ‘Let’s do it again!’ Without being in the least priggish, they stuck us as being amazingly adult by our standards and one could talk to them as one would to ‘grown-ups’ — though the next moment they would be wrestling like puppies on the sitting room floor. The highlights of England for them are open coal fires, especially if they can get hold of the billows and blow it up…

December 26, 1953 [Letters, 3:396]:

My brother and I have just had the experience of an American lady to stay with us accompanied by her two sons, aged 9 1/2 and 8. Whew! Lovely creatures — couldn’t meet nicer children — but the pace! I realize have never respected young married people enough and never dreamed of the Sabbath calm which descends on the house when the little cyclones have gone to bed and all the grown-ups fling themselves into chairs and the silence of exhaustion.

Francis A. Schaeffer was born 100 years ago today (Jan. 30, 1912). He died in 1984. In 1974 he wrote this in his book No Little People:

As I see it, the Christian life must be comprised of three concentric circles, each of which must be kept in its proper place.

In the outer circle must be the correct theological position, true biblical orthodoxy and the purity of the visible church. This is first, but if that is all there is, it is just one more seedbed for spiritual pride.

In the second circle must be good intellectual training and comprehension of our own generation. But having only this leads to intellectualism and again provides a seedbed for pride.

In the inner circle must be the humble heart — the love of God, the devotional attitude toward God. There must be the daily practice of the reality of the God whom we know is there.

These three circles must be properly established, emphasized and related to each other. At the center must be kept a living relationship to the God we know exists. When each of these three circles is established in its proper place, there will be tongues of fire and the power of the Holy Spirit. Then, at the end of my life, when I look back over my work since I have been a Christian, I will see that I have not wasted my life.