Ben Zornes

Living and Dying to Show the Preciousness of Christ

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Our Father and Our Baptism

Our Father and Our Baptism

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This world was made by the wise and loving will of our heavenly Father. We do not dwell in a world of impersonal laws. This world is not a lonesome speck of dust in a cold cosmos. In the words of that great hymn: this is our Father’s world. Fatherhood is inescapable. 

That being the case, it shouldn’t surprise us that in dealing with the sin which our first human father brought upon us, God our Father set about, through His redemptive purpose, to adopt us as His own beloved children. In baptism, the new birth, the regeneration, the new fatherhood which Christ obtained for us through His blood is held forth to us.

This is why Jesus instructed us to baptize in the triune name: in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Put simply, your baptism is God’s promise to be Your everlasting Father. 

So welcome our sister to Jesus Christ…

A Revival of the 5th

A Revival of the 5th

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As we celebrate the spark that lit the Protestant Reformation, we should consider the character of such revivals. One of the prominent features of the Reformers was the refrain ad fontes or “to the sources”. This was nothing other than the promised spirit of Elijah, which always accompanies such a renewal of God’s church. 

Where the Spirit goes, father’s hearts turn tenderly toward their children, and children’s faces are upturned in a hearty respect for their fathers. But a movement that reviles its fathers of the faith does not bear the tang of the Spirit’s presence. A movement that treads upon children isn’t born from above, but from below.

As we labor for cultural revival it must begin in this relationship between fathers and their children. If you are a father, regardless of how old your children are, you are summoned by the Spirit of God to turn your heart with tenderness to your children. You are not to despair over your children’s failures, nor should you presume that their bad character or habits are permanently fossilized. Rather, you must, by God’s grace, find another gear to pursue your children with scandalously generous love. Your joy and favor should rest upon them like the sun on a cloudless day. While this holds true especially for fathers, of course it’s applicable to mothers as well.

And children, as your father’s turn their hearts toward you, return that love with loving obedience. Let the instruction of your father and the wisdom of your mother be as a crown, a sword, a scepter unto you. They bestow you with the royalty of being children of the covenant, and so receive that lofty calling and fulfill it in honor of both God your Father and your parents. The true spirit of the Reformation is a glorious retrieval of the fifth commandment to Honor thy father and thy mother.

Prayer of Confession

Father God,

In a nation plagued by resentment and animosity between generations, where fathers have abdicated and walked out, where mothers are killing their unborn, where children defy their cultural heritage, we ask that within your church you would send forth Your Spirit. Stir up within fathers a strong paternal and selfless love for their sons and daughters; give fathers the courage to diligently sow seeds of righteousness within their children, plowing the fields in hope. And grant that our covenant children would not slacken their pace in walking according to Your Word, but stir them up to honor their parents by honoring You in all areas of their life. Where we have neglected this calling of hearts turned to our children, and so taught them to turn their hearts from us to sinful enticements, forgive us. Grant such a revival of godly love between fathers and mothers and sons and daughters in our day and in our midst.

You have called Your church to truth in the inward parts, so we now confess our individual sins to You. Selah.

We do this in Jesus’ mighty name, and Amen.

Husbands Are Gateways

Husbands Are Gateways

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Husbands, you are the gatekeeper of your home. Your presence is more than just the biggest and hairiest homosapien in the home. You guard the entrance of your home. So the question perpetually before you men is this: What am I allowing in my household? 

This also means that your attitude, your moodiness, your gruff voice, your furrowed brow, your mindless scrolling, your absence due to tee time with your pals are brought into your home by you. While you must be vigilant over what external things are allowed in––like entertainment and play dates with neighborhood friends––there is a deeper, more fundamental need. You and your disposition are far more potent for good or evil than any external sources.

So, you must not introduce into the atmosphere of your home the glowering clouds of envy. You can’t let in the gremlins of covetousness or lust. You must not be a carrier of the low grade fever of resentment. You are to be joyful, steady, and faithful. What does it profit you to keep out the latest smut from Netflix, but be the source of the stench that comes with being stingy, insecure, or lazy.

This then is a summons to vigilant and merciless mortification of every sin. But killing sin is not the only duty assigned to you. You must not only be gatekeeper for your home, you must be the chief herald of Christ. As the head of your home, you are to ensure that Christ is welcome in your home. 

And if Christ is in your home, an entire storehouse of virtues come along with it. Patience, meekness, contentment, and all the other graces land on your doorstep like the weekly haul from the Amazon warehouse. If you’ve been the funnel for sin in your home, repentance today is like opening the window to bring in the fresh air of grace.

No Insignificant Prayers

No Insignificant Prayers

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If your child urgently calls for you from the other side of the house, you will drop what you’re doing to rush to their need. Perhaps it’s happened to you that when you arrive, the child’s request isn’t quite as urgent as they made it sound. You expected to be cleaning up blood, and instead it turns out they just can’t get those pesky Lego pieces apart.

A parent’s temptation is to be dismissive of such requests. But this is to fail to imitate God the Father to our children. In fact, God calls us to pray to Him, with fervent zeal, over our every need, whether big or small. The primary restriction God places on our prayers is that we ought not pray in order to indulge the lust of our flesh (Jas. 4:3).

But if we ask believing, God has promised to hear and grant our requests. God delights to answer your urgent cry for aid. It is not small to Him. It is His joy to speedily answer your most trivial petition. There’s no such thing as an insignificant prayer.

However, a common objection to prayer arises, “Why pray if God is sovereign? Doesn’t He already know my need and even how He’ll meet that need?” Yes. But He is not the plywood deity of the stoics or fatalists. He is not an impersonal deity. He is the Father. And He has covenanted with His children to hear, remember, and act upon their every request.

It is this glorious union of God’s sovereignty & His gracious covenant which forms the ground of our bold praying. He is God over all, and He is your covenant God. He commands you to ask, and He has promised that He will answer. Your duty is to pray about everything, while trusting Him implicitly to answer graciously.

Prayer of Confession

Father God,

You not only command us to pray, but You delight in our prayers. They are not a drudgery to You. Too often, we mutter and complain about our circumstances, when You invite us to bring all our needs unto You. This displays a feeble faith on our part. A faith that would rather grumble, than to trust in Your unfailing goodness. Where we have become tightly wound with anxiety, forgive us. Where we have proudly thought we could handle things on our own, forgive us. Where we have hidden our sin, forgive us. We bring it all to Your footstool now, that we may obtain mercy and grace to help in time of need.

You have called Your church to truth in the inward parts, so we now confess our individual sins to You. Selah.

We do this in Jesus’ mighty name, and Amen.

Generous Fathers

Generous Fathers

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God filled this world with uncountable multitudes of molecules and gave them to us in a multitude of ways. God assembles the molecules into flaming spheres of heat and light, summer berries, cool streams, and all manner of other God-sent blessings.

Sinful man, as he runs from God, insists that he deserves all the things. When he’s deprived of any of his wishes he throws a fit––which he cleverly calls a protest. The nanny-state steps in to ape generosity, but this is just disguised theft. In our reformational efforts, we aim to build a culture which obeys & imitates God. One of the places we must begin is in imitation of our Heavenly Father’s generosity.

This means that fathers, in particular, are tasked with being models of God’s generosity; not only the generosity itself, but also the order of His generosity. Jehovah blessed Abraham in order to bless the nations (Gen. 18:18). Otherwise generous men often get the sequence backwards. He writes large checks to charities, gives Benjamins to panhandlers, helps friends out of financial jams; but he’s the stingiest of Scrooges towards his family. He’ll lecture his family when they make requests of him to meet some pressing need or reasonable desire, while convincing himself he’s just being a good steward of the resources God gave him.

Of course, this isn’t a call to live outside your means, or to indulge sinful whims. Nevertheless, fathers, you’re called to make the economy of your home famous for joyful generosity. Your wife & kids should find you to be a fountain of wise bounty. Fathers, send a steady stream of joyful generosity cascading down upon the heads of your wife, your children, and your children’s children. In so doing, you exemplify God’s free grace to your children, leaving them no appetite for Uncle Sam’s gravy train

Fellowship on the Frontlines

Fellowship on the Frontlines

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Introduction

What is the aroma of your home? If your four walls could talk, would they describe a home of joyful love, or bitter carping. The tone and aroma of your home matter. The battlefield is where life-long friendships are formed. In the midst of conflict, fellowship is most necessary. The family is the frontlines for Gospel warfare. Too often we think of it as far off mission fields, or “important” spheres of society, like business, politics, finance, or the sciences. The Christian home is an arms dealer. The wife manufactures the ammo. The husband is then supplied with an arsenal, and then takes aim at the foe. As in any war effort, unity of force is a necessity. Disunity is the downfall of any military enterprise. 

Fellowship not Fraternity

An important distinction should be made. The word unity gets thrown around, and can conjure up recent political appeals. While unity is a Bible word (Cf. Eph. 4:3,13), there can be unity on any number of things. What Scripture describes as the basis for Christian unity is the fellowship we have with God and, by necessity, the brethren.

Our fellowship is no mere fraternity of humans. Rather, because of our union with Jesus Christ–the mediator between God and man–we have fellowship with God. Christian fellowship is not based on  commonly held beliefs; it isn’t a country club. It isn’t simply coffee and donuts after church. John Calvin once pointed out, “The ungodly have also a mutual union between themselves, but it is without God, nay, in order to alienate themselves more and more from God, which is the extreme of all evils.” Our fellowship is a spiritual communion of the saints through Jesus Christ which binds us into one body (Rom. 12:5, Eph. 2:16). It is in this fellowship with God by Christ that we are also reconciled to our fellow man (2 Cor. 5:18-21).

Christian fellowship is partaking. It is enjoying the benefits of our covenant union with God by Christ (1 Cor. 10:16). When you gather around your dinner table, your children partake of the benefits of your covenant vows. They taste the father’s hard work to fulfill his promise to provide for his bride; they enjoy the haven which their mother promised to make for her bridegroom. Eventually, they will enjoy the fruit of a life of covenant faithfulness by receiving their inheritance.

Fellowship is broken by sin, whether in Eden, or in your home. Sin breaks fellowship. What restores fellowship is forgiveness, and reunion into the partaking of the family riches.

Good Behavior is Not the Goal

One mistake that Christian parents make is that of trying to simply get good behavior out of their kids. They know they don’t want their children to become Philistines. But your goal is not merely good behavior, it is fellowship. God has brought us to enjoy fellowship with Him, and this forms the basis for true fellowship within the church, the home, and the nation. We don’t want to simply have good laws in our nation, we want a nation which enjoys true fellowship, based on the Gospel that sins are forgiven through Christ.

If you aim merely at getting good behavior out of your little ones, you can begin to treat your children like a programmer treats code. Input the code, out comes the program. But that’s not how God wants us to train up our children. Your children are not a pile of cinder blocks. The imagery scripture gives us is that of olive plants, growing up around your table (Ps. 128:3). Meaning you cannot treat them as a clump.

The practical here is that, while in some instances you are shepherding a flock (i.e. at DisneyLand), you can’t forget that you are shepherding individual lambs. Are they a son, or a daughter? Are they teething, or are they conniving the downfall of the empire? Are they needing a nap, or have they become possessed of a devil? Did you make a major life change that’s effecting them, or are they really just being a monster of iniquity?

Here’s a scenario, one child, call him Reggie, is misbehaving. Mom and dad are pulling out their hair to figure out how to corral him. They start to bicker about the approach, they air their complaints about him and each other in front of his siblings. Then one of the other children makes a loud noise, and her head is summarily bitten off. Mom and dad are the tail being wagged, and they’ll soon find the whole home is full of suspicion, and every square inch will be covered in eggshells. So, don’t discipline the whole family for one child’s “squirreliness”. You’ve failed to pave the way for the one child to be restored to fellowship, and as a result, the whole family is prepping for WW3.

Another angle here is that it is quite important that you don’t import stresses from work, marriage, or extended family into the atmosphere of your home. You are working to have an immune system capable of combating any toxin that comes from within or without. Dads, this means that on the drive home from work you need to put all the projects in the briefcase and leave them there, so that when you walk through the door you are breath of refreshment for your wife and your children feel solid beams of joy radiating from you. Cast all your cares upon Christ, and then walk into your home to cast cheerful love upon your family.

Moms, this means not anxiously complaining. Don’t whine to your children about your children whining. If you’re fatigued and feeling like Bilbo Baggins once said, “butter scraped over too much bread,” the kids shouldn’t be able to pick up on it. This is the work God gave you, so do it cheerfully. Clean up that mess of legos, again. Make the next meal. Do another load of laundry. Offer it all up in joyful worship. And husbands, make sure she gets good long Sabbath afternoon naps.

When parents grump about the headaches of their work, or friction with the neighbors, or tiffs with the in-laws, you are sending a message about how your children should face off against their rivals. Your showing them that when they butt heads with their siblings that griping and blame-shifting and envy are fair play. Instead of an aroma of joy, you’re cooking up a stench of strife (Ecc. 4:6).

A Potpourri of Joy

This is all about joy. Fellowship flows out of joy. If we look at 1 John 1:3-4, we see this truth ready at hand: “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

This fellowship with the Father, through the Son, is the only means of Christian fellowship. This apostolic witness of our union with Christ is proclaimed so that joy brims over; so that your home is full of the sort of belly laughter that lasts until your cheeks hurt.

One of the key indicators that a marriage or a family is going sideways is if there is no more joking. The solution isn’t to buy a better joke book. Broken fellowship results in every interaction being poisoned, and the entire home will slowly be paralyzed. The Proverbs 31 woman , however, laughs at the days to come. 

Is your home riddled with anxiety? Is it full of back-biting, arguing, joyless interactions? Is it marked by rivalry, envy, and contention? Is fellowship broken? Then first things first: look to Christ on the cross. Your sins are forgiven. Then take stock, and find where you have sinned against members of your family, and go ask forgiveness. Remember that forgiveness is the promise to not remember the others’ faults against them.

This is the valve which makes joyful fellowship possible. When the Gospel is embraced within your home, you can interact with each other without dancing gingerly around the mutually agreed upon landmines. The Gospel starts disabling all the trip-wires of bitterness, envy, rivalry, and strife.

God invites us into fellowship with Him. He is joy. Bright, burning Joy. We partake of Him each Lord’s day, and then He produces fruit in us. Remember that joy is a fruit of God’s Spirit, which is the result of fellowship with the vine. Your home is the frontlines of the battle. You will be a blunt blade, and the munitions you fire will be duds, if fellowship is not maintained. How do you maintain fellowship?

Look to Christ. Forgive your brothers. Laugh at the days to come. 

Fathers & Mothers

Fathers & Mothers

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Introduction

The US Congress recently introduced the rules for their new legislative session. They struck gendered familial terminology (i.e. father, mother, son, daughter, etc.) from the House’s rules for legislators. The recent events of our nation reveal our void of fathers and mothers. This is just one more effort by the godless to further erode the biblical structure for families. As Psalm 11:3 says, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

So it is vital that we understand both how God made the world, and then as those who are in Christ, strive to live in this world according to our assigned duties.

The Text 

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named Eph 3:14-15

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

Galatians 4:26

Summary of the Text

When we think about Fatherhood and Motherhood we need to sweep out the clutter. These roles are not optional add-ons which you can discuss with the dealership. They aren’t social constructs which support the oppression of victims. They aren’t the evolutionary development of our species ability to babble some sounds and then linking them with our immediate ancestors. They aren’t interchangeable parts of machinery.

What we see as society rejects the biblical order for family is not an absence of fatherhood and motherhood, but we get mangled fatherhood and motherhood. We get satanic fatherhood, and tyrannic motherhood. We get State-run protection and provision and State-run nurture and rearing. All because those with their hands on the wheel of society are of their father the devil (Jn. 8:44).

Your father and mother are earthly shadows of cosmic realities. That cosmic reality is if you are in Christ God is your Father, the Church is your Mother. That is the evident in these two texts from the pen of Paul. 

In Ephesians 3:14-15, Paul bends his knee to God the Father; every family derives its name from God’s Fatherhood. You don’t have family without fatherhood, and you don’t have any of it without God the Father and Creator. In Greek, you can’t say family (patria) without saying father (patera). In other words, God’s Fatherhood fills the world and fills our earthly families as the inescapable reality. In Him we live and move and have our being.

Furthermore, God has taken a bride for His Son, our Lord Jesus, and she is our Mother. Paul, while making the case that we are delivered from the bondage to sin which the mosaic Law revealed, he uses the imagery of Hagar and Sarah. Two mothers: one a slave, one a free-woman. Which one is your mother? Mother Kirk is a fertile mother, because she is marked by grace and thus life springs from her; whereas Hagar (the bond-woman/Sinai), brings bondage and death (Gal. 4:26). 

To repeat, God is Father, and thus we have fatherhood; for those in Christ God is their Father, the Church is their mother. For those not in Christ, the devil is their father, and the death of Sinai’s law is their mother. As always it isn’t whether you will have Father & Mother, but which one you will have.

Children of Promise

Children who grow up without parents or with unmarried parents are faced with a deck of statistics stacked against them. With few exceptions, their lifetime income is significantly lower; their education level will not go as high; their likelihood of being abused and then abusing in turn shoots through the roof; their prospects are bleak by almost every metric. Children were not intended to exist in a covenantal void. Scripture is concerned with bastard children, which is why it placed heavy penalties on rape, pre-marital sex, and adultery (Cf. Lev. 18), as well as provision for the care of fatherless children (Deu. 16:11, Ps. 68:5).

So, if you are a father or mother, you must not think of your duty (as father or mother) as being in a separate container from your marriage vows, and the consummation of those vows. You are a husband and a wife first. The potency of this covenantal love produces children. Your children are children of a promise, even as the whole family of believers are children of the Promise.

Covenant Duty of Fathers and Mothers

So Fathers are first husbands which are called to be faithful to their promise of loving and cherishing. Mothers are first wives which are called to faithfully fulfill their vow to submit and obey. 

A father which exhibits for his children that he doesn’t beam with delight over their mother (Is. 62:5), isn’t attentive to her (1 Pt. 3:7), doesn’t shower her with love (1 Ti. 5:8) will teach them to railroad her (Pro. 10:1). Husbands love their wives practically by full bank accounts, full cupboards, full closets, and full wombs.

Mothers which run down their husband in front of the kids (2 Sam. 6:16-23), swerving the opposite direction he is leading (Eph. 5:22), or criticizing his leadership at every turn (Pro 21:19) is teaching her children to be lawless rebels. Wives respect their husbands by bearing his name, and being his glory; she demonstrates this respect practically by not being an indecipherable code to get into, but by being ready for him and responding to him in all spheres of their relations (sexually, directionally, financially). So while husbands are called to fill, wives are are called to receive and be filled.

Lazy, inattentive husbands and bitter, nagging wives are teaching the children more than just how to be unpleasant humans. A sin-riddled marriage is presenting a false Gospel, and a marred understanding of God the Father, Christ the Son, and His Bride.

It’s vital that we see that Fathers and Mothers are cosmic categories. Husbands show their children how Christ laid down his life for the church. Wives show their children what joyful obedience to Christ should be. Not only are you teaching them about Fatherhood and Motherhood, but also the glorious Gospel of sacrificial love, responded to in joyful response.

Covered in Sawdust & Flour

These covenantal duties are not pie-in-the-sky intangibles. Rather, these spiritual duties are earthy, and are covered in sawdust and flour.

In Scripture, fathers name; a fathers’ word carry great weight. Fathers provide and protect. Fathers represent God to their families and their families to God. Father’s correct and teach. Fathers sacrifice and intercede. Fathers rule and lead. Fathers head their home.

Mothers respond to this headship by being fruitful. Indeed without the Father, she cannot bear fruit. As the one who bears and nurtures new humans she is to be held in high honor. They are to be fountains of the sort of wisdom which might be worn proudly around the neck of their offspring (Pr. 1:8-9). They are to be industrious, and laugh at all the troubles which are around the bend (Pro. 31:25). Mothers give glorified life and nourishment that is provided by the Father. Fathers face outward, Mothers face inward.

Adopted as Joint-Heirs With Christ

In Reformed theology we generally emphasize justification and sanctification. We blast through the mega-phone that you are not saved by your works of righteousness, you are justified in God’s sight only because of Christ’s righteousness and death in your place. We exhort each other to holiness and growth in sanctification because God has set us apart to be a holy people. But we must not gloss over the fact that one of the terms which is frequently included in NT descriptions of salvation is adoption (Gal 4:4-7).

God the Father, by the redeeming work of His Son, has delivered you from bondage to the law of sin and death. This isn’t like one cruel slave-master defeating another cruel slave-master, and your just caught in the crossfire. Rather, Paul tells us that you are no more a servant, but a son. In other words, you now have a share in the inheritance which belongs to Christ Jesus: resurrection life, everlasting joy, unending glory. You have been adopted as sons. Your Father in Heaven has given to Mother Kirk the Bread of Life and the Wine of Relief, and she has spread a table for the nourishment of her children. The children of grace and glory.

Ben Zornes