Jan 23, 2022 | Parents and Family
I had a wonderful experience, and privilege, last week, of being on a podcast with a couple British lads discussing my international best seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent (I’ll do another post about the discussion, great fun). In the podcasts I do, I always point out that this is not a parenting book, but an apologetics book for parents. It is not do a, b, and c, and you can get results x, y, and z, or 10 steps to accomplish this or that with your kids, and so on. I’ve never been a fan of such books, on parenting or not. Thinking about this for the last several days, I realized I could boil the purpose of the book down to one. It came to me as I thought about my discussion with my two new British friends, Dan and Phil, and as I struggled to tell them what the book is really all about. This responsibility can be boiled down to this: We must teach our kids that Christianity is The Truth. Everything else is fluff. Of course the latter assertion is over the top hyperbole, but it makes my point. If we don’t major on the former, the latter might not matter. Why? (more…)
Aug 15, 2021 | Parents and Family
Instead of giving my wife flowers or taking her out to a nice dinner for this the 34th anniversary of our marriage, I thought I’d give her a blog post. It’s easier, and less expensive. Not to mention that it will last longer. It’s this kind of thoughtfulness that has kept her putting up with me for all these years, or maybe it’s the mercy and grace born of the cross of Christ to which we dedicated our lives before we ever met. I’ll go with mercy and grace! Any successful marriage that stands the test of time needs plenty of both. When we were walking into church this morning, Sarah, that would be my bride, needed a reminder of how long we’ve been married (you lose track after a while), and when I said 34 years, she replied, “Holy crap!” I know! The swift passage of time is a cliché I’ve commented on many times on this blog, but no matter how many times you talk about it, it is still incomprehensible just how swift that passage really is for we mere mortals. Since this is a post about marriage and not time, I’ll stay focused on the former. (more…)
Jun 20, 2021 | Parents and Family
Somebody told me there is this thing called Father’s Day, and I couldn’t believe I actually get my own day! If greeting card companies were going to make up a day in which to sell a lot of greeting cards, having a day for fathers is a mighty fine way to do it. They probably made up such a day a long time ago when the value of fathers in American culture was unquestioned. Up until the 1960s, when all the ideas that had been bubbling among Western intellectual elites for several hundred years in the West exploded into the culture, fathers were seen not only as valuable, but as indispensable. In other words, a society, let alone a family, could not exist without fathers doing what fathers do, and doing it relatively well. What is it that fathers do? Raise boys to become men, and girls to become women. Before the sexual revolution pretty much destroyed everything, most people knew the difference. Nowadays, it’s the over educated who don’t, and average people with average common sense who do. (more…)
Mar 25, 2021 | Parents and Family
We know in this excessively “woke” age we live in that the Bible is terribly regressive, and of course we Neanderthal’s wouldn’t have it any other way. One thing we know that our overly-educated elite refuse to admit, is that there is a biological, psychological, and emotional difference between males and females, men and women. I know, radical. The thing we have to remember about the woke mob is that they are a tiny minority of the population, with a very lot of cultural power and the biggest megaphones. What they don’t have is reality. When human beings insist on denying reality it will eventually rebound back on them, usually in horrific ways. History makes that obvious. The beautiful thing about the Bible, though, is that is corresponds perfectly with reality because the author is the author of reality! (more…)
Feb 21, 2021 | Parents and Family
This will be my final word in writing about the issues introduced on my book page, and discussed on Take 1, and Take 2. I’m kind of proud that I’ve been able to get Calvinists and Arminians to agree about something regarding salvation. In my experience discussing these issues, everyone regardless of their theology agrees with my current critic:
Only the Lord’s work prevails. . . . The Holy Spirit is God. He alone can regenerate hearts. . . . The means of grace are the means of grace, but the Spirit works through them when and where he pleases.
Good Calvinist that I am, I absolutely agree with this. The problem is the implication of the author’s assertion: when and where he pleases. If these words, all of them, were said outside of the current discussion, I wouldn’t even bother commenting on them because I believe they are biblical truth. The problem stems from what came previously, the assertion that nothing we can do in the raising of our children really matters, not ultimately anyway. I dealt with that as the straw man it is, playing God’s sovereignty off of human responsibility as if they are somehow, some way mutually exclusive. They are not, as even a cursory read through the Bible makes clear. (more…)
Feb 20, 2021 | Parents and Family
In my first post I addressed part of this misunderstanding, that “there is absolutely no correlation between faithful (or reasonably faithful) work in this with the outcome of personal faith.” The “work” is a reference to raising our children in the faith. The concern of my critic, and I think this is true for others who agree with him, is that I believe, “If you do X, then Y should result.” And I replied, You’re darn right I do! I want to be perfectly clear in this post as to why I think having a reasonable expectation of results is the biblical position, that whenever you do X, no matter what X is, it is reasonable to expect certain results. It could be raising children in the faith, it could be tending a garden, building a house, practicing to hone your art or craft, building a business, getting a degree, anything X human beings do. Can we be absolutely certain of or Guarantee results, or that we are in control of the results? Of course not! But to say that because of this it follows that we can’t then have a reasonable expectation of the results, or be confident that we can produce results is, well, unreasonable. And unbiblical. (more…)
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