Author: Tony Reinke

On New Year’s Resolutions

Tony Reinke New Year's Resolutions

Tis the season for talk of resolutions, and before you pooh-pooh the idea of resolutions, or before you start listing out your resolutions for 2013 in a personal journal, consider a few words from the Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12:

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

From this text, here are a few bulleted points to meditatively ponder:

  • By his power (δύναμις) God is eager to fulfill (πληρόω) the totality (πᾶς) of our faith-filled resolutions (εὐδοκία). Which means …
  • God cares about our resolutions, all of them — and he sets no limit to their number.
  • Our resolutions are legit only because God, by his power, is resolute on our eternal good in all things (Romans 8:28).
  • True godly resolutions focus outward: on God, on Christ, on divine glory, and on the good of others (2 Thessalonians 1:3–4, 11–12).
  • Shortsighted resolutions, resolutions with me as their end, are powerless and destined to fail.
  • True resolutions should fit within the context of our eschatological hope (2 Thessalonians 1:5–10).
  • True resolutions should fit within the reality of our union with Christ (2 Thessalonians 1:12).
  • True godly resolutions — “works of faith” — focus on God’s enabling power, thus they seek for what only God can provide.

And of course if you’d like help starting your list of resolutions, I find this one to be very helpful: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2, NIV).

As an aside, I appreciate what John Piper wrote about resolutions in his 2009 article:

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Well, the examined life is not worth living either if the examination produces no resolutions. What examination and experience teach us is that the unplanned life settles into fruitless routine. The drifting life — the coasting, que-sera-sera, unreflective life — tends to be a wasted life. The opposite of this is self-examination — life-examination, routine-examination, schedule-examination, heart-examination — followed by “resolves for good.”

My Favorite Books of 2012 on Writing

Tony Reinke spurgeon, Writing

Each year I set aside the month of January to read (and re-read) great books on writing. And each year I discover one or two worthy new titles to add to my bowed shelf of books on the topic.

I suppose the thrill of discovering a new great book on writing is a feeling shared only by fellow wordsmiths. But it is sweet, no? I distinctly remember the bookstore where in 2006 I discovered Virginia Tufte’s magnificent book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. I return to her book every year to be inspired in the delicate art of sentence crafting. And I still remember the smell of the bookstore where I discovered Stanley Fish’s, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, in 2011. Like I said, finding great books on writing is memorable.

This past year I added four new impressive titles to my shelf, so I guess I’ll call them my favorite books of 2012 on writing:

  1. Jack Hart, Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (University of Chicago)
  2. Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life (Canon)
  3. Constance Hale, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing (W. W. Norton)
  4. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (Knopf)

Santa Christ

Tony Reinke Christmas, Christmas and the cross, Sinclair Ferguson

What follows is Sinclair Ferguson’s article, “Santa Christ,” as published in Tabletalk Magazine, December 1997.

I took the hand of my toddler son (it was two decades ago) as together we made our way into the local shop on the small and remote Scottish island where earlier that year I had been installed as pastor.

It was Christmas week; the store was brightly decorated and a general air of excitement was abroad. Without warning, the conversations of the customers were brought to a sudden halt by a questioning voice from beside me. My son’s upraised index finger pointed at a large cardboard Santa Claus: “Daddy, who is that funny looking man?” he asked.

Amazement spread across the faces of the jostling shoppers; accusing glances were redirected to his father. Such shame—the minister’s son did not even recognize Santa Claus! What likelihood then of hearing good news in his preaching at this festive time?

Such experiences naturally encourage us to bewail the fact that the western world is given over annually to its Claus-mass or Commerce-mass, a reworked pagan Saturnalia of epic proportions whose only connection with the incarnation is semantic. Santa is worshiped, not the Saviour; pilgrims go to the store, not to the manger. It is the feast of Indulgence not of the Incarnation.

It is always easier to lament and critique the new paganism of secularism’s blatant idolatry than to see how easily the church—and we ourselves—twist or dilute the message of the incarnation in order to suit our own tastes. But, sadly, we have various ways of turning the Saviour into a kind of Santa Claus.

For one thing, in our worship this Christmas we may varnish the staggering truth of the incarnation with what is visually, audibly, and aesthetically pleasing, thus confusing emotional pleasure with true adoration. For another, we may denigrate our Lord with a Santa Claus Christology. It is alarming to see how common it is to manufacture a Jesus who is the mirror reflection of Santa Claus. Christmas time demands clearer thinking on our part!

A Pelagian Jesus emerges under Santa’s influence. Like Santa he simply adds something to lives that are already in fairly respectable order. Christmas dinner is simply a better dinner for the well-nourished. Jesus thus becomes an added bonus who makes a good life even better.

Or, perhaps, it is the slightly more sophisticated Jesus who, Santa-like, gives gifts to those who have already done the best they could! Thus Jesus’ hand, like Santa’s sack, opens only when we can give an upper-percentile answer to the none-too-weighty probe, “Have you been good this year?” Heaven, like Santa, helps those who help themselves. The only difference from medieval theology here is that we do not use its Latin phraseology facere quod in se est (to do what is in one’s self).

For yet others, this is the time of year for the mystical Jesus who, like Santa Claus, is important because of the good experiences we have, irrespective of the details of historical reality. As long as we have the experiences, all is well.

But Jesus is not to be identified with Santa Claus; worldly thinking—however much it employs Jesus-language—is not to be confused with biblical truth.

The Scriptures systematically strip away the veneer which covers the real truth of the Christmas story. Jesus did not come to add to our comforts; He did not come to those who were already helping themselves.

Those whose lives were bound up with the events of the first Christmas did not find His coming an easy and pleasurable experience. Mary and Joseph’s lives were turned upside down; the shepherds’ night was frighteningly interrupted, and their futures potentially radically changed; the Magi faced all kinds of inconvenience and separation; and our Lord Himself, conceived before wedlock, born probably in a cave, would spend His early days as a refugee from the bloodthirsty and vindictive Herod.

There is, therefore, an element in the Gospel narratives which stresses that the coming of Jesus is a disturbing event of the deepest proportions. And that by necessity, since He did not come merely to add something extra to life, but to deal with our spiritual insolvency and the debt of our sin. He was not conceived in the womb of Mary for those who have done their best but for those in whose flesh there dwells no good thing. He was not sent to be the source of good experiences but the One who was destined to suffer the pangs of hell in order to be our Savior.

The Christians who first began to celebrate the birth of the Savior saw this. They were not, contrary to what is often mistakenly said, simply adding a Christian veneer to a pagan festival—the Roman Saturnalia—any more than Christians who mark Reformation Day are adding a Christian veneer to the paganism sometimes associated with Halloween. In fact they were committing themselves to a radical alternative to the world and its Saturnalia, refusing to be squeezed into its mold. They were determined to fix mind, heart, will and strength exclusively on the Lord Jesus Christ. There was no confusion in their minds between the world and the Gospel, Saturnalia and Christmas. They were citizens of another Empire altogether.

Indeed, such was the malice evoked by their other-worldly devotion to Christ that during the Diocletian persecutions of 300 A.D. a number of them were murdered as they gathered to celebrate Christmas. Their offense? Worship of the true Christ—incarnate, crucified, risen, glorified, and returning—who that day demanded, and had, their all.

One Christmas eve, in my teenage years, I opened a book given to me as a present, and found myself so overwhelmed by its teaching on my recently-found Savior that I began to shake with emotion at what had dawned on me: The world did not celebrate His coming but crucified Him. Doubtless I was an impressionable teenager. But does not the world still crucify Him in its own, often subtle ways? Unless the significance of what He did at the first Christmas shakes us we can scarcely be said to have understood much of what it means, or of who He really is.

Who is He in yonder stall
At whose feet the shepherds fall?
‘Tis the Lord, O wondrous story,
‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory.

Let us not confuse Christ with Santa Claus. Let us find ways this Christmas, of making Him known in all His incarnate wonder.

Preaching and Complementarity

Tony Reinke Complementarian, Complementarianism

Claire Smith was a feminist, who then came to faith in Christ, and eventually earned a PhD in New Testament from Moore College. She’s now a wife, mum, and a complementarian with quite a story to tell, a story she tells in her new book God’s Good Design (Matthias Media, 2012). There’s much to commend from the book, but this excerpt struck me (from pages 230–231):

I have never felt that I have nothing to contribute. Because of this, as well as being convinced it is not God’s will for me to do so, I have never felt the need to teach the Bible to men or to be a leading elder in a church. I have had to ask myself if I wanted to do so — because invitations have come — but making the decision not to do so has not been a difficult one. I realize this is not always the case for some women who say they feel ‘called’ to those ministries.

My decision has been difficult only when — if I can be brutally honest, brothers — I hear inept preaching from a man. I do not mean your average run-of-the-mill preaching, where the preacher loves the Lord and loves his word but there is something lacking in the power or passion or application of that word. I mean preaching where the clarity of God’s word is obscured, or where error is proclaimed as truth, or where the preacher preaches himself and not our wonderful Saviour. It is then that I feel the rub of the different God-given responsibilities of men and women that prevent women from preaching to mixed congregations.

Of course, I realize the pride inherent in such a complaint. And I realize it is not only women who struggle with poor preaching. But perhaps this is a good place to remind those brothers who are preachers that you serve your sisters, in a way that you do not serve your brothers, by being the best preacher you can be — because if there is no lack in the pulpit, your sisters will be less tempted to want to fill it.

My Favorite Version of the Christmas Story

Tony Reinke Christmas, Christmas and the cross, D.A. Carson

… is of course the version with the dragon in it — Revelation 12:1–6.

I discuss this passage in my book Lit! to show the spiritual value of dragons (see pages 85–86). But here’s the gist of Revelation 12:1–6 in the words of D. A. Carson in his outstanding book Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus (Crossway, 2010):

The scene is grotesque. The dragon stands in front of the woman. She is lying there in labor. Her feet are in the stirrups, writhing as she pushes to give birth, and this disgusting dragon is waiting to grab the baby as it comes out of the birth canal and then eat it (12:4). The scene is meant to be grotesque: it reflects the implacable rage of Satan against the arriving Messiah.

Do we not know how this works out in historical terms? The first bloodbath in the time of Jesus takes place in the little village of Bethlehem — in the slaughter of the innocents as Herod tries to squash this baby’s perceived threat to his throne.

Jesus is saved by Joseph, who is warned by God in a dream and flees to Egypt. Herod, in a rage, “gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under” (Matt. 2:16). Satan later manifests his rage against Jesus in the temptation, and he manifests his rage against the church in every temptation. Satan’s rage manifests itself when some people try to push Jesus over a cliff, and others take up stones to stone him. Satan is after Jesus and wants to destroy him by any means possible.

Behind all these attempts to destroy Jesus is the red dragon, and behind the red dragon is God himself, bringing to pass his purposes even in the death of his Son to bring about our redemption.

But the text does not go on to talk about Jesus’ triumph here, not because this book has no interest in him but because the triumph of Jesus has already been spectacularly introduced in Revelation 4–5. The great vision of Revelation 4–5 controls the entire book. There we learn that Christ, this male child, is the only one who is fit to open the scroll in God’s right hand to bring about all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing. He is the Lion and the Lamb, the reigning king and the bloody sacrifice, the heir to David’s throne yet the one who appears from God’s throne. Because of his struggle, men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation are redeemed. Countless millions gather around him who sits on the throne and the Lamb and sing a new song of adoring, grateful, praise.

But here in Revelation 12 we move from Jesus’ birth to his ascension; we run through his entire life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension in two lines: he “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter” and “was snatched up to God and to his throne” (v. 5). The male child, Jesus, is born and snatched to heaven. In other words, this passage focuses not on Christ’s triumph — that is presupposed — but on what happens to the woman and her children, the ones left behind. And that is us: the messianic community, the people of God, the blood-bought church of Jesus Christ. This side of the cross they are described as “those who obey God’s commands and hold the testimony of Jesus” (v. 17). The woman (the messianic community) is the focus of the passage.

Work, Art, and Money

Tony Reinke Dorothy Sayers, Vocation

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (Harcourt, 1941), 219–220:

Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done. What else causes the armaments worker to labor passionately when he knows that the existence of his country is threatened, but that his heart travels along the endless band with the machine parts and that his imagination beholds the fulfillment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear. As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he “watches to finish the work”; for once, that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it, in a vision of Idea, Energy, and Power.

It is unfortunate that so little effort should be made by Church or State to show him the works of peace in the same terms. Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygienic world? I doubt it; yet there is much merit in sanitary plumbing — more, if you come to think of it, than there is in warfare.

But if the common man were really to adopt this high-minded and Christian attitude to the worth of his work and the needs of his neighbor, are there not some products which he would refuse at all costs to produce? I think there are; and that many of the machines would stop, unless the art of propagandist deception were carried to even greater lengths than it is at present. And who would issue the propaganda, if profit were no longer a motive? Perhaps some state which, not having enough useful commodities to exchange for necessities, was obliged to specialise in the export of trash. And if nobody would accept the trash? In that case, we could scrap a very great number of the machines, and the “problem” of industrialisation would assume a different aspect; because, in that case, every man in the world would have become an artist after his fashion.