Christian. Worldview. Thinking.
Recently we took the training wheels off my daughter’s bicycle. She had gone outside and found her neighbor friend, slightly younger than her, learning to ride without them. So the die was cast and off we went. And over the next couple evenings I was struck by something:
Teaching a child to ride a bike is a great metaphor for parenting in general. [Read more…]
Last week I had an opportunity to participate in a small panel of Evangelical voters for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 ahead of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary. It was a cool experience.
In my only comment that made it into the segment, I said that Evangelicals are not looking for a Pastor-in-Chief. There’s an idea out there that an Evangelical will vote for someone simply because that person professes faith in Jesus and quotes the Bible in his commercials.
But the premise is reductionistic. [Read more…]
The bonus room erupted in a fracas.
After untangling the boys – age 6 and 8 – it was time to find out what happened. It was honestly pretty amusing, though I disguised my amusement well enough.
Turns out the younger brother was drawing a picture of “chocolate poop.”
Now, I’m sorry if you find that a bit crass, but as anyone who has been around Kindergarten boys knows, this kind of thing is central to a boy’s sense of humor. Of course, plenty of people do object to this sort of thing, and that’s why this situation escalated.
The older brother knew that this would not be an approved activity. In fact, he’d heard a parent say it needed to stop. So he decided to enforce things himself, and of course that didn’t go well.
You see, even though the impulse was correct, my older son has no authority over his brother. In fact, he doesn’t really have authority at all at this stage of his life.
Why?
All authority is delegated authority.
Think about this: Nobody has intrinsic authority. In other words, you and I don’t walk around with authority that flows from our nature.
We all know people who think they do, but Scripture tells us better. There is no birthright to authority, there is no authority that you possess simply because you’re awesome. Any authority you have has been delegated to you by someone else.
We know this to be true practically. When given orders we don’t like, we might protest by saying, “Who do you think you are?” or “Who gave you the right to tell us what to do?”
What we’re asking in this situation is for someone to show the source of their authority. Where did it come from? Is it valid?
The religious rulers approached Jesus this way in Luke 20:2, when they said to him: “Tell us by what authority you do these things, or who it is that gave you this authority.”
How Delegated Authority Functions
At times I might choose to delegate authority to my oldest son – I might tell him, for example, “Watch your sister at the table while I get a refill.” For that particular period of time, he has received authority from me to carry out that task.
Or I might say, “If your brother is drawing pictures of chocolate poop, do what you need to do to stop him.” Had I delegated this aspect of my authority to him, then he would have been fine to disrupt or destroy his little brother’s masterpiece.
But he has no authority until I delegate my authority to him. So his authority in any situation is really an extension or application of my authority.
And so it is with all authority. My authority as a parent does not adhere to me by itself. Like we’ve said, I have no intrinsic authority. My authority as a parent is delegated authority – from God.
Consider Romans 13:1: “For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”
Jesus understood this, of course. He talked a lot about authority. As an example, we find him telling Pontius Pilate that his authority was delegated authority:
“So Pilate said to him, ‘You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?’ Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.’” (John 19:10-11)
Just as any authority my son has is an extension of my authority, so any delegated authority is an extension of the authority of the one who delegates it. And you probably know where we’re going with this…
The Source of All Authority
Ultimately, there is only one being who bears authority intrinsically – that is, who naturally has authority. Obviously that is God, the Creator of all things.
All authority belongs to and originates with God.
And God’s authority is all-encompassing.
Abraham Kuyper, the nineteenth century Dutch theologian/statesman/educator famously said, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, “This is mine! This belongs to me!”
Application
Understanding the nature of authority helps us in at least two ways:
1. We respond better to proper authority over us.
We live in a culture that despises authority. It is almost virtuous to question authority and submission to authority is seen as weakness.
While there are situations where it is appropriate to question authority, in general Christians should recognize that all authority comes from God. To rebel against authority that has been delegated by God – that is an extension of his authority – is to rebel against God himself. And that’s not a happy place to be.
The early church struggled with these things, and I suppose we would similarly struggle with earthly authorities if they were routinely persecuting us. But look at the advice Peter gave:
“Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God..” (1 Peter 2:13-15).
You might read that whole passage, and Romans 13, to go into greater depth.
2. We will be more humble in using authority.
You know what they say: “Power corrupts.” Authority has a way of going to our heads.
That won’t happen if we remember that it’s not really our authority – that it is delegated to us by the Creator.
We might also find that we give greater consideration to the purpose of our authority. Why has God delegated this to you? What are you to do in this role? We should seek to steward our authority well.
3. Other stuff!
There are doubtless plenty of other ways a biblical understanding of authority can help us, and there are plenty of situations where we might apply these principles. We can apply them in our parenting and family relationships, in government and civic duties, in the life of our local church, and in our daily work.
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
I’m tired of talking about it and ready to do it.
So behold the relaunch of my website. The scenery has certainly changed and I’m excited to say there’s a lot more under the hood of this new site.
In recent months I’ve had a cool opportunity to be involved in a pretty large writing project that involved helping students connect their educational curriculum – in multiple subjects – to the Christian worldview. That was challenging and fun. And it made me want to really commit to this kind of writing.
That’s the main point of the change: I want to write more and with greater focus. If you know me well, you know that focus has never been one of my great strengths!
My intention is to orient my writing here towards exploring with you what it means to live as an alien in this world, to explore what it means to live in the complex reality of the already/not yet.
I hope we can think together about questions like these:
What does it mean to be a Christian in a post-Christian world?
How do we actually develop and apply a Christian worldview in our lives in questions great and small?
How can we move beyond labels so we can simply explore what the Bible teaches?
And more.
In a sense I hope to simply chronicle my own spiritual journey – to explore the Scriptures together with you and try to dig a little deeper, to chronicle some of what I learn as I read elsewhere, and maybe even publish some interviews with people who can help us on the journey. I think it would be fun to build a little community here, so you’ll see open comments after each post and I hope you’ll say hi.
I hope you’ll join me. You can subscribe to my email list if you want me to occasionally let you know what’s happening here. You can also keep up on social media if you prefer. No pressure… but I’d love for you to hang around and connect.
What do you think?
I mentioned previously that we spent a day and a half at a really big homeschool convention that was held locally. We are interested in potentially homeschooling at some point, though we are not necessarily committed to the idea at present, so we decided to check it out. There was an enormous number of seminars available that appealed to a wide arrange of styles, methods, challenges, and stages of education. A few stood out (for all the wrong reasons!):
Now, to be fair, the seminars we actually attended did, without exception, hold some value (some more than others, obviously). There was some thought-provoking stuff, a lot of which could hold application for those who don’t homeschool. Honestly, though I’m poking a bit of fun here, I have a high view of homeschooling, whether or not we opt to do it.
Evidently one of the main reasons people hit these conventions is the exhibit hall, and it was absolutely massive. There were scores of vendors. As you’d expect, many curriculum providers had huge displays staffed by multiple people to discuss their curricular offerings. There were book sellers and all manner of services that were available to provide some kind of aid in the homeschooling venture. There were also, interestingly enough, seemingly random vendors that had little to do with homeschooling, like the homemade soap people. While there were a couple of guys who seemed to think they were going to a Renaissance Fair (they were, I’m fairly certain, vendors), the majority of people there seemed, contrary to the stereotypes, pretty normal.
About 24 hours into the thing, we were out of gas. The whole thing was pretty overwhelming, and one day was plenty for us to get a feel for it, talk to people in the exhibition hall, and that sort of thing. Will we homeschool our kids? Maybe now, maybe later, maybe not at all. There are advantages and disadvantages. We’ll see.
We recently launched a new division of our insurance agency called Go Mission Trip Insurance, which is aimed at providing travel/medical insurance coverage to missionaries – especially short-term mission teams. After putting a considerable amount of time as well as some money into building the website, setting up the business, and that sort of thing, we turned our attention to spreading the word (a process we’re still very much engaged in).
I thought it might be interesting to experiment with Facebook ads. The idea is pretty cool – people tell Facebook so much about themselves that you can do some narrowly targeted advertising. You can, for example, target ads to people by age range (or just a certain age), by marital status, by where they live, and by their various interests, “likes” and affiliations. So I put together an ad aimed at people who were interested in various “mission” related keywords, as well as those who “liked” a bunch of mission agencies, seminaries, and notable figures. The first ad bombed — not sure anyone saw it and don’t know that anyone clicked through.
So I went back to the drawing board, changed the ad around, widened the scope, and… BOOM! After a week or so I realized our traffic had gone through the roof and that it was clearly the Facebook ad doing it’s thing. “Well,” I thought, “it’s a good thing I had put a cap on how much money we can spend each day!” But… and it’s a very big but…. I soon learned that Facebook increased my buy without my permission.
I won’t get into my specific reaction(s) to this when I realized what had happened. But let’s just say that we don’t have much of a marketing budget (I mean… hardly anything – we’re not a big company!), and this was going to hurt. Turns out that, sure enough, when you get into the nitty gritty of Facebook’s ad program, they can (and evidently, they DO) increase your cap automatically if your ad is getting a lot of play.
This, of course, begs the question: Why give me the illusion of control by letting me set a cap?
The moral of the story is that you need to be very careful in setting up your Facebook campaign, and you need to keep a very watchful eye over it’s success rate. I’ve not given up on Facebook ads (though I don’t have any more money for it right now!), but next time you better believe I’ll be very careful. You should too.
Here’s an image that seems fairly descriptive of a fairly wide swath of our culture. It seems this is a remote control that doubles as a bottle opener. And, just in time for the hyperbolic run-up to the Super Bowl, it’s available at a Groupon special price. Oy.