Six Simple Rules for Parenting

written by Ryan Whitley, Pastor, CrossPoint Church, Trussville, AL

Some of you asked me to post my rules for parenting from my message last Sunday.  Since you asked for it, here it is.

Please note I am not an expert in parenting.  I have been, however, a parent for more than 22 years.  So I have learned a few lessons along the way.  Perhaps some of my lessons will help you.

The basis of my relationship with my children is my love for them.  I have always loved my kids, and I will always love them.  I loved them before they were born, and I have not stopped lavishing my love on them since then.  Thus, the basis for my relationship with my kids is my love for them.

There is nothing my kids could ever do to take away my love for them.  Again, the basis for my relationship with my kids is my love for them, and not my rules for them.

Nevertheless, I lavish my laws on my children because I love them.  I tell what to do and what not to do because I love them.  I instruct them in what to say and what not to say because of my love for them.  If I did not love my kids, I would not guide them with my laws.

These are my rules.

It’s Sunday, and we go to church.

This rule helps our children understand their need for a Savior.  If I give them a choice to go to church or not, they will chose not to attend.  It is part of their sinful nature.  On Sunday I want them in God’s house, hearing God’s gospel with God’s people so they can learn their need for a Savior.

It’s Monday, and we go to school. 

This rule helps our children understand the importance of learning.  In today’s economy our kids need an education, whether formal or informal, to survive.  I want my kids to get the best education possible.  That is why I have worked diligently with them to attain the minimum of an undergraduate degree.

IT’S THE WEEKEND, AND WE KEEP A CURFEW. 

This rule helps our kids understand abiding by rules.  If their curfew is 11:00 PM, then they should be home by 10:58 PM.  If they cannot make it home on time, they do not deserve the freedom of going out on a weekend.  Let them spend a boring weekend with you and they will soon appreciate keeping their curfew.

It’s the summer, and we get a job. 

This rule helps our kids develop a good work ethic.   Teach them how to cut grass, baby sit kids, paint houses or flip burgers.  In doing so, they learn the importance of earning an income.  Then teach them how to save and to spend their money.

It’s dinner time, and we eat together. 

This rule helps our kids develop healthy social skills.  By sitting and eating around the dinner table they learn how to carry on adult conversations.  They also learn about the dynamics of family.  More family values our passed on in those brief moments around a meal than many people realize.

And for those who were not in the third worship celebration, here is a bonus rule.

It’s a dating relationship, and we do not treat our boyfriend or girlfriend like our husband or wife. 

This rule helps our children understand sexual purity.  Too many kids associate the feelings of lust with being in love.  Remind them their boyfriend is just that, a boy who is their friend and not their husband.  And the same is true about your son’s girlfriend.

So, there you have it.  Here are my simple rules for my kids.

What to Say When Someone Says, "The Bible Has Errors."

by Jonathan Dodson

Most people question the reliability of the Bible. You’ve probably been in a conversation with a friend or met someone in a coffee shop who said, “How can you be a Christian when the Bible has so many errors?

How should we respond? What do you say?

Instead of asking them to name an error, I suggest you name one or two of them. Does your Bible contain errors? Yes. The Bible that most people possess is a translation of the Greek and Hebrew copies of copies of the original documents of Scripture. As you can imagine, errors have crept in over the centuries of copying. Scribes fall asleep, misspell, take their eyes off the manuscript, and so on. I recommend telling people what kind of errors have crept into the Bible. Starting with the New Testament, Dan Wallace, New Testament scholar and founder of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, lists four types of errors in Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible’s Origin, Reliability, and Meaning.

Types of Errors

1. Spelling and Nonsense Errors

These are errors that occur when a scribe wrote a word that makes no sense in its context, usually because they were tired or took their eyes off the page. Some of these errors are quite comical, such as “we were horses among you” (Gk. hippoi, “horses,” instead of ēpioi, “gentle,” or nēpioi, “little children”) in 1 Thessalonians 2:7 in one late manuscript. Obviously, Paul isn’t saying he acted like a horse among them. That would be self-injury! These kinds of errors are easily corrected.

2. Minor Changes

These minor changes are as small as the presence or absence of an article such as “the” or changed word order, which can vary considerably in Greek. Depending on the sentence, Greek grammar allows the sentence to be written up to 18 times, while still saying the same thing! So just because a sentence wasn’t copied in the same order, doesn’t mean that we lost the meaning.

3. Meaningful but Not Plausible

These errors have meaning but aren’t a plausible reflection of the original text. For example, 1 Thessalonians 2:9, instead of “the gospel of God” (the reading of almost all the manuscripts), a late medieval copy has “the gospel of Christ.” There is a meaning difference between God and Christ, but the overall manuscript evidence points clearly in one direction, making the error plain and not plausibly part of the original.

4. Meaningful and Plausible

These are errors that have meaning and that the alternate reading is plausible as a reflection of the original wording. These types of errors account for less than 1% of all variants and typically involve a single word or phrase. The biggest of these types of errors is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which most contemporary scholars do not regard as original. Our translations even footnote that!

Is the Bible Reliable?

So, is the Bible reliable? Well, the reliability of our English translations depends largely upon the quality of the manuscripts they were translated from. The quality depends, in part, on how recent the manuscripts are. Scholars like Bart Ehrman have asserted that we don’t have manuscripts that are early enough. However, the manuscript evidence is quite impressive:

• There are as many as 18 second-century manuscripts. If the Gospels were completed between AD 50–100, then this means that these early copies are within 100 years. Just recently, Dan Wallace announced that a new fragment from the Gospel of Mark was discovered dating back to the first century AD, placing it well within 50 years of the originals, a first of its kind. When these early manuscripts are all put together, more than 43% of the New Testament is accounted for from copies no later than the second century.
• Manuscripts that date before AD 400 number 99, including one complete New Testament called Codex Sinaiticus. So the gap between the original, inerrant autographs and the earliest manuscripts is pretty slim. This comes into focus when the Bible is compared to other classical works that, in general, are not doubted for their reliability. In this chart of comparison with other ancient literature, you can see that the New Testament has far more copies than any other work, numbering 5,700 (Greek) in comparison to the over 200 of Suetonius. If we take all manuscripts into account (handwritten prior to printing press), we have 20,000 copies of the New Testament. There are only 200 copies of the earliest Greek work.
• This means if we are going to be skeptical about the Bible, then we need to be thousands of times more skeptical about the works of Greco-Roman history. Or put another way, we can be a thousand times more confident about the reliability of the Bible. It is far and away the most reliable ancient document.

What to Say When Someone Says “The Bible Has Errors”

So, when someone asserts that the Bible has errors, we can reply by saying: 

Yes, our Bible translations do have errors—let me tell you about them. But as you can see, less than 1% of them are meaningful and those errors don’t affect the major teachings of the Christian faith. In fact, there are a thousand times more manuscripts of the Bible than the most documented Greco-Roman historian by Suetonius. So, if we’re going to be skeptical about ancient books, we should be a thousand times more skeptical of the Greco-Roman histories. The Bible is, in fact, incredibly reliable.

Contrary to popular assertion, that as time rolls on we get further and further away from the original with each new discovery, we actually get closer and closer to the original text. As Wallace puts it, we have “an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the biblical documents.” Therefore, we can be confident that what we read in our modern translations of the the ancient texts is approximately 99% accurate. It is very reliable.

For Further Study

In order of easy to difficult:

• My sermon and manuscript, “Is the Bible Inerrant?”

• Can I Trust the Bible? (free preview), by R. C. Sproul
• Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible’s Origin, Reliability, and Meaning, edited by Wayne Grudem, C. John Collins, and Thomas Schreiner
• The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, by B.B. Warfield
• Text of the New Testament, by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman

This post originally appeared on Gospel-Centered Discipleship.

Sunday Sermon, May 27, 2012

Sunday, May 27 was Pentecost Sunday and I continued my series of messages on the church "The Church is Built on the Power of the Holy Spirit" from Acts 1:1-8; 2:1-4.  Here are the notes on the sermon.

The audio of the sermon is here

Fasting by John Thweatt

(This article was written by John Thweatt, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Pell City, AL) 

Years ago I felt God calling me to an extended fast.  The experience was inexpressible for many reasons and since that time I have fasted on a number of occasions.  I can look back to each fast and see how God taught me and moved me toward Him, but there is one common denominator that I’ve found with every single fast.

Fasting demonstrates to me my own selfishness.  If we are completely honest we will have to admit that we are often so consumed with our own desires that we cannot see our own self-centeredness.  Some may be less self-centered than others, but we all tend to have a bad case of the Globe-Head.

Being Globe-Headed means you live as if the world revolves around you.  Fasting takes place when you give up an otherwise normal activity for the purpose of seeking God.  You can fast from TV, you can fast from Internet, you can fast from a particular type of food, or you can fast from food altogether, but the fast should be from something you enjoy.  For example I hate brussel sprouts…it isn’t a fast for me to give them up…I live an eternal fast from brussel sprouts, but I do love Diet Cokes, Coke Zero, and Diet DP, football, and Starburst Jelly Beans!  It would cost me something to give them up for a period of time if I would pray and seek God every time I wanted one that would be a biblical fast.

So, as we fast we become aware of how much we do to please ourselves.  Our schedules, our eating, our recreation, and even our church attendance are often driven by our desire to be pleased.  How much of our lives center around pleasing God?  What I have found is that you’ll never find a Globe-Headed person who is truly happy, but when you find a person who centers their life upon pleasing God you will find someone who has true joy.  Some of the most joyful people I’ve ever met happen to have the least in terms of material possessions.  It isn’t that being poor makes them happy—it is that they aren’t cursed with a number of gadgets to distract their relationship with God.

Try to go a day without Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, or your phone.  Try spending your lunch hour reading the Bible and praying and asking Him to make you as hungry for Him as you are for food.  Try giving up golf or tennis or TV for a day and spend time with your wife or children.   Give up something you personally like to help you learn to love as you are supposed to love.  When you begin to give up personal preferences you will find your flesh rebels and when it breaks out in an all out World War you’ll see just how Globe-Headed you really are. 

How to Backslide in 9 Easy Steps

(Copied from here written by Tim Challies.

A few days ago I shared John Bunyan’s wisdom on why some who profess faith in Christ eventually backslide. Today I want to follow him a little bit farther. Having covered the why, I’ve now drawn from Pilgrim’s Progress instruction on the how. In each case I’ve given my short summary followed by Bunyan’s own words. Here is how to backslide in nine easy steps:

1. Stop meditating on the gospel. “They draw off their thoughts, all that they may, from the remembrance of God, death, and judgment to come.”
2. Neglect your devotions and stop battling sin. “Then they cast off by degrees private duties, as closet prayer, curbing their lusts, watching, sorrow for sin, and the like.”
3. Isolate yourself from Christian fellowship. “Then they shun the company of lively and warm Christians.”
4. Stop going to church. “After that, they grow cold to public duty, as hearing, reading, godly conference, and the like.”
5. Determine that Christians are hypocrites because they continue to sin. “They then begin to pick holes, as we say, in the coats of some of the godly, and that devilishly, that they may have a seeming color to throw religion (for the sake of some infirmities they have espied in them) behind their backs.”
6. Trade Christian community for distinctly unChristian company. “Then they begin to adhere to, and associate themselves with, carnal, loose, and wanton men.”
7. Pursue rebellious conversation and fellowship. “Then they give way to carnal and wanton discourses in secret; and glad are they if they can see such things in any that are counted honest, that they may the more boldly do it through their example.”
8. Allow yourself to enjoy some small, sinful pleasures. “After this they begin to play with little sins openly.”
9. Admit what you are and prepare yourself for everlasting torment. “And then, being hardened, they show themselves as they are. Thus, being launched again into the gulf of misery, unless a miracle of grace prevent it, they everlastingly perish in their own deceivings.”

Sunday Sermon, May 13, 2012

I finished the two-part series on "The Church is Built on the Gospel Illustrated Through the Lord's Supper" yesterday (May 13, 2012) with this message on the elements of the Lord's Supper.  What does the bread and blood represent?

The notes of the message are here.

The audio of the message is here.

Sermon of Sunday, May 6, 2012

Yesterday (May 6, 2012) I began the two-part series on the Lord's Supper with this message here.  This message deals with the aspect of the covenant and the Lord's Supper.  The audio is below.

Suffering...Part III

“The subject of sin is vital knowledge. To say that our first need in life is to learn about sin may sound strange, but in the sense intended it is profoundly true. If you have not learned about sin, you cannot understand yourself, or your fellow-men, or the world you live in, or the Christian faith. And you will not be able to make head or tail of the Bible. For the Bible is an exposition of God’s answer to the problem of human sin and unless you have that problem clearly before you, you will keep missing the point of what it says.” J. I. Packer

“I hope in some way I can take my wheelchair to heaven. With my new glorified body I will stand up on resurrected legs, and I will be next to the Lord Jesus. And I will feel those nail prints in his hands, and I will say, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’ He will know I mean it, because he will recognize me from the inner sanctum of sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings. He will see that I was one who identified with him in the sharing of his sufferings, so my gratitude will not be hollow. And then I will say, ‘Lord Jesus, do you see that wheelchair over there? Well, you were right. When you put me in it, it was a lot of trouble. But the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you. And the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. I do not think I would ever have known the glory of your grace were it not for the weakness of that wheelchair. So thank you, Lord Jesus, for that. Now, if you like, you can send that thing off to hell.” Joni Eareckson Tada

More on suffering....

“I remember one Monday when two officers were interrogating me. About midday, a
general came into the room. He signaled with his hand for them to leave. He began to curse me and hit me, slapping my face and hitting my head with his fist, finally knocking my head against the wall. I screamed—intentionally. I shouted so the other detainees in nearby rooms would hear me. What the general was doing was clearly illegal. That, of course, was why he had ordered the two officers out of the room. He wanted no witnesses at my trial. He kept on for a while, and then left without another word. The two officers came back and resumed the interrogation as if nothing had happened.

“On Thursday afternoon, the general returned. Again he motioned with his hand for the
two to leave. I braced myself for a second round of beating. But the man sat down behind the desk and said, ‘Don’t worry. This time I am calm. I have come to talk to you.’ Now the Lord has promised that when His people are questioned, the Holy Spirit within them will do the talking. I can testify to this truth. I myself was surprised as I said, ‘Mr. General, because you came to talk to me, I want first of all to apologize for what happened Monday.’ He was very surprised. ‘Let me explain what I mean,’ I said. ‘On Tuesday, I was kept here the whole day without being interrogated. I had plenty of time to think. All of a sudden it dawned on me that this is Holy Week. And sir, for a Christian, nothing is more beautiful than to suffer during the time his Savior and Lord suffered. When you beat me, you did me a great honor. I am sorry for shouting at you. I should have thanked you for the most beautiful gift you could ever have given me. Since Tuesday I have been praying for you and your family.’

“I saw the man choking. He tried hard to swallow. Then, somehow, he said, ‘Well, I shouldn’t have done it. I am sorry—let’s talk.’ We talked many days after that. Eventually he said, ‘Would you put on paper all you have said to me? I want the president of the country to read it.’ From this I learned that no one—not even a Communist—is beyond the reach of Calvary love. These are savable people, redeemable people like anyone else. They desperately needed to see Christ in me.” Josef Tson

“Should you pray for a miracle? Well, you’re free to do that, of course. My general impression is that the God who is able to do miracles-and he certainly can-is also able to keep you from getting the problem in the first place. So although miracles do happen, they’re rare by definition. A miracle has to be an unusual thing. Above all, I would say pray for the glory of God. If you think of God glorifying himself in history and you say, where in all of history has God most glorified himself? He did it at the cross of Jesus Christ, and it wasn’t by delivering Jesus from the cross, though he could have. Jesus said, ‘Don’t you think I could call down from my Father ten legions of angels for my defense?’ But he didn’t do that. And yet that’s where God is most glorified. God is in charge. When things like this come into our lives, they are not accidental. It’s not as if God somehow forgot what was going on, and something bad slipped by. God is not only the one who is in charge; God is also good. Everything he does is good. If God does something in your life, would you change it? If you’d change it, you’d make it worse. It wouldn’t be as good.” James Montgomery Boice
(Diagnosed with liver cancer and died eight weeks after sharing this with his congregation)

Sermon Notes and Audio of Sunday, April 29, 2012

This past Sunday, April 29, 2012 was the last in the mini-series on Baptism.  The message was entitled "Is Baptism Essential to Salvation?  Yes and No" I dealt with the major passages of Scripture that those who believe salvation is essential to salvation use to teach "another gospel."  The notes for the message are here.

The audio of the message is here.