Saturday, March 11, 2017

Salt and Light

From Larry Alex Taunton:
A generation ago pop star Bonnie Tyler famously asked: “Where have all the good men gone?”  Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, Bonnie.  As C.S. Lewis noted, men in the English-speaking world have largely been emasculated, and men in the Church are seldom an exception to this decades-long trend.  To stand strong for one’s faith in Jesus Christ and push back against a culture that, in the words of Isaiah 5:20, “call[s] evil good and good evil” is to be “divisive,” “unloving,” “bigoted,” and “intolerant.”  This is because evangelicals have confused Christ’s command to love others with being likable, as if that were an attribute of God. (It isn’t.)  As such, they endeavor to be, above all else, inoffensive and polite.  This doctrinal malpractice has given us a generation of men who are what Lewis called “men without chests.”

I am a child of the military.  I was born at Fort Benning, Georgia and grew up at such places as Fort Gordon, Fort Campbell, and Fort Lewis.  The idea of fighting for things that matter has never been foreign to me.  I fully recognize, as the Athenian statesman, Pericles, observed, “Happiness depends on freedom, and freedom depends on courage.”  My father, a career soldier, had a phrase he liked to employ whenever he saw a man behave in a manner that was less than manly.  He would say something like, “That was candy-assed.”  Of course, my father didn’t invent the idiom, but in his use of it you didn’t need further explanation.  You knew exactly what he was talking about. (Read more.)
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