I married the most beautiful girl in the world on September 9, 1980.  She still loves her “fuddy duddy” husband who usually never has a clue.   She is remarkable in every way.

I like this song.  It seems that there are times in marriage that require a loving partner to wait for the other as we learn to walk in pace.

We said we’d walk together
Baby come what may
Back from the twilight
Should we lose our way
As we were walking
A hand should slip free
I’ll wait for you
Should I fall behind wait for me

Swore we’d travel together
Darlin side by side
We’d help each other
Stay in stride
Each lover steps on
So differently
So I’ll wait for you
Should I fall behind wait for me

Everyone dreams of
A love lasting and true
You and I know what this world can do
So let’s make ourselves be
That the other may see
And I’ll wait for you
Should I fall behind wait for me

There’s a beautiful river
In the valley ahead
There need be no drought
Soon we will wed
Should we lose each other
In the shadow of the evening dreams
Oh, I’ll wait for you
Should I fall behind wait for me
Darlin I’ll wait for you
Should I fall behind wait for me

Wait for me
If I should fall behind wait for me
Wait for me

Thanks for waiting for me.  I love you Donna!

My life revolved around Dan.   We were buddies.  Life was really good.  I don’t think I had an insecure thought in my head.   i never considered what I may have been seen as in the eyes of others.  I had friends, unconditional friends…. like Dan.

Then came seventh grade my “innocence was carried away by the unforeseen.”  For some reason, we had not seen much of each other that summer.  I was so excited to  be reunited again at school.  And then came that fateful first day.  We sat down at lunch and I was so excited to see him,  ready to catch up on summer and begin a new year together.  I remember it so clearly….  He called me “butt lips.”!  And that was the last time Dan Nichols ever talked to me.  And my first experience with insecurity.  From that point on Dan was my nemesis, churning out contempt for me like a flood.

I discovered later that Dan’s father had taken the family into the back yard and shot himself.   How could I have missed that?  As a young boy, the experience of rejection overpowered any sense of compassion or understanding towards Dan.

I was too young to understand what happened.  I prayed the rosary.  At night I cried myself to sleep.  I talked to no one about it.  I had no one to go to.   My parents were oblivious to my loneliness and despair.

So by the eight grade it was easy to jump into the drug and party culture that provided me an escape from the soberness that with every morning haunted me with loneliness and insecurity.  I honestly thought that my friends -  and friends from that point on were somewhat tenuous and noncommittal anyway - were always mocking my lips and looks behind my back.

Although this was a very painful time in my life, I became aware of the emptiness that is the condition of every man.   Yet this insecurity ultimately led to my conversion to Christianity at seventeen.   I am so sad for Dan, yet this experience in my life was the loving providence of God drawing me to Him.  God also used this fundamental fear in me to preserve me from the sexual revolution that was exploding all around me and I was able to enter my marriage without the haunting memories of failure that so many of my generation has experienced.

Since my conversion, I have experienced many more painful times like business failures, dreadful accidents and disappointments.  Yet each one has opened a “door of opportunity” that would not have been possible without the “turn” that pain brings.

I lost track of Dan Nichols, but I think of him and pray for him regularly.  I hope to see him again and this time be able to love him unconditionally as my Savior did to me.  And to show him a man who also was cut off from his beloved father and experienced loss greater than any human being could ever experience.  And he did it for Dan and me.

I know there are plenty out there that are militant against what i am about to write, but here goes…

Years ago during a road trip, my kids’ attitudes were terrible; they were fighting and bickering as kids sometimes do; but it went too far.  So I pulled off the highway and found a roadside park where I lined all five of them up along a fence and proceeded to tell them that if they died right then - with their current attitudes - I had reason to believe they all would go to hell. Wow, what a transformation! (This is not an exposition of my theology by the way… Now I would probably have been even tougher on them! That was a joke BTW))

Self-awareness. How do we get our kids’ minds around the Imago Dei?  -that they as rational creatures, most accurately reflect the glory of God. That their whole lives are a “set up” by God through his infinite love and mercy. However, in their goodness is badness. How do you help them understand the implications of the fall?

I was wondering if some of us parents, through our lack of precept (or example!) inadvertently teach our kids that living in a Christian family is like a Get out of jail free card?

But God has given us a precious gift. I have come to believe that the rod of discipline is a means of grace. In some mysterious way it provides the grace to my child to ultimately embrace a savior, Jesus Chris. It is the only way I can make sense of the following verse.

Proverbs 23:13-14 Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.

It includes an imperative: do not withhold discipline from a child

It gives us a method: Strike with a rod

It addresses our fears: even though you strike him with a rod, he will not die. This is probably one of the greatest reasons parents don’t correct their kids through chastisement.

It gives us an incredible promise: you will save his soul from Sheol (hell).

Think about it. This is lunacy to the educated mind and to the modern/post-modern person. A stick and a whack on the rump will produce everlasting fruit?! But isn’t that just like God? He always requires faith…. So take a hint from God here.

Do we understand how grace comes to us in baptism or celebrating the Lord’s table?  It is mysterious and we don’t really know how it works, but we do know it does; so we embrace Scripture’s imperative and thereby receive the promise of his grace.

Even though, let’s try and figure it out though.  Here is how I have seen it: The rod of correction brings two benefits to our kids.

One… it imparts to them a healthy understanding of what sin is and that they are sinners. (this is good)

Two… after discipline, the humbling of their hearts to their parent’s authority through repentance in the end prepares their heart to submit to the ultimate authority: God. (this is better)

So when they turn about 12 to 14 years old - at least with my kids -  they accept the fact that God is God. So it becomes a simple and natural response to receive Christ as His Son and sacrifice for their sin.

Now, discipline without affection can be a very dangerous instrument in the hands of a parent.  And discipline without clear prior-admonition or post-resolution (i.e. clear and clean repentance) is equally dangerous.

I know this is rather simplistic, but I hope you find it helpful. To my married kids: don’t give up with your own kids.  Make sure they come to the cleansing repentance that only comes after clear chastisement.  And remember every attitude of anger, jealousy, forgiveness, selfishness, resentment are all manifestations of the self-absorption of the fall and need correction as much or more than their actions.

There, I’ve said enough to be dangerous!

1.  Avoid moralism! Your listeners are wired to think moralistically.   In other words, they already are looking to find the next thing they can do in order to be accepted by God.  Don’t make your message an easy target.

Straightening out the lives of parishioners is the stock and trade of the pastorate. But much of this straightening is often unrelated to Christ and the real depth of congregational problems.  Moralism whether it takes the form of denunciation or pep talks, can ultimately only create awareness of sin and guilt or manufactured virtues built on will power. A ministry which leads to genuine sanctification and growth, on the other hand, avoids moralism, first by making clear the deep rootage of sin-problems in the flesh so that the congregation is not battling these in the dark, and then by showing that every victory over the flesh is won by faith in Christ, laying hold of union with him in death and resurrection and relying on his Spirit for power over sin… Ministries which attack only the surface of sin and fail to ground spiritual growth in the believer’s union with Christ produce either self-righteousness or despair, and both of these conditions are inimical to spiritual life. Richard Lovelace, The Dynamics of Spiritual Life (emphasis mine)

2.  Don’t be pedantic. Your listeners don’t want commentary they need life! In the words of DA Carson, we need to devote a fair bit of thought to the relations between ancient text and contemporary context, between expository lecture and expository preaching (where men and women are made to feel the text’s bite and balm), between rigorous exegetical accuracy and colorful presentation.

3.  Remember the gospel! Think motivation.  What motivates Christians to greater levels of commitment, sacrifice and holiness?  Only the Gospel.  In I Corinthians 5, Paul states that the love of Christ controlled him.  What was it that both constrained (think compulsion) and restrained (think banks of a river)?  What both compelled him to be “out of  his mind” and yet restrained him to hold his “reserve”if necessary?  It was the love of Christ, not just his love for Christ, but as the Greek suggests (and the majority of commentators agree) namely “Christ’s love” or “the love Christ showed” for him.  No one doubts that believers’ love for Christ motivates their actions, but here Paul is concentrating on an earlier stage of motivation, namely the love shown by Christ in dying for humankind. (M Harris, NIGNT II Cor).  When preaching we must see that Christians, as much as unbelievers, need the gospel, to see Jesus’ sacrificial love demonstrated at the cross.  That every thing Christ demands of us he has already done for us.  Here are a couple MP3 and articles by Dr. Keller that have really helped me in this area…. (all of these can be found here)

Evangelistic Worship PDF

Preaching to the heart I MP3

Preaching to the hear II MP3

Contextualization MP3

The Centrality of the Gospel PDF

Today the stock market dropped to it’s lowest in over ten years.  Most of you reading this are probably not invested but I think it important for you to read the quote below and learn a lesson now before you are older and forget that everything has its season and the outward condition of any man does not determine his/her spiritual condition. OR God’s disposition towards them…

Some people make a lot of money, living in a time for gain. Others lose a great deal.  Prosperity is His gift, and so are stock-market crashes.  God allows us to store it all up. He appoints the day we throw it away, not caring about it any more.  God is the one who gives the power to get wealth (Dt. 8.18). And when men forget Him, He is the one who brings financial calamity upon them  “Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store” (Dt. 28.17).  The commotion of the stock market reveals the hubris of man better than few other things.  We believe we can pump up the Dow forever and make money at a fine clip forever… but we cannot.  The cycles ordained by God for everything in this fallen and silly world will come around again, and many a millionaire will go white in deisbeleif.  “How could this happen?”  Friend, look at the world. How could it not?

Douglas Wilson,  Joy at the end of the tether.  The inscrutable wisdom of ecclesiastes.

It is appropriate at these times to give thanks to our loving Father who knows much better than we what we need.

Many of you who read this are young dads or moms. I hope you find this helpful.

Ask this question in front of a group of reformed Christians:  what is the nature of man? The initial response (although not always I must admit), is that man is depraved. No problem with that.  It’s a good start.  Yet man was also created in the image of God and this is crucially important for our children to understand.

I acknowledge that there is no merit in being image bearers; however in raising children, it is imperative that they have a healthy  (and I emphasize Healthy!) grasp of their beauty, dignity, value and worth before and from God.   Just like our righteousness received in Christ,  it is an alien dignity, an impartation from God himself; A gift to be acknowledged through a humble repentance that recognizes the fall that “darkened” that image and now requires a Savior to truly restore the imago dei.  Without this understanding of the genesis of our dignity, all other views lead only to conceit and ultimately to despair.  One goal as parents is to equip your children to understand that the dignity they have is only a “signpost”  directing their hearts to their Creator God.

As soon as my children were toddlers, I would tuck them into bed at night (an important practice!) and ask them these questions (with infinite variations):

1.  Who made you?

2.  Does God make any mistakes?

3.  Did you chose your birth date, family, or name?

4.  Did you know that God saved mom and dad so that you could hear the good news of Jesus Christ? What if you were born in Mozambique? What would it be like?

Then I would pray for them that they would they would trust Jesus with their lives and not die (a practice of Spurgeon’s mother)…

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory (emphasis his)

Psalm 8:4-6 What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet..

Psalm 139:14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

The goal for my kids is not the ungodly and conceited form of self-esteem that is becoming so prevalent in the Millenial generation; But a deep humility and gratitude towards a loving God that ultimately produces a bowing of their little hearts before Him in repentance and trust.

Recently, one evening my wife and I were getting ready for bed, but the kids were still awake. I still have six kids at home ranging from 21 years old to my twins at 10 years.  They were all in the bedroom next to us.  My wife, knowing that it was getting late, called out to them to “get to bed!”  But I noticed something going on that numerous times has brought such delight and happiness to my soul, so I held my wife back from enforcing the “code.”

“Listen,” I said.  As we laid there, we heard all six kids talking simultaneously, laughing, joking, acting out roles of movies,  like best friends!  We sat there and just soaked in the moment.  “Let them stay up,” I said “and let us just relish the moment.  It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Our family has been really blessed to have deep affections for one another. The kids from my oldest at 25 to the youngest at 10 are best friends and continue that way.

I suppose there are many reasons for this.  It could be our natural disposition.  Or simply because we spend a lot of time together. I am sure these help.  But I think in reality, we have “stumbled” onto this more by God’s grace than anything else…   Maybe these are the reasons…

1.  Jesus Christ:  We teach our kids that without the new hearts Christ has obtained for us through his substitutionary sacrifice on the Cross, we would be blind to true affections and be groping in the fog of this secular landscape for solutions.

2.  We are reformed in doctrine:In simple terms we have taught our kids that our salvation is TOTALLY dependent upon God’s free will and not our own.  He predestined us, chose us and gave us new hearts, a taste for Him, because he loved us and not the other way around. We also believe in the complete corruption of our nature before being In Christ and our inability to repent and believe the gospel without first having our nature transformed by a sovereign God.  This gives our kids great humility and gratefulness.

3.  From infancy, we have taught our kids early on that they were created by a loving God in His own image who makes no mistakes in timing, place, family, race, or country.  And that God made them in His image, beautiful, valuable and exalted above the rest of creation. He set them in the Taylor household, by his love, so they could hear the gospel of Jesus Christ.  And that same God saved their parents just so they could hear this good news.  This has given our children a deep sense of their infinite value to God, not because of what they have done, but because they are the Imago Dei. This gives them great humility and confidence!

4.  We home school: This has helped us avoid much of the problems associated with the segregated system we have today in many institutions.  We even keep our kids with us during church!

Now some think that these blessings have come to us in spite of what we believe. That if we truly acted out our beliefs on human depravity, beauty and God’s sovereignty, we would act quite differently.   But I say that it is because of what we believe that we have these affections, not in spite of….

George MacDonald said “the door of opportunity always opens behind you.”  Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you….  Include your kids in the process, they will pay you back in spades…  So will God!

Romans 12:19  Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,” says the Lord. (NAU)

A couple things from this verse:

1.  There are some things that God prohibits us from doing, while at the same time He sovereignly permits Himself to do.

2.  Inferred in this verse is this: What we cannot do without sinning, God does without sin.

In other words, we are human, God is not.  Let us be careful of forgetting the “otherness” of God.  Too many times we pull him down to our level, which is a grave mistake.  “God created man in His own image, since then man has always been trying to return the favor.” (a quote I read somewhere)

And let us always strive to grasp most fully God’s love demonstrated through Jesus Christ on the cross of calvary, our Substitution and foundation of Hope and the forward look….  (Romans 5.8; 2 Cor. 5.21)

1 John 4:9-10  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Only in the light of Calvary can hell be fully understood….

Some whom I respect deeply have made attempts to describe hell as a place where sinners would rather be than heaven, and that the doors of hell are “locked from the inside.”  All this to soften the image of God pouring out wrath on sinners who don’t know any better.

This is a tough topic for anyone to get their hands around.   I just listened to a teaching by John Piper given at Resolved 2008.   It will only increase your love, gratefulness, and savor for God.  I hope you will listen to it also.

John Piper:  The echo and Insufficiency of Hell

I want to give you this book!

I have been a avid listener and reader of Dr. Timothy Keller for three years now.  His insights into the centrality of the gospel have not only changed my life, which is the most important thing, but also reconstructed much of my harmful thinking i have embraced over the 35 years of my Christian experience.   The exposition of Jesus’ most well known parable in this new little book is the message that Mr. Keller states has helped direct the overriding vision of his church, Redeemer Presbyterian, :   the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This book (along with his message: The Prodigal Sons) is a must read for every Christian and especially young aspiring ministers, both male and female .

I will make an offer to all of you out there, an ethical bribe:  If you refer two readers to my blog, and they read a post, make a comment (hopefully on another post than this, since this one does not contain any content to speak of), and mention your name, I will send you a free copy of this new book!   The only commitment you must make is to read the book within three weeks after receiving it and then make a comment on this post about how the book effected you .  That’s it!

Oh, and you should send me your mailing address to my email address so I can send you the book:  teleoschris@gmail.com.

I may withdraw this offer at any point, so move fast!

with the forward look,

chris