As we have moved through this Thanksgiving week I have once again been sadly reminded of how little we as a nation now take to heart the real meaning and origins of this holiday that we celebrate. It really is now almost anything but what its name refers to. How did we get here? I still remember a time when families and churches met together on that day specifically to give their undivided attention and thanks to God and to remember all the blessings that He had given them in the year before. To answer this may I offer an observation that may surprise you because at first glance it is not obvious.
Pride
“C.S. Lewis, in his book “Mere Christianity” called pride “the great sin.” Every believer should read this chapter by that title. In there Lewis said, According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind…
… it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
If this sounds like exaggeration, it will help us to know that Lewis is not simply giving us his private opinion but summarizing the thinking of great saints through the ages. Augustine and Aquinas both taught that pride was the root of sin.2 Likewise Calvin, Luther, and many others. Make no mistake about it: pride is the great sin. It is the devil’s most effective and destructive tool. Why do the great spiritual leaders, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant alike, unite around this conviction? Because it is so clearly and solidly taught in Scripture.” From the C.S. Lewis Institutre.
So how do we deal with that? From another great Christian writer the late John R.W. Stott we hear the answer “Pride is your greatest enemy, humility is your greatest friend.” From the C.S. Lewis Institutre.
May I encourage you sometime this Thanksgiving Season to take some time and read / meditate on the admonition God gave His people in Deuteronomy 8, and take particular note of verses 11- 17. God gave our Hebrew forefathers in the Faith, Rom. 4:11-12, this admonition as a nation before they entered the land promised to their forefather Abraham. In short, they were to remember: “And you shall remember… (vs2) how they were humbled and tested (vs 2 and 16) by the Lord, as a Father training his own child (vs 5) in order to teach them that it is He that provides through their clinging to Him and to His commands. So that they might not Forget (vs 11,14,19) and their “hearts be lifted up” in pride (vs 14), and “they say in their hearts”, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth ” (vs 17). Pride, like the nations before them, would lead to their disobedience and destruction (vs 20).
I don’t know about you, but as I consider our nation’s founding and history, I cannot but help see significant parallels to us in our day in this passage and a prophetic warning for our future. Thanksgiving is a unique “American” Christian holiday having its origins in specified days of thanksgiving and prayer, mixed with celebrations of harvest festivals from our colonial past. It was finally “nationalized” as a single governmentally sanctioned holiday during the Civil War and celebrated by Americans ever since. This is a testimony to the sentiment of faithfulness held by our American forefathers. But as I look around, though I yet still see some of the form, I see increasingly less of it and even less of the heart that should accompany it. Like God warned the Hebrews in this passage, because of the “good land” which we have inherited, the “good houses” that we have built, “and all that (we) have is multiplied”, it has followed that we as a nation, in so many ways have,” forgotten” the Lord and gone after other (materialistic) gods to serve them.
But what about us and our children? We do not have to be swept away with this turning of the tide. We can yet “remember” what God has done for us in our own history, as a nation, as a family, and personally. We can yet consider that the benefits we have here today are due to the blessings accrued by many faithful family members and other citizens (forefathers) that have gone before us. We may yet, let these reminders “humble” us in thanksgiving to our good Father for how He has provided so well for us and renew in us a resolve to seek and keep His ways even in the midst of a society that is steadily forgetting and ignoring the source of their own provision. And, we may do so in the hope that our next generations and their children will not forget and might retain the blessings of God in their lives and for posterity. That is the promise of God to faithful parents.
May you and your family thankfully enjoy God’s blessings and the humble remembrance of them this Thanksgiving Season.
If we do not trust that the God that we fear loves us,
We do not know God.
If we do not love this God that we fear for loving us,
We have not known God.
For without this fear - respect, we cannot perceive love;
And unless we perceive love, we cannot return it;
And unless we return it, we cannot experience it;
And unless we experience it, we cannot truly know it.
For to me, worship is the humble drawing near to God in sober fear-touched reverence of His awe-full Holiness as our Creator, Judge, and King, with the thankful anticipation of His goodness, mercy, and blessing as our Father, Redeemer, and Friend. Only from this attitude of heart, comes any real joy, peace, and security for me. For without first seeking to offer Him the proper respect due His Holy Person, we cannot truly perceive or understand this experiential dimension of love that He desires to give us. Our reward as His children, it seems, is tied to the honor and respect of our hearts that we offer to Him. We cannot truly mature as children of our Father unless we first learn to humbly honor our Father for who He truly is. This truth is expressed by Jesus in a parable that He told:
Luke 18:13-14 …the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Unless we first perceive the cool superficiality of our hearts in the light of His Holiness, it is doubtful that we will earnestly seek to experience the confirming warmth of His Heart.
Teach your children to respect and love God. Without respect and honor for His Holy Person we create a impotent and permissive image of God in our children's minds. Without the knowledge of His love to us and our love returned to Him we create a distant and unmerciful image of Him. Both are needed to have to help our children begin to know God aright and the depth and ongoing discovery of neither is ever exhaustible.
Hello Fideles Ministries friends. Today we would like to share with you a concern that just keeps resurfacing in our thoughts about raising children in our culture and age. That question is, how do we faithfully present to our children the true Person of the God of Scripture? What is our concern? Two things: first, any and all of us have the unfortunate tendency to begin to mold our perception of God into the image that we are most comfortable with. At some point, our "comfort" may begin to lead us to worship some of the "characteristics" of God that we prefer more than the "Person" of God as He has revealed Himself to be in the Scriptures. As bad as that is for us, the Second Commandment clearly points out that we will pass that error on to our children and even to their children with disastrous results.
Our second concern is about today's culture that our children are growing up in.
"As Michael Horton says, 'Nobody today seems to think that God is dangerous. And that is itself a dangerous oversight'.”
"It’s dangerous because before we yawn at God, we must first replace the majestic, holy, awesome Tiger of Scripture with a domesticated kitten, conformed to the standards of the world, measured by the yardstick of political correctness. Who wants a God who roars, who threatens, who judges? Why not rather fashion a god in our taste — a friendly god we can pet, leash, and export for popular appeal?" says Tony Reinke.
This seems to be not only true of our culture in general, but also of our churches, who in their efforts to "reach out" to unchurched people in a winsome way, are in danger of the same imbalance that we described above. This deprives not only the people they reach out to of a true understanding of who this Holy Person is, but in the meantime deprives their members and their children of the same. Make a little study of church history, this error has been repeated throughout the ages again and again. So, it is important that we individually recognize and moderate for ourselves and family these pendulum swings of imbalance.
To that end we would like to recommend a book and a blog page about that book.
The book:
"Yawning at Tigers: You Can't Tame God, So Stop Trying"
By Drew Dyck
“A strong antidote against a domesticated God.” Matthew Lee Anderson
"When was the last time you were overawed by God’s majesty? Have you ever stood in stunned silence at his holiness and power?
In our shallow, self-centered age, things like truth and reverence might seem outdated, lost. Yet we’re restless. And our failed attempts to ease our unrest point to an ancient ache for an experience of the holy.
Drew Dyck makes a compelling case that what we seek awaits us in the untamed God of Scripture—a God who is dangerous yet accessible, mysterious yet powerfully present. He is a God who beckons us to see Him with a fresh, unfiltered gaze.
Yawning at Tigers takes us past domesticated Christianity, into the wilds where God’s raw majesty, love, and power become more real and transformative than we could ever imagine."
To be sure, to swing in the other direction and over-emphasize the Fear of God versus His Love does not result in the respect He is due. But, it is not so much "balance" that we need either. We need faith to always, actively be seeking the Living Person of God as the waves of cultural change press against us, and as our own personal Providence changes. We worship a real Personal Being with an unlimited depth to His Holy character, never a static set of attributes.
For our first blog, we simply wish to explain the foundational principles that Fideles Ministries is built upon. Jonny
What we believe and teach about the raising and educating of God's children
1. Christian parents are given children as a gift and reward from God. They are honored with the opportunity to be their children’s primary mentors and disciplers. It is their personal responsibility to see that they are raised to trust in and live for the Lord in their personal and public lives.
Psalm 127, Matthew 28:18-20
2. The discipling, educating, and ”equipping” of the children of God’s people, though the personal responsibility of their parents, is not the soleresponsibility of their parents, but the concurrent responsibility of God’s family to assist those parents as a corporate duty.
Ephesians 2:19-22, Ephesians 4 :11-16
3. The goal of the partnership between individual parents and God’s People is to raise children to adulthood who take ownership of their own individual relationship with and mission for God to which He has called them in this life.
Matthew 25:14-30
4.The purpose of education for God’s people is to equip our children to be God’s benevolent ruler-managers, first of their minds, hearts, bodies, and actions, then of their families, businesses, churches, social groups, government, and world. Therefore that education must be relevant, competitive, and profitable in their existing culture, applying what God has taught us here in this world and keeping in view the future world that God is preparing.
