Russell Moore on Why We Should Hate the Sanctity of Life Sunday

Sunday is Sanctity of Life Sunday and it looks like this year we will be participating in it. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the cursed day that abortion was legalized by an oligarchy at the Supreme Court.

To prepare for this service and this day, I want to encourage you to read the helpful article by Dr. Russell Moore, the VP at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (my alma mater), on why he hates that such a day is necessary, but is hopeful that it won't always be.

I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that we have to say things to one another that human beings shouldn’t have to say. Mothers shouldn’t kill their children. Fathers shouldn’t abandon their babies. No human life is worthless, regardless of skin color, age, disability, economic status. The very fact that these things must be proclaimed is a reminder of the horrors of this present darkness. . . . 

I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that as I’m preaching there are babies warmly nestled in wombs who won’t be there tomorrow. I’m reminded that there are children, maybe even blocks from my pulpit, who’ll be slapped, punched, and burned with cigarettes before nightfall. I’m reminded that there are elderly men and women languishing away in loneliness, their lives pronounced to be a waste.

But I also love Sanctity of Human Life Sunday when I think about the fact that in our churches there are ex-orphans all around, adopted into loving families. I love to reflect on the men and women who serve every week in pregnancy centers for women in crisis. And I love to see men and women who have aborted babies find their sins forgiven, even this sin, and their consciences cleansed by Christ.
We’ll always need Christmas. We’ll always need Easter. But I hope, please Lord, someday soon, that Sanctity of Human Life Day is unnecessary.

Read the rest of the article here.

Using God's Gifts As Weapons: Dr. Moore on the 3rd Temptation

The book that inspired our current series on the temptation of Jesus is Dr. Russell Moore's wonderful book, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ. Regarding next Sunday's temptation, the third temptation, Dr. Moore has the following to say:

When Eve, and then Adam, turned from the world of God to believing th word of Satan, they acted as though Satan could be the guarantor of their exaltation. They worshiped him. The nihilism of the fall wasn’t simply tat the primeval couple a from the wrong tree. They worshiped the wrong god and thus attacked the entire structure of the divine economy.

The further the Israelites went away from their merciful rescue from Egypt, the more they showed the same idolatrous instinct. The golden calf incident sums up perfectly the nihilism of human pride. The calf was made of gold, of course, but the Scripture insists that we acknowledge where this gold had come from in the first place. Aaron had taken up an offering of “the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters” (Ex. 32:2). Now where did these “rings of gold” come from? The Israelites had plundered this gold jewelry from their Egyptian taskmasters, right before their flight into the night (Ex. 12:35) They did so at the direction of the word fo God. And how did it come about? It was because “the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked” (Ex. 12:36).

The Israelites used the very gifts God had given them as a weapon against him, the height of entitlement and hubris. This was, of course, precisely what our first ancestors did as well. God created the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He gave the vegetation to the man and woman to eat. They used the one as a means of insurrection and the other as a hiding place from communion with God. In their pride they’d forgotten they were creatures and subjects and sons and daughters. As the Israelites danced around the golden calf, and in every other instance of worshiping a thing rather than God, they showed they loved their kingdom more than their King. By offering praise to a crated thing made out of their own stuff, they were “rejoicing in the works of their hands” (Acts 7:41).

Satan was willing to give away his territorial rights to the kingdoms of this world partly because he knew he wouldn’t be giving up a kingdom but rather would be gaining another subject. Satan knew from millennia of experience that seeking the kingdom while rejecting the King means losing both. -140-141


July 1, 2012 | Mark 1:1-15 - Make War: The Great Cosmic War & the Warrior Whose Already Won It 
July 8, 2012 | 1 John 2:15-17 - Gone Fishing: The Bait & Hook Strategy of Temptation  
July 15, 2012 | Luke 3:18-4:22 - Who's Your Daddy?: Our Christian Identity and the Nature of Temptation
July 22, 2012 | Matthew 4:1-4 - Hungry? Why Wait?: Learning to Feast When on a 40 Day Fast
August 8, 2012 | Matthew 4:5-7 - Don't Jump: Why the Gospel is Greater Than Self-Vindication
 

For more:
GBC - "Tempted and Tried": A Review
GBC - Trip Lee "War" (lyrics)
GBC - Brad Stine on Fishing and Fishermen
GBC - "Make War!": Piper's Call To Fight Sin
Sermon - December 20., 2009 - Worship the King:  The Folly of Misplaced Allegiance 
Sermon - November 22, 2009 - Self-Control in the Face of Temptation
GBC - Still Surviving The Storm

Stomach Virus' and the Humanity of Christ: Moore on the Suffering and Sick Servant

If everything had worked according to plan, we would be discussing the humanity of Jesus this upcoming Sunday, but do to the snow last Sunday, we will discuss that a week later.  Recently I came across an article by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Dr. Russell Moore regarding the humanity of Jesus.  Moore raises the question:  did Jesus ever have a stomach virus?  This is an interesting question and it has been asked in many different ways.  The question is basically about how human Jesus was.

It is important to remember that Jesus wasn't a sort superman:  all God and not human at all.  Instead, Jesus was both fully human and fully God.  It is dangerous to overemphasize one and ignore the other.  Moore writes:


Last week a friend called my office to leave a question she wanted some help thinking through. Could Jesus have gotten a stomach virus? Or the flu? Or a head cold? This question was rooted in something a little deeper. Since sickness is part of the curse of the Fall, would Jesus’ sinless nature have exempted him from viruses and bugs and fevers?

That night one of my sons woke us, crying as the stomach virus hit with all the unpleasantness that brings. As I watched his little frame tremble as he vomited, I thought about this woman’s question. Would Mary have ever watched her little firstborn in the throes of such sickness? . . .

The Scripture repeatedly makes a point of telling us about Jesus’ exhaustion, about his digestion of food, in order to make the point that our Christ really identified with us in every aspect of our common humanity, except for our sin (Heb. 4:15).

The very beginning of the Christ story itself tells us that part of the sign of the Messiah is that he is wrapped in cloths (Lk. 2:12). Why do you wrap cloths around a baby? For the same reason you might diaper your baby, or wrap her up in a blanket. The point is to keep the baby warm, and to keep him dry from waste. This signifies from the very beginning just how much Jesus is our brother, sharing with us a human nervous system and a human digestive system.

It’s also hard for us to imagine the radical nature of substitution. Of course, we understand Jesus’ suffering for us on the Cross. But the Cross was culmination, not the beginning of Jesus’ identification with us. Jesus walked into a world fallen with sin, a world cursed by thorns, death, and, yes, sickness. Though Jesus clearly had power of sickness in his healing ministry, and over death itself, he voluntarily joined us in a world of suffering and pain, for the purpose of offering up a sacrifice and restoring human peace with God and nature . . .

It just doesn’t seem right to us to imagine Jesus feverish or vomiting. But that’s precisely the scandal. It didn’t seem right to many to imagine Jesus as really flesh and bone, filled with blood and intestines and urine. 

Somehow that seemed to detract from his deity. It surely didn’t seem right to many to imagine the only begotten of the Father twisting in pain on a crucifixion stake, screaming as he drowned in his own blood. This was humiliating, undignified. That’s just the point. Jesus joined us in our humiliation, in our indignity.

I hope you don’t get a stomach virus this year, or the flu or the fever or a cold. But, if you do, I hope you remember, just for a minute, in your discomfort that Jesus has passed through everything you’ll ever face. He might have been racked with nausea or chills or aches, just as you are. And then he faced far, far worse.

But, as you lie there, remember the gospel of incarnation and substitution, a gospel that comes, as the old song says, to make his blessings known “far as the curse is found.”

There is some great insight here.  I love the emphasis on the cross.  The suffering of Jesus makes no sense unless Jesus is human.  If Jesus is not human then the cross loses its power.  This is hugely practical as we'll discuss next week.  I encourage you to read the entire article.


Russell Moore - Did Jesus Ever Get a Stomach Virus?