A Christian Reaction to Albert Pujols

Anyone who knows me fairly well knows how very passionate I am about the St. Louis Cardinals. And anyone who knows anything about the Cardinals knows that their best player is Albert Pujols.  Ten years into his career, Pujols' statistics are breathtaking. Three times he has been named the National League's Most Valuable Player, finishing second four other times. He is universally considered to be in select company as one of the greatest hitters that baseball has ever seen.

My household is populated by Albert Pujols fans. We love the fact that the best player plays for our team, but we also enjoy the fact that he has by all accounts been a pretty stand-up guy character-wise. But now Pujols is in the final year of a contract and negotiations for an extension with the Cardinals have broken off until after the season.

Some have been critical of the fact that Pujols (a professing Christian) has turned down the Cardinals' initial offers. Exact specifics are unavailable, but the Cardinals' proposals would (continue to) make Albert very wealthy, though not one of the highest paid players in the game. "How can a Christian be so greedy?" they ask.

My friend and fellow pastor Kevin Golden had a great post the other day in which he challenged us not to be quite so quick to point out the speck in Albert's eye. His whole post is well worth reading, and I suggest that you click here and do just that. But he sums things up quite well in his very helpful conclusion:

All of this is to say: yes, Pujols should contemplate how he can use his financial resources in a Godly way and that he not give offense by appearing greedy. And we should all do the same. One means by which my priorities in life are made evident is my checkbook. How I spend money reveals much about my truest and deepest allegiances, even betraying the false gods which I worship. Thus, rather than using Pujols contract negotiations as an opportunity to scrutinize him, let me first scrutinize myself.

Then, having faced my own sinful nature and being led to repentance by Christ, I will rejoice in Christ’s forgiveness, purchased at the cost not of gold or silver but His own precious blood and His innocent suffering and death. And so Christ’s priority becomes clear - He has done all this that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. That is Christian witness, not my use of financial resources, but Christ’s giving of His very self for the salvation of the world.

Apologizing and Forgiveness...Neither is Easy

My brother-in-law Tyson Sturgeon sent me a link to this story and interview from Good Morning America.  In it I learned of Matt Kravchuk, a sophomore basketball player for Holy Family University in Philadelphia, and John O'Connor, the team's coach.  Last month in a practice, O'Connor shoved Kravchuk, knocking him to the ground.  What has followed has been accusations and legal actions, culminating in the coach's resignation.

This came hours after both men appeared on ABC's Good Morning America.  In that interview, George Stephanopolous prompted the coach to apologize, at which time O'Connor said to Kravchuk, "The main thing is that this was an accident..I was just trying to make us a better team, make us more competitive and in doing so an accident happened.  And it was unintentional by me, and I'm really sorry that it happened.  If I could take it back I certainly would.  But again, it was an accident and I'm really sorry it happened."

"To be honest, it's kind of hard to accept your apology, just because you claim it's justified, you claim you weren't crossing the line...I can't play for you anymore because as your player I'm supposed to be able to respect you and I don't feel I can do that anymore."

In the end, I'm not posting this to spark a conversation as to whether the coach's actions were justified, wether he ought to have resigned, or whether other further legal and disciplinary steps need to be taken. What I want to draw our attention to is something that Tyson pointed out to me.  He put it exceedingly well, so I'll leave you with his words:

"I just thought it was fascinating in two regards, especially when I think about my own life:

1. How difficult it is to truly apologize and say you were wrong and feel it in your heart and let it be what it is, and
2. How difficult it can be to forgive, let someone say they made a mistake, and let that be what it is and live with the hurt that is still there.

This back and forth really made it hit home for me how much we need the Gospel to penetrate our hearts to be able to do both well."

Friday Fun...Free Snowcones from Improv Everywhere

A freshly fallen snow can be so beautiful.  But one of the worst parts about winter is those unsightly piles of dirty plowed snow that subsequently fill our parking lots and sit alongside our roads.  Who knew they could be so useful?

Grace for Both Brothers

When I was growing up, I learned the story of The Prodigal Son in what I suppose was the traditional fashion.  That is to say, the message of it was that God loves sinners, even the most vile of sinners, and his love for them is not conditioned on their behavior, but is rather a matter of free grace.  A wonderful message indeed.

In the last ten or fifteen years, I've heard the story told in a slightly different way.  It adds a much needed twist to it, rightly realizing that the story Jesus tells in Luke 15:11-32 is actually a story of two lost sons, not just one.  While the younger son was clearly lost in his sin, his older brother is equally lost in his self righteousness.  What we need is neither religion/moralism nor irreligion/relativism, but the gospel.  Tim Keller does a wonderful job of describing this in his paper, The Centrality of the Gospel.

As Henri Nouwen points out though in his wonderful book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, we need to take care that we don't respond to this story by seeing the younger brother as the "good guy" who gets it and the older brother as the "bad guy" who doesn't.  Rather, what we need to do is see in ourselves our own tendencies to be like both the younger brother and the older brother.  And then we need to flee to Christ, for his grace is sufficient for both situations.

Matt Chandler had what I thought were some great thoughts on showing grace toward both brothers.  You can click here to download the MP3 audio file.  It's well worth the four minutes it takes to listen to it.

(HT: Vitamin Z)

Indeed, God Does Have a Wonderful Plan for Your Life. But...

A couple weeks ago, Trevin Wax posted this picture as part of a blog post which included an excerpt from his book, Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals.  In it he pointed out that God's "wonderful plan" for us is not always the same "wonderful plan" we would have for ourselves.  Whereas we would often desire health, wealth and happiness, along with physical and emotional security, what God desires is that we would be conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).

Often this occurs through pain and suffering, trials and persecution.  And sometimes it happens that we experience these not just for our benefit, but for the benefit of others.  After all, we are not individually (as we so often functionally suppose) the center of God's world.  Rather he is to be uniquely the center of ours.

As my seminary professor Dr. Jack Collins liked to put, "Don't hear what I'm not saying."  Indeed, we should remember (and be encouraged by!) the fact "that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose," (Romans 8:28, ESV).  But we need to remember that the good toward which all things work is not always an earthly good.  As Wax put it:

"Our lives do not always seem wonderful. But rather than trying to see what wonderful plan God has for giving us our best life now, Christians trust that the picture God is painting will be beautiful, so we look to experiencing our best life later. God has a wonderful plan, and because of his grace, we are part of that plan."

Click here to read his whole post.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom

    
"When people observe our lives, they ought to be able to see the character of God in us, because as his children, we are those in whom his image has already begun to be restored."
 
Sinclair Ferguson

A Word for Preachers from Tullian Tchividjian

"PREACH THE GOSPEL: It's not sermons about parenting that make you a better parent as much as sermons about the Father parenting rebels like us...PREACH THE GOSPEL: It's not sermons about money that make you generous as much as sermons about the generosity of the Father in giving the Son...PREACH THE GOSPEL: It's not sermons on marriage that make you a more loving spouse as much as sermons on the unconditional love of God...It's only when we stop obsessing over our need to be holy and focus instead on the holiness of Christ, that we actually become more holy!"

Tullian Tchividjian
(pieced together from a series of tweets)

Friday Fun...Barney Fife and the Preamble to the Constitution

An oldie but a goodie.  As Barney says, once you learn something, you learn it.

More Nuggets of Gospel Gold

 

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've been reading through the book Don't Call It a Comeback: The Old Faith for a New Day and sharing some of what I perceive as highlights.  One of the things that has really impressed me is the fact that even though there are a myriad of authors from various backgrounds, there is such a consistently God-glorifying, grace-exalting, gospel-proclaiming message in this book.  What a joy it is to come back to the gospel time and time again! 

Some of the golden nuggets I've come across in the last few chapters I've read:

From Ben Peays on the New Birth...

"While it is crucial that we repent, confess, believe, trust, give thanks, and so on, these responses do not bring about the new birth.  God causes it to happen, and we live out the transformation."

and...

"Salvation is ultimately saving us from God's wrath at judgment, but it also saves us into a life with Christ today.  The reality changes our priorities, our desires, what we treasure, and how we will spend our time and energy on earth."

From Jay Harvey on Justification

"...we do not grow in sanctification in order to be justified.  We grow in sanctification because we are justified.  The declarative act of justification is gracious soil out of which grace-filled lives will grow."

 and...

"In our increasingly non-Christian culture, more people in out church will come to Christ with deep struggles in their past or present.  Young people are more likely to engage in sexual sins of all kinds at younger ages than before.  Pornography threatens to strangle a whole generation of young men.  Of course, these sins must be fought against.  But they cannot be battled until we know they are forgiven."

From Owen Strachan on Sanctification...

 "The struggle against our inherent unrighteousness is not a one-time cataclysm, but a lifelong war."

even so...

"Sanctification is doxological, motivated by an overarching purpose transcendent above all others: the glorification of the God whose perfect holiness requires nothing else.  Sanctification is of God, and sanctification is for God."

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom

"What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake"

D.A. Carson

Stan the Man

"Here stands baseball's perfect warrior.  Here stands baseball's perfect knight."

Ford C. Frick, former Commissioner of Baseball.

Congratulations today to Stanley Frank Musial, better known to his adoring fans simply as Stan "the Man."  Today Musial will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can bestowed upon an American civilian.

Once I was at a breakfast meeting for work at a restaurant in St. Louis. Some time after we had ordered our food, in walked Stan the Man. He sat down at the table right next to us and his food came almost immediately, a good five minutes before ours. Nobody minded.

I actually got to spend a little bit of time with him on another occasion. I had my mom's old 45 RPM record (if you're under the age of 35 or 40, maybe you can ask your parents what those are) of the 1961 song Stan the Man by Steve Bledsoe and the Blue Jays. You can listen to the song below and that of course is the 45 to the right.

I had always thought it would be neat to get the 45 autographed.  Though he quite often signed in public for no charge, he eventually set up a company named Stan the Man Inc. through which he sold autographs.  I called them one day and asked about getting the record signed. They said I could send it in, but I was leery to send it through the mail, and asked if I could drop it off instead. To my relief, they said that would be fine.

When I got there to drop it off, the guy I spoke with said, "You know, Stan's in back signing things. Why don't you just come back and have him sign it now?"  I was thrilled to gain a private audience with Stan the Man!  He turned out to be every bit as kind as his reputation suggested and we ended up spending about fifteen minutes talking with each other, mainly about the Cardinals' season which had just finished.

Musial is not just a great guy.  He is one of the greatest baseball players of all time.  He possesses my favorite statistic in all of sports: Of his 3630 career hits (fourth all time), exactly 1815 were at home, 1815 were on the road. What a testament to his consistency! When he retired, he held 17 major-league records, 29 National League records, and nine All-Star Game records.  Most of those records have since been eclipsed, but to Cardinal fans, he will always be "the Man."

Congratulations Stan!

The Weight of 1000 Sermons

If you are a pastor, no doubt you have been frustrated by the fact that people rarely seem to remember the main points you offered in last week's sermon.  Well, I saw a great post for pastors today from Trevin Wax in which he offers this exhortation:

Pastors, don’t underestimate the cumulative effect of your preaching. You are not dumping information into brains. You are forming the habits of your people, teaching them how to read and understand and apply the Bible for themselves. How you preach week after week matters just as much as what you preach.

Click here to read the whole post.

The Cost of Graciousness

My friend Andy Kerckhoff, who has a wonderful blog called Growing Up Well, passed along this CNN piece the other day on facebook.  It is a story about Four-star General Peter Chiarelli, the number two ranking general in the United States Army, and events which occurred at a recent dinner in Washington D.C.

White House adviser Valerie Jarrett was seated at a table and saw General Chiarelli walking by out of the corner of her eye.  What caught her attention was the striped uniform pants he had on, which apparently looked quite similar to those which the waiters were wearing.  Before she saw anything else, she asked him to get her a glass of wine.  She was understandably mortified by her gaffe when she realized who he was, Gen. Chiarelli responded in a manner that is all too unfamiliar in our world today:

Rather than take offense, or try to make Jarrett feel small for her blunder, the general, in good humor, went and poured her a glass of wine. It was evident that he wanted to defuse the awkward moment, and to let Jarrett know that she should not feel embarrassed.

General Chiarelli would go on to say to a reporter who asked him about the incident,

"It was an honest mistake that ANYONE could have made. She was sitting, I was standing and walking behind her and all she saw were the two stripes on my pants which were almost identical to the waiters' pants -- REALLY. She apologized and will come to the house for dinner if a date can be worked out in March."

The CNN column by Bob Greene has some other examples of people showing graciousness to others and is worth reading.  I enjoyed it, but there was one part I took issue with.  It was the way that Greene began the piece:

Graciousness can pay priceless dividends.

And it doesn't cost a thing.

While I agree that the dividends of such graciousness are indeed priceless (for both parties involved), I think it must be realized that graciousness does cost something.  General Chiarelli had to lay aside his pride and the benefits of his position.  Instead of being served (as he had every right to expect), he had to be willing to serve another.

I am reminded of the example of Christ Jesus as spoken of by the Apostle Paul in Philippians 2:5-11 (ESV):

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

If we are to be truly gracious to others, we need to follow the example of Christ and die to ourselves.  We need to sacrifice our self-importance and pride, and assume the roll of a servant.  The cost is actually immense.  And it is precisely the immensity of this cost that makes Christ's graciousness to us so astounding.

But in Paul's words, we see that Christ is not just the perfect example of how we should behave and the perfect motivation to such behavior.  He is also the perfect atoning sacrifice for when we fail do so.  That is why he had to humble himself to the most ignominious of deaths -- that of the cross.  Because it is that death we deserved, and that death he took upon himself.  And that is why "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."

A Word for Preachers

"I believe that as people's confidence in Christ grows, they do, ordinarily and inevitably, bear fruit that accords with faith.  Thus, there is no need for some trade-off here, or alleged dichotomy suggesting that we need to preach morality if we are to have morality.  No; preach Christ, and you will have morality.  Fill the sails of your hearers' souls with the wind of confidence in the Redeemer, and they will trust him as their Sanctifier, and long to see his fruit in their lives.  Fill their minds and imaginations with a vision of the loveliness and perfection of Christ and his person, and the flock will long to be like him.  Impress upon their weak and wavering hearts the utter competence of the mediation of the One who ever lives to make intercession for them, and they will long to serve and comfort others, even as Christ has served and comforted them."

T. David Gordon

Friday Fun...Now THAT'S A Speed Trap

When I was growing up in Webster Groves, Missouri, there was a police officer in the next little town over named Ron Zeigler.  Just about everybody knew Officer Zeigler because just about everybody had had the "pleasure" of meeting him somewhere not too far from the corner of Manchester and McKnight Roads.

During his distinguished 38 year career, Officer Zeigler wrote over 150,000 speeding tickets.  In recent years he averaged about  26 per day but he once wrote a legendary total of 52 in a four hour period.

A little over a year ago I heard that Officer Zeigler had retired from the speed trap business.  When I saw the video below though, it made me wonder if he had just traded in his motorcycle for a helicopter and moved to Georgia.



(HT: Kevin DeYoung)

Where Have All the Singers Gone?

Zach Nielsen has one of my favorite blogs and it definitely has the coolest name in all of the Christian blogosphere: Take Your Vitamin Z. This afternoon Zach pointed readers to a post he had seen dealing with the lack of congregational singing, specifically among men.

In it, David Murrow suggests that much of the reason for such a lack is the constant introduction of new and unfamiliar songs.  Click here to read his whole post and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic as well.  Zach is a talented musician who says he might write about it himself tomorrow.  Keep an eye on Vitamin Z, as I'm sure his insights will be a helpful addition to the conversation.