An Exegetical Analysis of GI Joe

Saturday was Man Day at our house. That means that my sons and I didn’t wear shirts, wrestled, ate hot dogs and listened to Credence Clearwater Revival. For about six hours, our lovely home looked more like a day care that was being run by the cast of Swamp People. As part of our Man Day festivities, we watched a cartoon called GI Joe: Renegades. I grew up watching GI Joe cartoons so I was hyped when my sons wanted to watch this one. I didn’t know anything about this new version but it couldn’t be that different from the one I knew and loved as a child.

What follows is my assessment of GI Joe: Renegades. Expect to be moved as you read this. As a result of this analysis, it is likely that the whole debt ceiling issue will be worked out, your kids wont need braces and you’ll enjoy a fuller, greener lawn. So sit back and enjoy the genius that is GI Joe: Renegades.

The title of this episode is Revelations Part 1. The very first scene is a woman with black hair and black glasses getting off an airplane. She is a bad guy. We know this because the bad guys in GI Joe cartoons always have dark hair. This is how I broke it down for my son as he continuously asked who was a good guy and who was a bad guy. Apparently, this is a very imp0rtant question for kids his age.

A few scenes later we see an old video of a professor in some laboratory. This is reminiscent of the Dharma Initiative scenes from Lost. My guess is that every character on this show is actually already dead and once the Joes and the Cobras learn to get along, they’ll all meet up in some weird looking church. Just a hunch.

We are quickly introduced to another bad guy. We know that this guy is bad because his head is made out of metal. In GI Joe cartoons, if you see a guy with a metal head, he’s evil. As a side note, this also holds true for real life. People with metal heads are up to no good. The one on this episode also wears a coat and tie. He’s evil but handsomely evil. That’s especially dangerous. The girl with the black hair and black glasses, while also evil, doesn’t like the guy with the metal head. Evil people in GI Joe cartoons can never get along. That’s one reason why they never get the upper hand on the Joes.

Cue intro montage. There’s lots of graphics that probably looked really cool in 1993 and we are introduced to the Joes by a narrarator that says, “Accused of a crime they didn’t commit, a rag tag band of fugitives fights a battle to clear their names…”

Stop.

Since when did GI Joe stop being GI Joe and start being The A Team? To make matters worse, the Joes are led by a buff looking blonde dude (blonde always equals goodness in GI Joe cartoons) and the rest of the team is made up of a big, muscular black guy (think Mr. T) and a skinny, wise cracking white dude (think Murdoch). The Joes even drive a cool van just like the A Team did. The only difference is that the Joes have a girl on their team with red hair (red is a neutral color in GI Joe cartoons so keep your eye out for this one, she may turn on you, Joes). So imagine if the A Team started hanging out with Scooby Doo’s friends and you’ve got GI Joe: Renegades. “And I would have gotten away with melting the sun with this cool laser beam I invented if it weren’t for you pesky kids, I mean rag tag band of fugitives.”

The story line of the show basically centers around the red headed girl that’s with the Joes. Her name is Scarlett and her dad was, along with being a jerky dad, a scientist that worked for, get this, Cobra. Remember what I said about keeping your eyes peeled for people with red hair in GI Joe cartoons. As you can imagine, this girl had serious daddy issues. This makes the episode take a drastic turn away from the A Team and towards an episode of The Wizards of Waverly Place that “tackles the tough issues.” You’ve seen the commercials. “Tonight at 8, Hannah Montana tries to hide an acne flair up from her dream date. (Goofy voice over suddenly gets real serious) And then on a very special episode of The Wizards of Waverly Place, the kids are faced with a tough decision about (insert hot topic here: gang violence, drugs, global warming).”

It takes about half of the 30 minute episode before the Joes stop “tackling tough issues” and start firing guns. Yes, they actually have guns. This was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting the Joes on this new version to sit and talk with the Cobras instead of shoot at them. Oh, and these guns are legit. And when they hit the bad guys, it actually kills them. That’s one thing that always confused me about the old Joe cartoons. “No wonder they can’t ever beat Cobra. Every time they shoot down one of his planes the guy parachutes out.” Not in GI Joe: Renegades. Finally, score one for the new version.

There are several commercial breaks during this episode and each one begins with one or all of the Joes caught in a really bad spot, just like the original. When the commercials come on you’re left thinking, “Great, the Joes are all going to die. Now I’ve got to find a new cartoon.” You’d think one would grow wise to such trickery but no, I still thought it on this version and yes, they still made it out okay.

Also in this episode, we get to find out a little bit more about my favorite GI Joe member when I was a kid, Snake Eyes. Snake Eyes is a ninja and the coolest Joe ever. When we played on the playground at school every kid wanted to be Snake Eyes. Well, in this episode we find out that Snake Eyes doesn’t talk. No big deal. Ninjas aren’t much for chatter. But we also find out that Snake Eyes has, get this, blonde hair. What?! You can’t have a blonde haired ninja. This never works out. It’s always lame. Just ask this guy.

So in conclusion to my cultural analysis I would not recommend GI Joe: Renegades due to its attempt to tackle tough issues and its reckless uses of ninjas with blonde hair. Also, any show with the name Renegade in it that fails to some how pay homage to the original Renegade is not worth your viewing time.

And now you know to keep your kids away from GI Joe: Renegades and knowing is half the battle.

God Is Faithful

Earlier this month I celebrated my 36^th birthday. If you forgot a gift, it’s okay. Just stop reading this right now and head on over to this site to pick me up a little something nice. Thank you.

One of my first thoughts when I woke up on the morning of my birthday was on God’s faithfulness. As I gave a quick scan over the last 36 years of my life, I thought about how I had to deal with my parents splitting up before I was even five, spending most of my school years as a latchkey kid (Is that even legal anymore?) and now leading a family of my own. God has been faithful through it all.

As my day continued, God’s faithfulness became even more evident. I got out of bed early that day and went for one of the longest and best runs of my life. When I got home, I was greeted by the smell of breakfast cooking, hugs from my two sons and a kiss from my wife. All three came to me with gifts and cards and pictures in their hands.

After breakfast, I rushed off to our town’s housing authority where our church had been working with kids and families all weak by teaching them the gospel, sharing food and playing games. I got to tell these kids and their families about how through faith and repentance in Christ we can call God our Father. The kids in this group were as young as 4 and as old as 12. Each one of them sat side by side and hung on my every word. I was in my element. It was great. God is faithful.

When my day was over, I met back up with my family for my oldest son’s soccer game that went something like this. Afterwards we ate Chick-fil-a, ice cream and homemade pie. To top it all off, I got word later in the day that the most pathetic team in all of college football, check that, all of sports, was placed on probation and forced to vacate its already meaningless conference championship from a few years back.

Before I went to bed that night, I went for a walk through the meadow where I drank from a brook with a dear and laughed as a blue bird ate berries from my hand.

You get the point. It was a good day and my first thoughts of that day regarding God and his faithfulness were quite appropriate.

But, what if?

What if I would have tripped over a rock just after starting my morning run, wiped out (Yes, it’s happened to me but you can’t prove anything. This is not an admission of guilt.) and had to cut my run off early, licking my wounds all the way back home?

What if instead or returning home to the sound of my family laughing and food sizzling, there would have been no noise, no pitter patter of little feet on the floor, no kiss from a wife and no pictures to post on Facebook?

What if, like my older brother, there would have been no first birthday, much less a 36^th one? If, like him, I had been born with severe deformities and died shortly after coming into the world, would this have done anything to chip away at God’s faithfulness?

Absolutely not. But why?

I have a tendency to think of God as being faithful for 36 years, 11 days and counting. In other words, I have been known to make the mistake of judging whether or not God is faithful by how good things are going for me. It’s easy for me to proclaim God’s faithfulness while I’m high as a kite from a great morning run but it’s also easy for me to doubt that very same God’s faithfulness when his agenda doesn’t exactly cooperate with mine.

Scripture shows us a God who has been faithful before time began and who will continue to be faithful after time as we know it has come to a screeching halt.

We see his faithfulness in his perfect Triune fellowship before creation (Genesis 1:1).

We see it in his promise to deliver humanity from the mess we got ourselves into (Genesis 3:15; Matthew 1:21).

We see that God is faithful when he makes an unusual promise to a seemingly random man and keeps that promise (Genesis 12; Galatians 3:29).

And we will one day see that faithfulness in all of it glory as we enjoy the perfect, eternal rule of Christ (Romans 8:18-25; Revelation 21:22-22:5).

By God’s good grace, may we not stop with just our birthdays as we consider the faithfulness of God. For an even fuller picture, let’s look further to the birth, murder and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a fulfillment of God’s promises to his people.

God is faithful.

Hip-Hop: A Personal History

“Basketball is my favorite sport. I love the way that they dribble up and down the court. Just like I’m the king on the microphone so is Dr. J and Moses Malone.”

Basketball by Kurtis Blow

If my memory serves me correctly Kurtis Blow’s Basketball was the first rap I ever heard in my life. I’ve been hooked ever since. As a side note, the video for this song is perhaps one of the most unintentionally hilarious videos of all-time complete with dudes dunking on 3-foot goals and ninjas doing Gymkata in the middle of some inner city basketball game. I would rap this song in my head while I shot hoops in my neighborhood. There was never any Gymkata.

As I grew up, so did hip-hop. Raps about cars, basketball and food were quickly replaced with songs that centered on having sex, bragging about having sex, wanting to have sex and bragging about wanting to have sex. The Beastie Boys got the ball rolling in this direction with their debut album, License to Ill. Luther Campbell and the 2 Live Crew picked up the ball and ran with it all the way to some bank in Miami. The Beastie Boys would go on to somewhat regret the perversions of their first two albums but the monster had been created and it is still with us today.

Not too long after rap music began its downward spiral into sexual perversion another stream of rap came along that was also headed in the wrong direction. You probably know it as gangsta rap. This is the kind of music that made middle-class white kids all of the sudden hate everything and want to join a gang. When they couldn’t find a gang to join due to the fact that the Bloods and Crips had yet to franchise out to the suburbs, they just made up their own gangs. There’s not a whole lot in this world funnier than seeing relatively rich white dudes with names like Stephan (pronounced Steff-haan), Chandler (first name), and Brooks (also first name) ride around town in Geo Trackers with matching warm up suits that say things on their back like Rock Boys or Spur Posse.

But what was simply an imitation in the suburbs was a reality in the inner city. That’s always been the debate. Does art influence culture or is it simply a product of it? In this case it’s both. NWA and Ice T influenced kids in the suburbs by glamorizing stories about what they saw in their inner city reality. If 2 Live Crew and the Beastie Boys created a monster, NWA was creating a legion of monsters. Hip-hop had now become a talented yet ugly combination of sexual perversion and violence. The members of NWA would feel the full force of this monster several years after their humble beginning when Eazy E died just a short time after finding out that he had full blown AIDS and Dr. Dre found himself in the middle of a violent feud between two different record labels on two different coasts that would end with the death of each label’s biggest star.

The deaths of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. changed rap music. People were tired of the drama and just wanted to dance. Sean Combs was more than happy to give them something to dance to. Around this time, the city of Atlanta seemed to emerge from Miami’s shadow and came into its own as a hip-hop epicenter with home grown talent like Outkast and Goodie Mob that gave the world an original sound without a lot of the gangsta angst but with plenty of misguided sexuality.

Of course, the Christian music industry was along for the ride and, as usual, driving in circles in the cultural cul-de-sac. The first Christian rap to hit stores was called Bible Break and it was performed by a man named Stephen Wiley. You wont find Bible Break on anyone's top 50 songs of all-time list. The opening line, “Praise the Lord for goodness sake, we’re all gonna take a Bible break” instantly made the guy who wrote Kurtis Blow’s Basketball look like Robert Frost. Wait, Stephen Wiley was the guy who wrote Basketball. Nevermind.

With very few exceptions, Christian hip-hop continued to market unoriginal and poorly produced duplicates of what had already come and gone in the mainstream market. I’m sure that today (July 19, 2011) there’s a guy sitting in some office in Nashville getting ready to market a hot new Christian ska band that sounds a lot like The Deftones. Most early Christian rap music either sounded like something from a CBS Afterschool Special (Middle aged dudes who know the Bible and fight crime and have tons of funky dancers following them around) or a weird combination of science fiction and bad theology (slaying demons with a KJV 66, shoving a microphone down Satan’s windpipe). While mainstream hip-hop was soaring in production quality and talent its message was taking a nose-dive. For the most part, Christian hip-hop was crashing upon take-off.

Last week, our church led a ministry that we call The Three One Nine. The Three One Nine is a summer day camp that we do every year with our local housing authority. We play games, do crafts, eat food and share the gospel with families in this community, in hopes of building a bridge between our two cultures for the glory of Christ and the growth of his kingdom. Hip-hop is a big part of our ministry. We don’t learn raps about Moses Malone or shooting kids from the other neighborhoods but we use a new strand of quality hip-hop to help us present the gospel message. We listen to this guy named PRo rap about how Christ is King and another guy named Lecrae rap about joy in Christ. I smile every year when I see 12-year-old black kids and 60 something year old white ladies dancing together to the same song.

God is using hip-hop for his glory. This is primarily seen through ministries like Reach Records and Lampmode that distribute quality music and even teaching curriculum that is centered around Jesus Christ. As you can imagine, there are some Christians who, when they think of hip-hop, immediately think of NWA and 2 Live Crew and are, therefore, staunchly opposed to something as seemingly contradictory as holy hip-hop. (In case you haven’t been paying attention to the last 2000 years of history, this is nothing new for some Christians. Other easy targets of their disapproval include but are not limited to: guitars, organs, blue jeans, double piercings in one ear, funny stories and Mickey Mouse.) Ironically, these opponents publish their views by using a medium (the Internet) that almost from its birth has been used to distribute pornography. How dare they?! Down with the Internet!

On the last day of our Three One Nine we got to hear from a Christian rapper named Suzy Rock. As I listened to her I couldn’t’ help but think about Stephen Wiley’s Bible Break as well as other rappers like Diddy (Diddy was once known as P. Diddy and before that Puff Daddy and before that Sean Combs. If you are a rapper and you have more than one name you are legit.) I thought about how far this medium has gone in the wrong direction and how God is now using it for the growth of his kingdom. As I listened to Suzy Rock share about growing up with a dad who was hooked on cocaine I thought of all of the kids in our ministry who share the same story. As I listened to her tell about ultimately finding her identity not in cars or men or looks but in Christ I prayed that the girls and young women in our ministry would one day be able to share in that same identity through faith and repentance in Christ.

And I also thought about when I was in the sixth grade, standing on my church’s playground with friends, saying lines from the Beastie Boy’s Paul Revere. Little did I know then that this new thing called rap would stick around for a few more decades and that God would allow me to see him use it to speak his truth into the lives of a whole new generation of kids.

The Church Hurt Me

My palms were sweaty and I’m sure that my blood pressure was as high as it had ever been. I was a nervous wreck.

This was certainly obvious to the man sitting across the room from me. He showed no mercy. He sensed weakness and went in for the kill.

His threat went something like this, “Jay, if I’d been there you would’ve had to deal with me and I don’t think you’d like that very much.”

This didn’t do much to help my sweaty palms and “high blood” as the folks call it.

The week before this confrontation, I was serving as a fresh out of college intern for a church group on a two week-long missions trip that was part adventure and part missions. It was one of those kind of trips where some dude named Dakota convinces you to scale down a 60 foot cliff and then asks you about your feelings when you get to the bottom.

“Jay, how about you? What was going through your mind as you repelled today?”

“Death. Dismemberment. What will it be like eating pureed hamburgers through a straw for the rest of my life? Is that what you were looking for, Mr. Dakota?”

Towards the end of this trip an adult volunteer called my character into question. She accused me of some pretty vile behavior that I, and everyone else, just kind of ignored with a laugh. But at the end of the trip I came home to find that World War 3 was waiting on me. That’s how I found myself, complete with sweaty palms and heart palpitations, sitting in some strange living room getting yelled at for everything short of the Kennedy assassination.

It didn’t take long for the truth to come out and for my name to be cleared and I was thankful for that. The church where I served as an intern and the leaders of that church were incredibly supportive and rational. The elders even carried out church discipline on this couple and asked them to leave. But even still, another person who also claimed to be a Christian and who belonged to a church attacked me. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I thought we were on the same team? Isn’t the church the one place in the world where you are protected from attacks and hurts and insults?

No.

But my story is G rated. Others have seen churches unravel into something that looks more like a mob scene and there are even those who have suffered from sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted church leader. Our own experiences remind us that being involved in a church doesn’t mean you are protected from insults, accusations and pain.

But how should we respond when we find ourselves saying with countless others, “The church hurt me”? Our options are many. Here are a few.

1. Quit

This is probably the most popular option and it is usually layered with good intentions.

Here’s a quote I’ve never heard from a disgruntled church member: “That’s it. I’m shaving my head and joining the Church of Satan. Wanna come with me?”

Here’s a quote I’ve heard a lot: “Why do I need all of this nonsense from the church? It just slows me down. I can do more good for God on my own.”

There are many problems with this option but one really sticks out. Since when is the gospel about one person doing more good for God? Where in the New Testament do we see an individual abandoning the church and striking out on his own to do some good for Jesus?

Our salvation is given to us by God’s grace, not as a strategic move on his part because he saw a little potential in us that he thought might help him take out Satan’s team next year. The gospel-centered life is a life that is centered on commitment and surrender to Jesus, not performance for Jesus. The best place for believers to live out that commitment and surrender is in the context of the local church.

Quitting is not an option for believers.

2. Hide

This option recognizes the pain that can come with getting involved in people’s lives and allowing them to get involved in yours. It sees that this thing we call community can get messy pretty easy. But giving up on church all together seems a bit extreme. Maybe if you could just find the perfect church, preferably one that’s at least 30 minutes away, you could finally feel safe and secure.

So you find a church three counties over where the pastor is really good, the worship band and their 3.4 million albums sold to date really speaks to you and the softball team is coached by former big leaguer Darren “Dutch” Daulton. Oh, and best of all – nobody knows you.

I mention Darren "Dutch" Daulton because he was a part of the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies, the only softball team to ever play in the World Series. They beat the Braves in order to get to the World Series where Mitch Williams literally threw a softball (slow pitch style, 12 foot arc) to Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays who proceeded to hit it over the fence, thus ending the Phillies title run. I digress.

The problem with using a church as your own personal hideout is that it forces you to treat church only as a place where you go to get fed (see entertained; see also Golden Corral) rather than a place where you also go to pour your life into other people (see Galatians 6:1-10). And who wants to bother with getting involved with other people when there is such a risk of getting hurt again?

The words of C.S. Lewis from his great book The Four Loves are very appropriate here.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

Hiding is not an option for believers.

3. Wait Him Out

This happens way too much. You don’t like the pastor because of all of the terrible things he’s doing to your church. But at the same time, you don’t want to just leave and go somewhere else because it is… ahem… your church. So you do what any reasonable, forward thinking person would do – make your pastor’s life miserable until he finally leaves and gives you your church back.

This kind of approach is foolish, prideful and ineffective. It is foolish and prideful because it forgets that no church worth its salt belongs to the pastor or the oldest and loudest member but to Jesus (Colossians 1:18). It is ineffective because life changing ministry takes a back seat to the spiritual arm wrestling match between you and whatever leader it is you don’t like with the rest of the church just sitting and watching.

If your pastor is an arrogant jerk, forgive him and seek reconciliation while at the same time remembering the tendencies you have to also be an arrogant jerk. It’s funny how often I think of moments when the church has hurt me in comparison to how little I think about the times when I have hurt the church.

Foolishness, pride and inactivity are not options for believers.

4. Persevere

A friend of mine is a pastor and has been the victim of his share of personal attacks and accusations over the years. One day he lamented to me, “When I was hanging out in bars nobody ever tried to destroy my character but now that I’m working in a church it happens to me all the time.” But he hasn’t given up. He still preaches and leads faithfully because he loves Jesus and part of loving Jesus means loving what Jesus loves and Jesus loves the Church (1 John 4:20-21).

My bad experience in that angry man’s living room really rattled me. I forgave him quickly but remained gun shy towards ever getting involved in any kind of church ministry for a few years. I never quit going but I did try hiding out in the church as if attendance was all that mattered.

Looking to Jesus and following the example of others who also look to him has helped me to hang on since then and through other difficult times. Many can say, “The Church hurt me.” But when we do we must look to the One who can say, “The Church killed me but I still love it with all of my life (Romans 5:6, Ephesians 5:25).

_________________________

Three excellent books on why the church is worth the struggle are Why We Love the Church by DeYoung and Kluck; Stop Dating the Church by Harris and Journeys by Duren and Wright.

Bible Belt

The church building was dimly lit and packed with hundreds of people. There was a picture of Grace Slick projected on a wall and The Eagles were playing over the speakers.

It was the mid 1980s and this was not my fundamentalist church’s attempt at relevance. It was a seminar about the evils of rock and roll. Grace Slick, former member of Jefferson Starship/Starship/Jefferson Airplane/Starships of Jefferson with an Airplane, was plastered on the wall because we were being told the famous rock and roll urban legend about how she named her kid “god”. The woman that sang “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” somehow got lumped in with Aleister Crowley and the Church of Satan.

The Eagles weren’t being played because our pastor was really into Joe Walsh but because of the evils of Hotel California and its hidden messages about the awesomeness of Satanism. Ironically, this is probably one of the best songs ever written against such evils but that kind of talk isn’t what packed out church buildings in 1985. Along with The Eagles, Led Zeppelin and others were played backwards. When you’re ten years old and sitting in a dark church building, nothing scares your more than hearing Robert Plant’s voice played backwards. I was clay in the hands of the evangelist leading the seminar.

Just as fascinating as the backwards music were the stories that went along with these seminars.

“One church held a seminar just like this one and afterwards several of the people brought their rock and roll albums into the parking lot, threw them into a big trash can and lit them on fire. As those albums from AC/DC and Meatloaf (seriously?) burned, a black snake crawled out of the fire.”

I can’t prove it but I’m pretty sure that one of the guys that saw that happen went on to marry the girl that woke up lying in a bathtub full of ice in a Panama City hotel room with one of her kidneys missing. I’m sure they’re doing well.

That did it for me. The next day I grabbed Michael Jackson’s Thriller cassette (a small plastic device with tape inside of it used for listening to music, preferably in a Camaro with T tops and the phrase Youth Gone Wild written on the top of the front windshield) and smashed it with a rock in my driveway. I never saw a snake but I did purchase that music again later on in life.

Rock and Roll seminars were the norm in the 1980s in what is known as the Bible Belt. As funny as they seem now, they are a perfect fit for this area of mostly southern states with a few Midwestern states and some of Texas thrown in. When you drive down a road in the Bible Belt you will see as many churches as you will Waffle Houses and dead possums. That’s another way of saying that there are a lot of churches in the Bible Belt. Also, everyone who lives in the Bible Belt says the same thing – “I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” That’s another way of saying that my place is more Bible Belt-ier than yours. Unlike most other belt buckles in the south this one probably says something like Turn Or Burn instead of Bocephus.

Maybe you’ve heard it said before that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire. As a life long resident of the southern states, I think that the same formula could be applied to the Bible Belt. There’s not a whole lot of Bible and there’s certainly no belt. But there is a lot of that old time religion, good manners and church buildings. None of which ever saved anyone.

In the Bible Belt, people are absolutely in love with Jesus. They wear bracelets reminding them to do what he would do, they spend money on roadside billboards telling commuters that he’s watching them and they even listen to music about him on radio stations with words like fish, joy and love in their names. The Bible Belt Gospel, just like the 1980s Anti Rock and Roll Gospel, focuses only on the externals. They are both false gospels because of their emphasis on morality and performance. Who needs Jesus when you already live in his favorite part of the world and you’ve just burnt your collection of Winger records? Yeah, all two of them.

But even in this gospel of performance, there’s not much room for commitment to the very body for which Jesus died. There are games and recitals and trips and work and sleeping in late that prevent many from showing any kind of devotion to a local church body. As a pastor, I’ve lost count of how many people have told me that the church where I pastor is, “their church” and “where they belong” but have never set foot into our building in the three years that I’ve been here. When I was a kid, one of my heroes in the faith told me, “If your religion isn’t good enough to get you up out of bed, I wouldn’t count on it getting you into heaven.” I’ve thought about that a lot lately.

Burn this, don’t drink that, join this and vote for him may have their place at times but they offer no real eternal hope when they are presented as the meat and potatoes of the gospel. You can burn all the Whitesnake albums you want and you can buy all the old time gospel standards you can afford but if the gospel of Christ never truly penetrates your heart, convicting you of your sin and moving you towards obedience, you will hum a Squire Parsons tune on your way to hell. One possible clue that the gospel of Christ hasn’t truly penetrated your heart is a lack of commitment to his church (see 1 John).

Many refer to the Bible Belt with joy and appreciation and certainly there are plenty of excellent gospel-centered churches in the Bible Belt. But I can’t help but wonder if the title we’ve given to our part of the country is actually an indictment against us. For all of our churches and for all of our good manners and for all of our traditions, is there really a deeper sense of the Holy Spirit’s work in Georgia than there is in Stockton, California or Entebbe, Uganda?

I think that Satan is just fine with the Bible Belt. I think that he has absolutely no problem with blue laws that prevent the sale of alcohol on Sundays. I think that he loves hearing young people say kind words about Jesus and seeing older people cling to that old time religion. He’s fine with all of these things just so long as the gospel isn’t clearly understood and applied and just so long as hearts are ignored in favor of surface level bells and whistles.

So maybe the Bible Belt isn’t really a region in the United States. Maybe the Bible Belt is just some accessory Satan gives to people in the south in order to convince them that they’re okay with God. I’m sure that it has a very big buckle.

Human Shield

It’s been over a week since Osama bin Laden was killed by American forces. In that short time the details surrounding the event have changed quite a bit. Bin Laden did have a weapon. No he didn’t. Secretary of State Clinton was horrified as she watched the whole thing go down. No she wasn’t, she just had a sinus infection. It was the Navy SEALs that pulled off the whole operation with such precision and power. Oh, no sir. It was this man and him alone. No weapons needed.

"He's had enough, Johnny!"

One of the stories about bin Laden’s capture that really stuck with me was the one about how he used his wife as a human shield once he was finally confronted by his long time enemies. For some reason, this shocked us.

“How dare he hide behind a woman like that!”

“Just who does he think he is?”

Did we expect the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, the man who has been the face of global terrorism for two decades to actually be a pretty cool guy once you get to know him? Did we expect to hear reports of SEALs entering the bin Laden kitchen just as they were hearing the man himself say, “No, it’s okay honey. I’ll get the dishes tonight. You go watch The Apprentice with the other wives”?

Regardless of how it actually happened, the story of bin Laden hiding behind his wife, using her has a human shield, disturbed us. It haunts me because I know how easy it is for me and every other man in this country to do the exact same thing. Sure, maybe you would stand up and take a bullet for your wife if some heavily armed group of men were to come into your home. But in the regular day-to-day routine of marriage and family, are you using your wife as a human shield?

You are using your wife as a human shield when you fail to be present at your home.

This can take various forms. For some men, the temptation is to load up the bass boat, hunting gear, trail bike or whatever suits their recreational fancy and take off for the weekend. Sure, one weekend every now and then isn’t a problem and can even be a good thing. But when this becomes habitual it is as if your wife is left competing with a mistress, not in high heels and a skimpy dress but one that is on the other end of a fishing hook or in the scope of a rifle.

For others, such hobbies are useless because they get in the way of work. Sadly, for many of these men, their family also gets in the way of work. Perhaps you wouldn’t dream of going away one weekend a month to hunt bear in Canada while your wife deals with the kids alone. But maybe your abandonment is more secretive. Maybe you tell yourself that leaving home every morning at 5:00 and not coming back until 8:00 six days a week is putting food on the table. What's the harm in that?

Husband, it doesn’t matter if it’s your recreation or your job. If it’s pulling you away from your role as the leader of your home you are leaving your wife and family unprotected from the temptations that come with an absentee father and husband. You are using them as a human shield.

You are using your wife as a human shield when you fail to discipline your children.

This one is dangerous because you can fall prey to it while spending plenty of time at home. You can shun all hobbies that pull you away from your family, be home every night at the same time and still hide behind your wife when it comes to dealing with 4-year-old sinners climbing the walls and peeing on their brother. As husbands, we do well to remember that our day is not over when we leave work and come home. In a very real sense, the most important part of it is just beginning.

This does not mean that you come home with your hand on your belt ready to get medieval on your kids. It does mean that if your wife stays at home she has been putting up with your precious little sinners all day long. What she needs to come through the front door at 5:00 is a rescuer, not another kid to take care of. Husband, if you fail to discipline your kids, you are hiding from their temper tantrums, rolled eyes and violent outbursts behind your wife. When it comes to discipline, are you using your wife as a human shield?

The examples of how we can use our wives as human shields could go on and on. These are just two of many. The remedy is not simply to stop enjoying your hobbies and start knocking your kids around. The real issues are love and leadership. When we read in Ephesians 5:25 that husbands are to love their wives "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” we should immediately think of the cross. The cross is the greatest demonstration of God’s love for his people (Romans 5:8). The implications here are simple yet profound. Husband, model the love of Christ by being there for your wife. Husband, model the love of Christ by serving your wife. If Jesus demonstrated his love for you by going to the cross in your place and then commands you to have that same love for your wife, you should have no problem taking care of a diaper and a whiney toddler.

Another way that Christ demonstrates his love for the church is by leading it (Colossians 1:18). Husband, have you used the old saying that says “if mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy” as an excused absence, releasing yourself from your role as the leader of the home? Christ’s loving leadership isn’t done from a distance (apologies to Bette Midler) and yours shouldn’t be either.

We all fail. None of us leads like we should all the time. No husband has ever always been there and no father has always handled disciplining his kids the right way. My most common prayer as a husband and father is that God would redeem the mistakes I make daily. But we must not use our past failures as fathers and husbands as excuses for more failure (Romans 6:1-2). Instead, let’s rely on the grace of the One who always leads and loves the right way. Let’s rely on the Spirit’s power as we seek to follow the example of a Father who hides behind no one but who is “my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him” (Psalm 28:7).

Mother's Day and the Faithfulness of God

The short, feisty woman balled up her hand into a fist, cocked it back and hit my wife as hard as she could right in the stomach.

I couldn’t believe what just happened. Did that just happen? What should I do? What would Bruce Lee have done in this situation?

I didn’t do anything. My wife was still lying there in pain, the short, feisty woman with Joe Frazier’s left hook was still standing there with a look of determination on her face and I was left questioning my manhood.

But it turns out that my decision to do nothing was the right one. The short, feisty woman was a nurse in the maternity ward. My wife was very much pregnant and at that level of pushing and breathing where she was about to no longer be pregnant. At some point just before our firstborn son’s entry into this world, there were complications. When that nurse punched my wife in the stomach, it helped to push our son out quicker and probably saved his life.

The whole thing seemed more like a movie or a dream than real life. In the span of just a few seconds, I saw my wife get punched and deliver a baby. Nobody in the UFC can do that. The whole thing was really weird. The silence in the room after my son was born went beyond weird.

I remember standing at the end of my wife’s bed when I heard someone say that the baby wasn’t breathing. That’s when it registered for me that there was no crying like you see on TV when the doctor whacks the baby on the butt. After a minute, I sunk back, up against a wall and seemed to hover as a few people took care of my wife. As another minute passed I looked over to my son but couldn’t see him. During the delivery our room only had a few nurses in it. Now it seemed like a convention for every nurse in the hospital and they were all gathered around my son.

I realized that I was out of position. I needed to be with my wife. I went to comfort her but, as is usually the case in matters like these, the tables were turned. She had a concerned look on her face. There’s no telling what mine looked like. I’ll never forget what she told me. Out loud. Everyone could hear it.

“If God wants to take our baby, it’s okay. He belongs to God anyway.”

Now I believe in God’s sovereignty. I know that he is the God of the nice sunny day as well as the tornado. I could not agree more with Job’s response at the death of his kids, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Not only do I believe in God’s good and just rule over all things, I teach and preach about it. The life of Joseph, the story of Ruth and Naomi and countless others are all marked up in my Bible, ready to be preached in an instant. But this time, I got the sermon preached to me.

This was not a seminary student trying to impress one of his buddies or professors at the coffee shop. This wasn’t a well-meaning pastor with bad timing. This was my wife. The one who was told much earlier in life that childbirth probably wasn’t an option for her. The one who carried her son for nine months. The one who endured the back pain, morning sickness and a fever that once topped out at 103 degrees. She’s the one who recognized God’s sovereignty and proclaimed it for all the room to hear. Not, “Why me, God!” but “He’s yours anyway, God!” All while her son was on the other end of the room, breathless, with a dozen nurses standing around him.

Finally, after four minutes, God allowed our son to breathe. It came out as a cry. I don’t think parents have ever been so happy to hear their baby cry. The head nurse loaded up the cart and got ready to wheel our crying baby down the hall but the cart wouldn’t cooperate so she picked him up, held on tight and sprinted out of the room and down the hall. Her speed let me know that the boy wasn’t out of the woods yet.

By God’s grace, he did make it out of the woods. And so this is the part where I’m supposed to say that God is faithful. He is. But what if the four minutes without breathing turned into six and left our son severely disabled? What if there never was a first breath? Would God still be faithful?

Yes.

Just as God’s sovereign power isn’t limited to the things we consider good, his faithfulness isn’t limited to the good times when the money is flowing and the babies are bouncing. Both God’s sovereignty and his faithfulness expand beyond human circumstances. Sure, we can look to the events of our lives to see reminders of God’s faithfulness but we must look to the character of God as revealed through Scripture to see the depth of it.

Early one August morning, Mothers Day became more to me than reminding my mom how much she meant to me. It became a demonstration of God’s sovereign faithfulness. My son’s name, Isaac, is a rich reminder of that faithfulness. It carries with it a story of a Father who called a special people to himself. It tells of a Father who remains faithful when his people are faithless. It tells the story of another Son, a better Son, who lived a perfect life, was murdered and came back from death three days later. It tells of a promise of “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

My wife showed me, in the heat of battle, that God is sovereignly faithful. Thank you, Marsha. Happy Mother’s Day.