Ben Zornes

Living and Dying to Show the Preciousness of Christ

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Ben Zornes

Thirteen Ways to Cultivate Godly Manhood

Thirteen Ways to Cultivate Godly Manhood

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  1. Get up early. Read the scripture. Pray for your wife, children, extended family, work problems, government, etc.
  2. Don’t leave for work without kissing your wife.
  3. Work hard. Don’t mail in your work. Break a sweat (figuratively if you have a desk job).
  4. Come home for lunch, if possible. Especially while the kids are young. Your wife will appreciate the adult interaction/conversation.
  5. When you get home from work, greet your children with a big smile. Make sure they know you delight in them. Tickle them. Tell them how excited you are to see them.
  6. Once you get home in the evening, put your phone away. Spend time with your wife and children, undistracted by texts, social media, work emails, or sports scores.
  7. Rally the troops to help their mom to get dinner on the table. Eat dinner together. Pray before the meal. Read a scripture verse afterwards, or a catechism question. Explain and discuss.
  8. Read books to your children. Play a board game with them. Help with their homework, and/or discuss what they’ve been learning in school and help them comprehend the concepts. If the weather is good, go for a walk, toss a football, scoop up some ice cream for the whole family.
  9. Be involved in the bedtime routine. Get the bubble bath ready. Brush the teeth of the little ones. Wrestle with the older ones. Make up stories to tell them. Tell them a story about when you were a child. Pray aloud for each child by name. At some point in the evening, you may (very likely) need to discipline them. Give them spankings, restore them to familial fellowship, and let the good times rolls.
  10. Once the kids are in bed, spend time with your wife. Read a book with her. Watch a good show/movie. Make love. Ask about her thoughts on some text of Scripture, cultural event, theological issue and discuss.
  11. Before you drift off to sleep, talk with your wife about the cute/funny things the kids did that day or recently. Laugh with her. Rejoice in the fruit of your union with her. Kiss her. Pray with her.
  12. Ask God to bless your home before you go to sleep. Kiss your wife again.
  13. Go to sleep at a reasonable hour, get a good night’s sleep. That way you can get up on time the next day, and do it all over again.
God the Warrior

God the Warrior

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Our God is a warrior. When the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, the Lord went to battle against His––and their––enemies. The ten plagues are ordered in such a way as to demonstrate that the God of the Hebrews was more powerful than any & all of the Egyptians’ most revered gods. Their gods could not keep what God had determined to deliver.

Each battle shows that what the Egyptians worshipped as a deity, was in fact no god at all. The god of the Nile, defeated. The goddess of fertility––represented as a woman with a frog’s head––defeated. The god of the earth & the goddess of the sky, defeated. And so on, until utter darkness descended on Egypt for three days, mocking their second highest god, Ra. The Lord embarrassed all their idols; He turned what they had honored as deities into the very things that brought ruination upon their land. God went to battle against His enemies, and wiped the floor with them. This contest wasn’t even close.

The final battle, the tenth plague, takes aim at Pharaoh himself. He was the embodiment of the Egyptians’ entire religious system, he was the highest of the gods. For this final showdown, the Lord commands His people to hold a feast, while He brings their captor to utter ruin.

All this should assure us of a glorious truth: God fights for us. Our enemies are defeated. Sin, the devil, the world, defeated. But they are not defeated by you or me. We feast while He fights. He conquers for us, while we enjoy the peace He wins for us. He delivers us, while we partake of the bread of His body and the wine of His blood. We remember in this meal that God delivers His people, in order to commune with His people. This is a victory feast, where we taste the spoils of the great war our King has won.

So come in faith, and welcome to Jesus…

Content in Sunshine and Shadows

Content in Sunshine and Shadows

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Are you content? Does your current life arrangement gnaw away at you as you’re drifting off to sleep? Maybe you’re single and you want to be married. Maybe you’re childless and want to have children. Maybe you’re in an unpleasant job and you want something that’s a better environment and pays better. Maybe you’re sick and you want to be whole again.

Paul teaches us that godliness with contentment is great gain (1 Tim. 6:6). Knowing Christ as an all-surpassing treasure, makes the Christian able to bear all circumstances with joy and contentment. 

If you have plenty, gratitude wells up. If you have little, you rejoice that in Christ You have all things. If your life has taken unexpected––and seemingly unfortunate––turns, you rest at ease in the confidence that God is sovereign over all the details of your story and is working all things, even hard providences, out for your good. If your circumstances are remarkably wonderful––good health, happy family, full tables––you can humbly receive it all from God’s hand as a gracious, undeserved gift.

Godliness is a chest full of eternal treasure. But when augmented by contentment, not only do we find delight in the glorious joys of eternity, but the ebbs and flows, the trials and triumphs of earth become a bank-vault of reasons to praise the Giver of every good and perfect gift.

So, are you faced with hard trials? Thank God for every last inch of that trial. Through it you will taste the sweetness of God’s sanctifying grace. Are you surrounded by blessings? Humbly receive those blessings, and use them to praise God. Then we can truly sing, with godly contentment, the wise words of one old hymn: 

And if our dearest comforts fall before his sovereign will,
He never takes away our all – Himself he gives us still.

Hard Truths

Hard Truths

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The Lord’s Supper is the most joyous feast this world has ever known. It’s where sinners are welcomed into God’s home, and clothed with white robes of Christ’s righteousness, while a banner of love hovers over the whole festival. Indeed, this is a celebration. And it is not limited in scope to just a certain people group. The nations are invited.

But while the world is invited to the festal celebration, we must remember that joy and reverence preside. Sinful man would love to turn this into a meal where everyone is welcome but there are no rules, no order, no standard, and thus turn it into a feast where appetite presides. Pagan feasts of old often demonstrated this by their debauched and lecherous gluttony. 

No. This feast has hard truths which fence it. We’re told in one place that eating this meal without faith, which is eating it unworthily, turns this bread and wine into damnation (1 Cor. 11:29). In another place, we’re told that if someone is living a sinful and unrepentant lifestyle we are not to eat with them (1 Cor. 5:11). When someone is formally cut off from this meal it is known as excommunication. When the church excommunicates someone it’s because they have shown that they prefer the table of sin, and thus unless and until they repent they’re no longer welcomed here.

But these hard truths don’t spoil the meal, any more than a father’s loving discipline and presence ruin a family’s supper. Rather, they ensure that the purity and peace of this celebration remain untainted. These hard truths keep the household in order so that the laughter, songs, and stories around the table might be enjoyed with clear consciences. They serve––not as an impediment––but as a fence around the fellowship of this table. These hard truths ensure that the wine we taste is joy unmingled.

So come in faith, and welcome to Jesus…

Idols Are Cheats

Idols Are Cheats

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Idolatry is a vicious cycle. The worshipper defies the commandments of God to not have any other gods, and makes a graven image out of wood, gold, or some other material substance. Then there sits their idol. Cold. Lifeless. Powerless. Deaf. 

If you look at the second commandment, and then notice the idols, you might quip, “They must not have gotten the memo.” But though the idol itself sits there in deaf defiance of God’s commands, something terrible is occurring to the worshipper. They are becoming just like their idol. They’ve traded the source of all being, life, and pleasure for an impotent, blind, deaf, and stupid block of stuff.

Idols are cheats. They promise joy, pleasure, and blessing. But they demand that you sacrifice your joy, pleasure, and blessings to them. They demand that you shed your blood to make them happy. 

Is your idol gold? Does your life revolve around the accumulation of material wealth, such that you sacrifice your family, your peace of mind, your integrity on its altar? Is your idol power? Do you kneel to kiss the toe-ring of upward-mobility, fearing what may occur if you lose your place in the pyramid of society? Is your idol sex? Do you believe the lie that gratification of that desire is yours by right, and thus you partake of the sacrament of consuming others bodies at the price of their shame and your so-called pleasure?

If you continue to worship these idols, you will soon be dead, deaf, and dumb. They cannot offer you life. They will only cheat you out of your joy. So, topple them. Grind them to powder. Burn them to the ground. As Spurgeon once said, “Down with all idols, up with King Jesus.”

Fear’s Torment

Fear’s Torment

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Think of the “pit in your stomach” feeling you get when you are afraid. The most fearful I’ve ever been was in the days following a harrowing experience. Years ago my family was awakened in the middle of the night by a gas line exploding a hundred yards from our home. Fortunately, neither we nor our home were harmed. But for the next several days, whenever a cupboard slammed shut, or something made a loud bang, we all jumped with fright.

Fear brings torment. It leaves us miserable. It leaves us continually “on edge.” It cripples. It eats away at the inside. It foments and brews new things to fear. 

However, my fright from that explosion subsided due to loving parents who took special care to let my sister and I sleep in their room for a few nights, made some special meals, and other deliberate acts of love. Their love dispelled the choking, black smoke of fear.

Sinners are innately fearful creatures. The fear of God’s impending wrath and judgement on their sin looms large. But God’s love is so great that He sent His Son to pay the price for Your sin, that He might dispel all your fear.

The Lord declares to you in this supper that you are welcome, you are beloved, you are reminded of the salvation He gives from your sins. Here is assurance that though your sin deserved His white hot wrath, because you have trusted in His Son, all you will taste is the wine of His love and the bread of His fellowship. Here is love that casts out fear. Here is God’s voice to the fearful:

“Come in faith, and welcome to Jesus…”

No Prosthetic Hands

No Prosthetic Hands

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Jesus commands us that, “if thy hand offend thee, cut it off (Mk 9:43).” He repeats this for the foot and eye, with the point being: take the battle against sin seriously. Better to lose limbs than let sin conquer you. Better to live free and die, than to live in slavery to sin and die spiritually.

In this room are a wide-variety of sins. The sin which you might find such a struggle to overcome might not be the sin which the person to the left of you finds they are beset by, and the person on your right could be facing some other sin entirely. But each of you need to face your sins and temptations square in the face and resolve to do whatever it takes, by the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, to resist your sins.

Confessing your sin is a sort of cutting off of your hand. It is acknowledging the wickedness of your sin, and your admission that it is vile in God’s sight. It is you separating yourself from your sin. But the routine of confessing your sins (whether in your daily walk, or at a set point in the weekly liturgy) should not be taken as a permission slip to go out and get a new hand to facilitate your sin tomorrow. Jesus didn’t say that if your hand causes you to sin cut it off but it’s ok to go get a prosthetic replacement. He didn’t say to pluck out your eye and then replace it with a robotically enhanced one.

So, confess your sin. Cut off anything which facilitates that sin you need to confess this morning. Delete that app. Leave that group of friends. Cut up your credit card. Unsubscribe from that streaming service. Don’t go to that party. Don’t hit the snooze button. In other words, make no provision for the flesh…kill it, mortify it, and triumph over it in the death and resurrection of Christ which enables you to be victorious over your sin. 

Ben Zornes