His Righteousness For our Sins
Today is Reformation Day. 490 years ago, on October 31, 1517, a monk named Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church — the catalyst event which soon led to the Protestant Reformation, a movement which was an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church back to the foundation of God’s Word alone as the authoritative rule of all life and faith, and to the foundation of faith in God’s grace alone as the source of man’s salvation. As we all know, this led to the tremendous fracture of the church as it was at the time — something completely unintended by Luther, but albeit a necessary change in order to bring about the Spiritual transformation that God so desired.
Tonight, at my church here in Louisville, we went through Romans 4 and 5 briefly during the prayer meeting, so as to set the stage for what we would be praying about during the service. Interestingly, it is also today’s ESV Verse of the Day, and my small group back at my home church in Toronto is also studying Romans 4 tonight.
1 What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness
The question that has plagued humanity for centuries is simply this: how can us, a sinful people, be right with a holy? The Apostle Paul argues that it is only by faith alone that any person could be made right before God. We must trust Him who justifies us by exchanging the righteousness of His Son, Christ Jesus death and resurrection for the unrighteousness of our sins. Traditionally, this is known as the “Great Exchange”.
Paul uses the model of Abraham to prove justification by faith alone because the Jews held him up as the supreme example of a righteous man, and because it clearly showed that Judaism with its works-righteousness had deviated from the faith of the Jews’ patriarchal ancestors. In a spiritual sense, Abraham was the forerunner of the primarily Gentile church in Rome as well.
So if Abraham’s own works had been the basis of his justification, he would have had every right to boast in God’s presence. But such would make the hypothetical premise of verse 2 unthinkable. Be that as it may, faith is not a meritorious work. It is simply the channel through which it is received and it too, is a gift. Abraham did nothing to accumulate it; God simply took His own righteousness and credited it to Abraham as if it were actually his (traditionally known as “imputation” or “imputed righteousness”). This God did so because Abraham believed in Him.
Broadening his argument from Abraham to all people, the apostle thus makes it clear that the forensic act of declaring a person righteous is completely apart from any kind of human work (contrary to what the apostate Roman Catholic Church believes). If salvation were on the basis of one’s own effort, God would owe salvation as a debt — but salvation is always a sovereignly given gift of God’s grace to those who believe. And since faith is contrasted with work, faith must mean the end of any attempt to earn God’s favor through personal merit.
-MacArthur Bible Commentary
Only those who surrender all their own claims to righteousness by their own strength and acknowledge themselves to be sinners can be justified. The great news is that for those who are graciously justified by the Father, our direction in life is completely changed. Once we have trusted in His righteousness for our sins, our direction in life — not perfection — is transformed. We will never be perfect and may still slip and sin on occasion, but the enemy has been disarmed and ultimately been defeated! While God does allows our faith to be tested (cf. Job 1:6ff), by His Spirit He works through us to sanctification towards glorification, where one day we will have new bodies that are not corrupted.
And thus, while our justification is monergistic in nature, our sanctification is synergistic. Through the discipline of His grace, He calls us to press on and train ourselves for the purpose of godliness.
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
On this Reformation Day, let us remember how important for us to keep Sola Fide at the forefront of our lives — His righteousness for our sins.
SDG
A Review of The Doctrine of God by John Frame
This is a review of
Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002.
864 pp. $39.99
Copyright © 2007 by Alex S. Leung. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The popularity of J.I. Packer’s classic book, Knowing God (1973), is evidence to the widespread desire in today’s church to reclaim the center of Christianity in the knowledge of God. In recent times, the need to understand why major disasters and calamities have occurred underscores the yearning of the society at large to understand who God is and why He does what He does, why He would allow so much suffering to occur if He is truly good. More recently, in response to 9/11 or the bridge collapse in Minnesota, many Christians are even questioning whether or not God truly had control of the events. Some have argued that God allows and uses suffering in the world to amplify the dire need in people to repent of their sins, including unbelief, and to put their trust in the atoning work of Christ on the cross. In spite of this, many still are left dumbfounded by life’s circumstances about the will of God in all these things.
This pervasive rejection of the God of Scripture in secularism and alternative spirituality and religions compels us as Christ’s ambassadors to call unbelievers to be reconciled with God (2 Cor 5:20). What this undeniably implies is that we actually know this God of whom we confess, so that we would be ready in season and out of season, to give a biblical defense for the hope we have in Jesus Christ (2 Tim 4:2; 1Pet 3:15). While postmodern epistemology may be accurate to assert that we cannot exhaustively know everything about God, we can however know with certainty everything that God has explicitly revealed about himself in Scripture. In “The Doctrine of God”, John Frame, professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, provides a concise exposition of theology proper as defined in Scripture.
The Highest Place and the Greatest Honor
I can’t believe I found this on my portable hard-drive! Back in Toronto, I served 2 years as the Worship Coordinator for Ryerson University’s CCF (Chinese Christian Fellowship) for the school years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005.
The following was my evaluation of the 2004-2005 ministry year, the theological reflections I presented to the CCF Planning Committee and fellowship.
May this be a blessing to you, as we think through how to live lives of worship — lifestyles that puts Christ at the highest place in our lives and gives the Father the greatest honor.
In holy and divine matters one must first hear rather than see,
first believe rather than understand,
first be grasped rather than grasp,
first be captured rather than capture,
first learn rather than teach,
first be a disciple rather than a teacher and master of his own.
We have an ear so that we may submit to others,
and eyes that we may take care of others.
Therefore, whoever in the church wants to become an eye and a leader and master of others,
let him become an ear and a disciple first.
This first.-Martin Luther, First Lectures on the Psalms II, Works II.245-246.
I think that there’s a tendency in fellowship to build up the next generation of leaders, and in so doing, we neglect our first and foremost mission that is to make “disciples.” We puff ourselves up to be “leaders” as if we have something to teach and change others. If we do this long enough via trial-and-error, I’ve personally found myself to be a failure at leadership. People don’t listen for one, they don’t learn anything, and don’t even embrace the Spirit-sanctified truth that is in our words. I think what God requires of us is what Luther said so plainly–we need to become disciples ourselves first, before we even remotely consider our role in leading others.
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Piper at Passion’s OneDay conferences
3 John Piper - Passion conferences messages from the Desiring God DVD “One Day: One Passion” are now available free online:
- Boasting Only in the Cross (OneDay 2000)
- A Generation Passionate for God’s Holiness (OneDay 2003)
- How Our Suffering Glorifies the Greatness of the Grace of God (Passion06)
It’s such a blessing to the church that Desiring God can provide these videos free to the public! I’ve seen the first couple sermons from the original Passion DVDs and saw Piper preach live at Passion06 for the talk on suffering. I highly recommend these videos if you have not seen or heard the sermons before. Certainly, seeing Piper preach live is a spiritual feast — Pastor John is so biblical and passionate in his expositional preaching that many times I just want to shrink and hide myself from how he pierces the heart and mind through God’s Word!
(HT: Desiring God blog)
Trinitarian Worship
Phil Ryken, Senior Minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church (Philidephia, PA) shares some helpful suggestions on how to stay trinitarian in the church’s corporate worship:
- Make sure that every element of worship is saturated with Scripture — the Scripture breathed out by the Spirit, revealed by the Father, bearing witness to Christ.
- Use hymnody — not just psalmody, but also hymnody — that offers explicit praise to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Trinitarian praise is characteristic of common responses such as the Doxology and the Gloria Patri, but also of many great hymns of praise.
- Confess the ecumenical creeds, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, which are Trinitarian in their structure.
- Preach the whole counsel of God, so that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit receive proper attention in their biblical proportions.
How often does your church do the above?
Dr. Ryken also confesses:
“I suppose there is a danger that Christ-centered preaching may eclipse the Father and the Spirit. It should be kept in mind, however, that as our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ rightly deserves our paticular praise. To know the Son is to know the Father, Jesus said. And the work of the Spirit is to glorify Christ. So the Father and the Spirit are also worshiped when Christ is praised as our Creator and Redeemer.”
The Deceptiveness of Sin
In light of the recent conversations about Erwin McManus’ book “Soul Cravings” and its lack of a clear Gospel presented, I think it would be timely and appropriate to quote Hans Madueme on “The Deceptiveness of Sin“. (If you don’t know him, Hans Madueme, M.D., is Research Analyst at The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.)
Hans paints a very clear picture of the theological and biological implications of the noetic effects of sin:
Something is rotten in the state of the world. We do not need as witnesses the Wall Street Journal or BBC News. Just look around. We live in a dark, painful, and unjust world. Ethnic minorities are victimized. Women are second-class citizens. Children are pawns in evil chess games, now sex slaves, now victims of million-dollar advertising shenanigans. We feel the pain of brokenness in our homes and in our neighborhoods; bitter anguish permeates our world. We try to placate our cries with Zoloft or the comforts of a cigarette and one more strong drink. Our world is morbidly obese, stuffed up with the calories of injustice and unrighteousness: need we mention Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur? The poor remain oppressed, the foreigner denied justice. Once upon a time, people may have enjoyed happiness, peace, and justice, but for many today, misery is an intimate companion.
The situation is grim, but these are symptoms of a deeper malady, what the Christian tradition calls sin. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is more real than anything else; God is creator and all else is creation. In him we live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). God is also holy, morally pure and impeccable. He is light; in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). The prophet Isaiah glimpses the high and lofty one, dwelling in a high and holy place (Isa 57:15). There is no sin in God. To behold his glory is to be utterly ruined: “For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isa 6:5). Yet mysteriously we are unclean, sick, desperately ill, and ridden with moral disease. We fall short of the holiness of God, like bent arrows missing the target. We are perverted, wicked, and unholy. We are morally crooked, defective, twisted. Committing high crimes against God, we are fools, disobeying God’s law and demeaning his character. In religious vernacular, we are sinners.
But like letter writing, this self-understanding has fallen on hard times, a myth from a pre-scientific age. Functional MRIs have taught us that “my brain made me do it.” If there is anything ‘unholy’ here, it is the waxing and waning levels of serotonin and norepinephrine (the usual neurotransmitter suspects). Behavior is a complex interplay of countless pathways in our neural systems. The quaint notion of moral culpability, presupposed by the language of sin, has no currency here. Perhaps your grandmother believed in sin, but we have reached adulthood, so we put away childish things. In short, damaged brains cause bad behavior. Or so the claim goes. Since the pastor is on a long paid leave, we can now consult the friendly neuropharmacologist—neuroethics replaces soulcare. To go deeper: we know that genes determine all that we are and do (since the genome encodes the brain). The real culprit, then, is my DNA double helix. Ergo, I need gene therapy! Maybe you find all this too reductionistic, and you prefer a more psychosocial paradigm. Here, too, there is often no conceptual room for the language of sin. Human beings are socially and historically located; we are victims of situations beyond our control—an abusive father, a poor neighborhood, low socio-economic status, childhood mental and psychological abuse, and so on. Sin is not the problem: “My poor upbringing made me do it.”
We have simply restated the ancient nature-nurture debate. Scripture and Christian tradition recognize, of course, that both nature and nurture are part of our identity. They shape us in important ways, though we cannot be reduced to either biology or sociology. These categories do not exhaust the moral significance of being human. Our moral lives transcend both nature and nurture; they are therefore not determined, though they are influenced, by them. We are moral agents made in the image of God. To make either nature or nurture tell our whole moral story is itself evidence of the noetic (intellectual) effects of sin. Intellectual self-justification and moral slipperiness reflect diminished ability to reason and think well; our noetic life is impaired. Thus we forfeit moral clarity as we think about the world in which we live, our fellow human beings, and even ourselves. We become like the man who looks at his face in the mirror and sees a remarkably fine specimen of humanity. Alas he does not realize the mirror speaks lies. In reality, his head is flattened, his stomach grossly inflated, and his arms helter-skelter. Call this the reverse ‘circus mirror’ syndrome. Such are the distorting noetic effects of sin: irresistibly, the tree looks good for food and pleasing to the eye.
Continue reading the article at The Gospel Coalition.
The Atonement in Focus
The latest (summer) issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology has just been published and is focusing on the ever important doctrine of the atonement – the primary doctrine which has been under attack in evangelicalism.
Fellow Canadian Dr. Stephen J. Wellum (professor of Christian Theology), in the opening editorial writes,
“…in the evangelical church today we are in danger of downplaying and even distorting the true meaning and signifi cance of the cross.
A number of examples could be given to demonstrate this last observation, but I want to focus on one disconcerting trend that is increasingly occurring in evangelical theology, namely, an effort to reinterpret the cross in non-substitutionary terms.”
Continue reading Wellum’s article “Articulating, Defending, and Proclaiming Christ our Substitute”.
Amend ETS
Does anybody think it is necessary to amend the statement of faith of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS)?
After the past ETS President jumped shipped, resigned and joined the Roman Catholic Church, it may be time to rethink and revise the ETS Doctrinal Basis, which currently only reads:
“The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.”
Denny Burk and Ray Van Neste are thinking it is time to amend this. I’m thinking it is necessary also. Visit http://www.amendets.com/ for details and info about how you can be a supporter.
Opinions are just that
Truth is different.
Subtitle Difference
Bob Kauflin, in his latest blog post answering a question about worship leading and entering the presence of God, he makes note of a subtitle but significant difference:
So as I’m standing in front of the church, leading them in songs, Scripture reading, and prayer, my goal is not to “lead them into God’s presence,” but to help them remember and celebrate what Christ has accomplished for them through his righteous life, atoning death, and glorious resurrection. As they place their faith and trust in the perfect high priest, they will most likely experience a fresh awareness of God’s nearness. Their position in Christ hasn’t changed. Their appreciation of it has. The church will be built up and God will be glorified.
Understanding this area really brings freedom to me as a worship leader. I don’t have to try to pull off an impossible task. I don’t have to be anxious about whether or not people will “make it.” I simply have to present what Christ has done in a clear and compelling way to encourage people’s faith. The Holy Spirit takes care of the rest.
Hullabaloo Over the Gospel
Seems like there’s been quite a hullabaloo over the gospel lately.A man named Chalke, echoing a McLaren, echoing a Green and a Baker, echoing a number of feminists, used the words “divine child abuse” to talk about the cross. In response, two major British evangelical institutions refused to let Chalke speak, thereby cutting ties with a third institution that has Chalke on its board.A book called Pierced For Our Transgressions responded to Chalke, which in turn provoked a heavy-weight named Wright to enter the ring, pound the book, and defend Chalke.The conservative blogosphering bleacher-sitters then jumped to their feet and started quarrelling with one another over whether or not Wright is one of them. Another heavy-weight named Piper now promises to leap in soon with a book that says “no” and argues that Wright is “harmful to the church and to the human soul.” Meanwhile, the U.S. counterpart to the British publisher that printed Pierced decided not to touch the book, telling the enquiring yours truly that the book “doesn’t add anything to the conversation.”Those evangelicals. Always squabbling with one another instead of doing the work of the ministry. Isn’t that what this is?
Well, what does Jude mean when he says “to contend for the faith”? What does Peter mean when he says “be on your guard”? What does John mean when he warns a church to not “even greet” false teachers? What does Paul mean when he says to let anyone with an alternative gospel—my goodness—”be eternally condemned”?
Until this world is ended, the gospel will be challenged from places high and low. It will be tweaked and twisted, denounced and denied. And most fundamentally, Christ calls local churches—not seminaries, not presbyteries, not synods, not theologians, not publishers, and not even eJournals—to defend the gospel. It’s the people in the pews and the pulpits whom these apostles address.
Insofar as God permits, this issue of the 9Marks eJournal aims to equip local churches and pastors to do just that—defend the gospel. The sweet news is, defending the gospel means meditating on it. Start with Powlison, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
–Jonathan Leeman, in his “Editor’s Note” to the
July/August 9News (PDF): CHALLENGES TO THE GOSPEL
Individual Online Articles: (more…)
How do you like THEM Calvinists!?
As first reported by The Christian Post, it is very interesting to see the theological background and position of the top 2 of the top 25 list multiplying churches in America! #1 is Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church (New York, NY), and #2 is Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church (Seattle, WA) (–not to be confused with the highly emergent Mars Hill Bible Church of Grandville, MI that Rob Bell pastors). Given the misconception that Calvinists don’t care about evangelism and missions, the list clearly shows that we really do care and are doing the best we can at making the Good News known to the lost!
The top 25 list was compiled by ranking the top 40 respondents using such self-reported criteria as the total number of church plants, the average number of churches planted each year, the percentage of budget dedicated to church planting, and the number of daughter churches that have planted a new church.
Calvinists are not few but are plenty in this world — especially in the US of A — and especially among them “younger” evangelicals!
And as Mark Dever of 9 Marks Ministries correctly asks, Where’d All These Calvinists Come From?
This is the Road
“This life, therefore, is not righteousness but growth in righteousness,
not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise.
We are not yet what we shall be but we are growing toward it.
The process is not yet finished but it is going on.
This is not the end but it is the road.
All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.”
-Martin Luther
What’s on your heart?
At the heart of Reformed Theology, at the heart of Luther and Calvin’s struggle, and in Knox and Jonathan Edwards, were men who were awakened to the greatness, to the majesty, to the holiness, and the sovereignty of God. By contemplating the holiness and sovereignty of God, they were driven to develop their doctrines of the grace of God. Because until you meet a God who is holy and is sovereign, you don’t know what grace means. I don’t think we are ever going to see a healthy evangelical church until the evangelical church is solidly Reformed, where it takes biblical Christianity seriously with a right concept of a sovereign God.
Continue reading this quote by R. C. Sproul - from his series “A Blueprint for Thinking.”
Proven: Total Depravity
“The amount of misrepresentation to which Calvin’s theology has been subjected is enough to prove his doctrine of total depravity several times over.”
J. I. Packer, “John Calvin and Reformed Europe,” in Packer, Honouring the People of God, p. 19.
(HT)
God Is for Us: Christ Obeyed and Died
John Piper for the last year or so has been studying and writing a defence of the doctrine of justification as a response to N. T. Wright and objection to the New Perspective on Paul. Dr. Piper just posted an excerpt from the conclusion of his book “The Future of Justification“, which will be relased this November:
Our only hope for living the radical demands of the Christian life is that God is totally for us now and forever. Therefore, God has not ordained that living the Christian life should be the basis of our hope that God is for us. That basis is the death and righteousness of Christ, counted as ours through faith alone. All the punishment required of us because of our sin, Christ endured for us on the cross. And all the obedience that God required of us, that he, as our Father, might be completely for us and not against us forever, Christ has performed for us in his perfect obedience to God.
This punishment and this obedience (not all obedience) is completed and past. It can never change. Our union with Christ and the enjoyment of these benefits is secure forever. Through faith alone, God establishes our union with Christ. This union will never fail, because in Christ, God is for us as an omnipotent Father who sustains our faith and works all things together for our everlasting good. The one and only instrument through which God preserves our union with Christ is faith in Christ—the purely receiving act of the soul.
On a related note, the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) at its General Assembly just adopted the recommendations of the Federal Vision Committee. The committee report is available here (PDF). An MP3 of the Federal Vision Committee Discussion: mp3 (20 MB).
Grace - spoken word
Grace
Unmerited favor toward those who deserve wrath.
Unmerited favor toward those who because of sin wouldn’t desire to ask
Unmerited but given, inherited our sinning
Grace
Is salvation from predestination, Christ gave his life to change our
destination
Is good health, when we deserve bad
It is unmerited favor to those who deserve wrath.
Is good relationships with God and with others
Is the reason we call each other brothers.
Grace forgets mistakes and gives new air to breathe
It the reason we sing, we pray and we read
Grace is the warm breeze when it’s cold and the cool breeze when it’s hot
Grace would be everything but some things it’s not
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Issues with the Baptist Faith & Message
Dr. Sam Storms notes 2 theological issues with the Baptist Faith & Message 2000: one concerning the issue of justification, and another about the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
To Online Date or not to Online Date
Over at Joshua Harris’ blog, he’s posted an article that’s written by one of Covenant Life Church’s singles pators. Itis aptly titled, Online Dating: A Pastoral Perspective.
For the single and seeking among us, this should be a very helpful piece to help you in spiritual discernment. And if you are in ministry to such a postmodern generation of singles, this is a very concise resource as a pastoral, biblical perspective on this very difficult issue.
Corrupted Theology, Corrupted Worship
The unspoken but increasingly common assumption of today’s Christendom is that worship is primarily for us—to meet our needs. Such worship services are entertainment focused, and the worshipers are uncommitted spectators who are silently grading the performance. From this perspective preaching becomes a homiletics of consensus— preaching to felt needs—man’s conscious agenda instead of God’s. Such preaching is always topical and never textual. Biblical information is minimized, and the sermons are short and full of stories. Anything and everything that is suspected of making the marginal attender uncomfortable is removed from the service….Taken to the nth degree, this philosophy instills a tragic selfcenteredness. That is, everything is judged by how it affects man. This terribly corrupts one’s theology.
R. Kent Hughes, Disciplines of a Godly Man (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991)
(As quoted in R. Albert Mohler, Jr.’s article, The Whole Earth is Full of His Glory: The Recovery of Authentic Worship; Isaiah 6:1-8. The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Spring 1998.)
Excellent Corporate Worship
In an age increasingly suspicious of (linear) thought, there is much more respect for the “feelings” of things – whether a film or a church service. It is disturbingly easy to plot surveys of people, especially young people, drifting from a church of excellent preaching and teaching to one with excellent music because, it is alleged, there is “better worship” there. But we need to think carefully about this matter. Let us restrict ourselves for the moment to corporate worship. Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it’s a bit like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire themselves admiring the sunset.
One Pure and Holy Passion
“I’m a Christian. I love God. I currently don’t have a wife. If God wants me to marry someone, He’ll make that explicitly clear. For me to get proactive in the process is to imply that I don’t trust God to make it happen. And seeking a wife seems less spiritual than taking on another ministry responsibility. After all, I’m single. I really should commit all my time to God, and not be distracted with thinking about girls.”
With One Voice
The ritual of courtship in America has depreciated to the degree that the path to marriage, once enriched by established cultural patterns, gender role expectations, and a sense of the normalcy of marriage, has become a bewildering maze. A century ago, young people looked forward to marriage and child rearing as both marks of adulthood and economic necessities. Today, the fruits of the sexual revolution, feminism, careerism, a growing youth culture, and a modern economy that values individuals over families have all contributed to the divorce of sexual expression from long-term commitment. Though not all of the social forces of the last century are intrinsically sinful, we must soberly admit that, to many, marriage is no longer an economic, social, or sexual necessity. Instead, it is at best just one more option for individual self-fulfillment and at worst a distraction from education, career, and sexual exploration. Such views have resulted in the increasing acceptance of a rise in the age of marriage, the debasement of women, the normalcy of divorce, and the general immaturity of young adults, particularly men. Against this backdrop, our youth and singles must recover a sense that marriage and childrearing (with their many associated joys and responsibilities) are not only precious milestones that enhance direction and stability in life, but are–apart from the gift of celibacy for Kingdom fruitfulness–biblical norms that mark the successful transition to adulthood.
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