If Being a Real Man Means Watching UFC, Then I’m Out

If you are a Christian dude, you’ve probably talked about what being a “real man” means.  Other than the obvious (reading your Bible, praying, repenting of sin, etc.), here are some of the more curious things I’ve heard.  A real man: watches UFC, never wears bright colored shirts, does not listen to contemporary Christian music, smokes good cigars, owns a shotgun or rifle, and drives a Jeep or an F-250.  There are others, but you get the idea.

It seems that we encourage men at retreats and conferences to do these types of “dude things” so they can “live missionally” in the culture.  I’m not saying that these things are sins (though they may be).  I’m not saying never go to the bar to hang out with your non-Christian neighbor.  My point is that there are huge oversights in the male Christian community that would help young men grow in holiness and make some non-Christians scratch their heads.

I’m thinking about service and responsibility, particularly regarding how you live your life in your home.

Most of this list comes from what I’ve observed as I’ve lived with other men for the past seven years.  Basically, it comes down to common sense, courtesy, and responsibility.  Real men:

• Know how to wash the dishes and put them away.
• Sweep the floor when it’s dirty.
• Take off their wet shoes when they walk in a house.
• Do laundry instead of using Febreeze.
• Make the whole bed instead of just throwing the comforter over the messed-up sheets.
• Wash their facial hair down the drain after shaving.
• Keep their clothes in their closet, not on the arm of the couch.
• Take out the garbage (without being asked).
• Do not treat their vehicle like a garbage can.
• Offer to let someone else use the TV remote for a change.
• Do not insist on always seeing a shoot-em-up flick with their girlfriend/fiancee/wife.
• Vacuum and dust on a regular basis (not just before Mom and Dad come to visit).

If you are that guy who says, “This is chick stuff,” thank you.  You just proved my point.  I’m not talking about being a domesticated she-man who stays at home wearing an apron while his wife brings home the bacon.  Not at all.  But let me be honest: if you can’t do these things, you aren’t a man, and you aren’t ready to take care of a household, wife, and kids.

You don’t need to be Mr. Clean, but be quick to serve and regard others as more important than yourself (Phil. 2:3).  A true leader is a servant.  Are you the guy with two-week old pizza boxes on the carpet, playing Xbox in a t-shirt that hasn’t been washed since May?  There’s a remedy: get off this blog, go pick up a broom, and serve somebody.

Think about this: if you were to ask 100 Christian women if they’d prefer a man who could do a UFC move while smoking a cigar or one who knew how to keep an organized, tidy house, how do you think 100 of them would answer?

You Can’t Make Science to Mean Something it Doesn’t Mean

I’m not a scientist.  My science classes in college were geology, meteorology, and food science.  The best I did in high school was a B in honors physics at a public school.  And even that grade should be investigated.

So allow my non-scientific mind to think through something with you.

Often in debates about evolution and creation, I hear people argue for evolution (that is, the origin of the universe via big-bang) by saying, “Science proves it.  Science is not faith, it’s fact.”   They do this by talking about carbon dating, fossils, and the fact that Noah couldn’t really have had all those animals in the ark.

Well, science is “fact” if you are talking about how a tree grows, how a car moves, or how my heart works.  You can prove those things.  But science cannot prove the origin of the universe.  “Yes it can!” people tell me.

No.  It can’t.

Why?  When we refer to science, we usually mean “systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.”  We come to this knowledge of the physical world by using the scientific method, which Merriam-Webster defines as “principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

You cannot re-create a universe as vast, complex, organized, and beautiful as ours in a test tube in order to collect data about how it began.  It just can’t happen.

So if you hold that the origin of the universe is due to a randomized explosion of atomic particles, that’s fine by me.  Just don’t call it science.  Call it what it is: faith, belief, and religion.

Some arguments are better than others, and this one is just bad.

Check out the video below of Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens, stars of the new documentary Collision, appearing on the Joy Behar show.

During the video, Behar asked Wilson if he really believed “that all those animals were on the ark” with Noah.  That puzzles me.  Out of all the things that happened in the Bible (like say, God becoming a Man, being killed, and rising from the dead) she wants to know about animals on a boat?  Seriously? That’s not the most miraculous and mind-boggling thing you’ll read in the Bible.

Hitchens comes across as a bitter, arrogant, angry, lonely man.  As I watched, the famous C.S. Lewis quote that he ended Mere Christianity with comes to mind:

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.  But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

One day, Christopher Hitchens (and every other person) will stand before Jesus to be judged after the resurrection.  That’s sobering.

New iPhone App to Allow Driving from Mobile Phone

German researchers have developed an iPhone app that will allow the user to drive a vehicle via their mobile phone.  Here’s a snippet:

The iDriver has individual accelerate and brake buttons and a virtual steering wheel that utilises the phone’s motion-sensor technology. It interfaces with a specially equipped car which receives messages from the iPhone and relays them into the vehicle via wireless technology. The virtual driver allows driving from a distance through the use of live video streaming from a roof-mounted camera

I swear that some people already drive as if they were sitting on their couch in boxers, iPhone in one hand, a bag of Cheetos in the other, singing along to VH1’s pop-up video classics.

Thankfully, the app is not expected to be commercially available any time soon, or at all.

How can I know if my faith isn’t even the size of a mustard seed?

If I can honestly answer the question, “What do I think is impossible?” I will probably find out where I have little faith.

Weekly Weirdness

Let the pop-culture philosopher Dr. Phil McGraw introduce our weird news this week:

You’re an individual. That makes people nervous and it’s going to keep on making them nervous — all your life.

It’s always a good day when I don’t wake up reading about myself in the weird news section.

• 22-inch Nepal man: I’m the world’s shortest
• Man Busted for Being Naked at Home
• Man found asleep in closet…with a corpse

Preaching in Pretoria

Oh no. He’s refuting my sermon points before I even speak.  Jesus, there’s either going to be radical transformation today, or I’m going to be chased to my car.  I shouldn’t have worn flip-flops.

Those were my thoughts as the service began this morning at my friend Lordwick’s church here in a South African township, when John, the “emcee,” was up front.  He excitedly talked about enjoying a prosperous life as a Christian.   At one point he said, “If you are in trouble, if you are suffering, there is something wrong with you.  You need to get close to God.”

The demonic prosperity gospel has an enormous stronghold here in Africa. I wanted to confront it head-on.  I wanted God to do a mighty work and reveal the true nature of the gospel.  I knew that because of what I was going to say, suffering could come my way.

While I sat and listened to John’s pre-sermon ’sermon’ and the loud, keyboard-driven praise music, I prayed that God would come with power to preach boldly — even if the message would be unpopular.  I prayed for transformation.  And by God’s grace, I think we saw the beginning of transformation by the time we were done.

Let me be honest: after the service, I tried to avoid John.  But he found me (it wasn’t hard, there were only about 40 people, and more than half were children).  He grabbed me and shook my hand and said, “James, you have opened my eyes up to something I didn’t know about.  I thought when I have Jesus, the money should flow in.  But I realize that I wasn’t believing the real gospel.  Your message, it was the real gospel.”  I was floored.  All I could say to him was, “Praise God.”  I gave my manuscript to John, and over lunch, we talked about getting him more resources that will help him be shaped by the real gospel.

With this response, God answered my prayer.  All week I had been praying that God would open people’s eyes to see.  I can’t do that.  Yet, that is exactly what God told Paul to do in Acts 26:18, “I am sending you to open their eyes.”  How can we do this impossible thing? It is only by God’s grace that he works through us.  Anything is possible with him.  He is the one who says, “Let light shine!” (2 Cor. 4:6). And he did today.  In fact, he’s doing it everyday.

John was just one man, during one service, after one sermon, in one small, sweaty, school room in South Africa.  But it’s a testament to God’s grace and power.  It’s a testament to his kindness in answering prayer.  It’s a testament that he is the one who opens eyes, and that he uses nobodies like me to do it.

*               *               *

Thanks to Rylan for the pictures!  Preaching with a translator is never easy (this was my second time).  It’s difficult to get in rhythm because I have to speak very simply (he’s not a professional translator) and sentence-by-sentence.  But by the end though, Lordwick and I started to feed off each other.  Listen to or read the message.

Are missions and the doctrine of election at odds? I don’t think so.

Some missionaries have said that if the doctrine of election were true, they would never have become a missionary. Well, I say, “I am a missionary because the doctrine of election is true.”

Where do I find this in the Bible?  In Acts 18, Paul is in Corinth.  You would not have found a more pagan city on the planet than Corinth in the first century.  Yet Jesus appeared to Paul in a vision and said, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people” (vv. 9-10).

Paul’s preaching didn’t elect people to salvation.  God elected them and the true sheep responded to the gospel message.  Remember Jesus’ words: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold.  I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice” (John 10:16).

Jesus does the bringing.  You do the preaching.  People will respond.

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Related Posts:

• Unconditional Election
• Election is for Humility
• God’s Sovereign Choice in Salvation

Don’t Get Any Leviticus on My Chicken, I Like Mesquite.

If you are in the Canton, North Carolina area next week, you might want to check out the the Bible burning hoedown on Halloween.

According to the church, the King James Version is the only true version of God’s word and that other versions are “perversions” and “Satanic.”  I mean, it makes perfect sense that a Bible, originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, that was translated to English in England in 1611 is the most authoritative Bible in the history of the world.  Who can argue with that logic?

Furthermore, many popular Christian books will be up for a roasting as well. Authors include, among others, John Piper, Billy Graham, Bill Bright, Chuck Swindoll, and some guy named Mark Driskol.

The website, however, did not say they would be burning the English Standard Version of the Bible or C.S. Lewis books.

Oh, and don’t eat beforehand.  They will be serving “bar-b-que chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.”  So bring your appetite, lighter fluid, and a fire extinguisher — just in case the kiddos get to close to the flames.

Preaching This Sunday on The Gospel and Suffering

This past week a pastor that works at Beam Development Center kindly asked if I would be willing to preach at his church before I leave for home.  I graciously accepted.  I’ll be speaking there this Sunday, October 25 at 10am (3am American Central Time).

I’ll be preaching from Romans 5:1-5.  The title will be “The Gospel and Suffering.”  The health and wealth mindset reigns down here, and I would miss a great opportunity if I didn’t try to dispel this false teaching by speaking on what the Bible really says about God’s sovereignty and suffering.  As you finish reading this post, please take a minute to pray for these things:

• That God would say “Let light shine!” and that the blinding work of the devil would be overcome so that people would see Jesus and believe the gospel (2 Cor. 4:4-6).
• That God would work mightily so that the demonic “prosperity (false) gospel” would be exposed.  It is held tightly by so many poor, black, African congregations.  I want to preach “Christ and him crucified” and not a gospel of comfort and convenience.
• That God would speak clearly through me and the pastor, Ludwig, who will be translating my message.  It doesn’t take a linguistic expert to know that speaking with a translator is never easy.  And no matter what your view on speaking in tongues is, no one can deny that, in fact, I’ll be speaking in a tongue (American English) and Ludwig will be interpreting my message to the congregation’s native tongue (Tswana).  We know that the Bible says this is difficult and so we should pray for power to interpret (1 Cor. 14:13).  Pray for clear, powerful, Christ-centered exaltation of the word of God.

Thank you!