The aim of this post is somewhat narrow.   I won’t attempt to comment on the entirety of the Ephesians passage that follows and contains what some scholars call a household code.  What I want to challenge is the commonly accepted interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 that claims that Paul is teaching that there is to be mutual submission in a Christian marriage of both the wife and the husband to one another.   

I have a confession to make: I find it a challenge to pray. It is not something I can easily do. It is hard also to be consistent in praying daily and regularly throughout the day. Prayer cannot be formalized or systematized. For me prayer exposes my weakness and at times my raw unbelief but maybe that is not so bad. If we come to prayer with a sense of our sufficiency to pray then are we indeed praying? When we pray it seems that at the core of what should be occurring in our minds and hearts is just how needy and messy we are.

I am sure that you, like me, have been somewhat preoccupied with world events of late. I am not certain if the number of disturbing events is due to the fact that there are more now than (let’s say) two and a half years ago or that we simply have greater access to immediate information and reporting. Of course we have all been impacted by the covid pandemic. Now there is the unjust war on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and his henchmen that threatens to spill over into Europe. Xi Jinping and China’s Communist Party have been intensifying their threats toward Taiwan. Kim Jong-un keeps cranking out new ballistic nuclear missiles. Then there is the cultural and social unrest here in our own country. Inflation is on the rise and so is horrific gun violence. It seems that the very fabric of our nation is unraveling at breakneck speed. All the political and cultural tension and stress has also made its way into the church. Rather than stand as salt and light, the (evangelical) church (my tribe) seems to have imbibed the heady cocktail of blatant worldliness!

I have come to three settled convictions regarding what I am to do in light of all these overwhelming and seemingly threatening circumstances.

For some time I have been fascinated by the way the Apostle Paul lays out most of his letters. In a letter like the one he wrote to the Roman believers he lays out the Gospel using the indicative mood. That means that everything he writes from 1:1 to 6:10 is descriptive. There are no imperatives or commands given until 6:11, where he urges his readers to consider themselves to be, by God’s grace in Christ, dead to the rule or dominion of sin. Yet, he really does not give more detailed directives until he comes to 12:1-2.

Therefore, I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable act of worship; and do not be conformed to this age but be transformed by the renewing of your mind for the purpose of you being able to approve what the will of God is, the good, the pleasing and the perfect.

This time of year I am drawn again and again to the prologue of John’s Gospel. I never get tired reading through it slowly, contemplatively and prayerfully. At times I try to imagine what it must have been like for those early first and second century Christians to have heard it read in their assemblies for the first time or to have had the great gift of setting their eyes on a copy of it. What no doubt would have immediately caught their attention was the phrase “En archē ēn ho logos” (In the beginning was the Word). The Logos would have been somewhat familiar to both Jewish and Gentile believers.

As you read the New Testament there are times when it seems that the Law is viewed negatively and there are times when it seems to be viewed positively. We can use Paul’s letter to the Romans to make this point. He sees the law as something under which the unbeliever is in bondage. Those who come to faith in Christ are not under law but under grace (Romans 4:14, 7:6). So in some sense the law is something from which we need to be delivered or set free.

Freeman Barton came from a New Hampshire farm family. In spite of his quiet and soft spoken manner he was as solid as New Hampshire granite. At the core of his life, of course, was his faith in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and his unswerving commitment to the authority and sufficiency of God’s Word, the Bible.

I have been following the posts and video debate of my fellow Advent Christians Catherine Rybicki, Luke Copeland and Robert Mayer concerning egalitarianism and complementarianism. By now I am sure all those who are regulars at Advent Christian Voices have no need for these terms to be defined or explained. Of these two positions I do believe that the complementarian one is the harder of the two to hold.

In John chapter six we find the record of Jesus miraculously feeding over five thousand people. This, along with his miracles of healing, John calls, "signs." They were signs of the presence of God's Kingdom coming into the world in the person of the Jesus Christ. As such they were pointers to his deity and to his work as God's appointed Messiah.

The Gospel is really very counter intuitive. We are wired as Pharisees. We have a hard time understanding the nature of grace. Even though we confess that we believe God saves us by grace, we tend to operate in the arena of works. We are basically performance driven. We live on a treadmill of performance in how we conceive of God dealing with us. We are treated by others this way and we treat others this way. But God does not treat his born again and justified children in this way. It is God’s grace relied upon and even to some degree felt that motivates his children to live in in loving obedience to him rather than in a quid pro quo performance oriented existence.

The puritan theologian John Owen in his treatise on the Trinity entitled “Communion with the Triune God,” shows how believers may have intimate communion with the persons of the Godhead. This is seen in Paul’s benediction from 2 Corinthians 13:14, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

We are by nature worshipers. We worship with our mind, our emotions, our will and our words. These dynamics are in one sense working simultaneously and apply to false worship, as well as, to the worship that the living God calls us to give to him. Another way to look at worship is to speak of the levels of worship.

Sin is often and correctly seen to be disobedience and rebellion. Yet it is also idolatry; idolatry of the heart. As such, sin is binding and blinding. Sin is also foolish and stupid. My purpose is to get you to think about the issue so you will be better able to repent and humble yourself under God's gracious and mighty hand. Just do not think of idols as statues or icons. They are “no-gods,” for sure, nevertheless idols control our hearts as we foolishly give ourselves to them.

It is a privilege to blog for Advent Christian Voices. My posts will be a bit eclectic but the overall trajectory of what I will write and aim to communicate concerns what I call Gospel consciousness. This simply means striving to maintain and grow in one’s awareness of the Gospel.