Author Archive
Morgan Guyton
Sixty Percent
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Sixty percent is a supermajority,
who took time out of their busy schedules,
who needed to make a statement,
who wanted to leave a legacy,
who knew exactly how and where lines must be drawn.
So much good could be done with sixty percent:
sixty percent whose lives say Jesus,
sixty percent who love mercy most,
sixty percent who give ten percent,
out of which ninety percent goes to the ones who cannot repay.
“The land is mine” (the importance of Leviticus 25:23)
Monday, April 16th, 2012
As the debate rages within Christianity over what the Bible teaches about economic “fairness,” a key chapter to peruse is Leviticus 25, which introduces the concept of the year of the jubilee that Jesus proclaims in His Nazareth sermon in Luke 4. An amazing line in Leviticus 25:23 jumped out at me as I was perusing it this week. It’s the justification God gives His people for redistributing all their property and freeing all their slaves every 50 years: “The land is Mine, and you reside in My land as foreigners and strangers.” I believe that this sentence is a paradigm for understanding the whole gospel and a potential foundation from which we should consider every social issue we face in our world.
Persecution and Epistemic Closure
Sunday, March 4th, 2012
Epistemic closure is a recently defined philosophical term that describes someone who is so thoroughly encased in the echo chamber of their own ideology that they are completely immune to considering other viewpoints. The term is derived from the Greek word pistis which means faith or trust. When people live in epistemic closure, they are immune to integrity because they only trust people who already agree with their ideology. They scan potential sources of information for the presence of code words that indicate whether or not the speaker can be trusted as a member of their own ideological tribe. As a pastor communicating in our “post-truth” environment of ideological tribalism, I try to be very attuned to both the code words that make me trustworthy and those that instantaneously discredit everything I have to say.
Like Religious Freedom? Wear Ashes on Wednesday!
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
There’s been a lot of talk about religious freedom over the past couple of weeks. Whatever side of the story you believe, Christianity has taken a hit both from people who oppose it and people who exploit it. I want to propose something that those of us who love Jesus can do to represent Him in a way that will assert our religious freedom without oppressing other people.
Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a forty-day period of penitent reflection in which we remember our sins and our need of Christ’s redemption. It’s a long-standing tradition in Catholic and many Protestant denominations to have your forehead marked with a cross of ashes both as a reminder to be humble since your sins nailed the Son of God to a tree and as a public witness showing the world that you are a sinner dependent on God. If there ever were a time in our country when Christians needed to put ashes on our foreheads, it is now.
Stop Abusing the Word “Biblical”!
Sunday, February 12th, 2012
One of the great epidemics of modern American evangelicalism is the abuse of the word “Biblical” by attaching it to causes and ideas that have nothing to do with the Bible. Last month, I was at a meeting with some undercover spies from our church who had gone out to test how other churches welcome their visitors. One of our spies shared her experience at a local “Bible” church where the topic of the sermon that week was “The truth behind the Arab Spring.”
Seriously? That’s the message that they had to encourage people to give their lives to Jesus Christ and spur them on to love and good deeds in His name? To fill their heads with anti-Arab propaganda? How did somebody think it was okay to call that a sermon which represents the word of God? They may have quoted the Bible as part of this “sermon.” But what is the kingdom-building purpose of giving your congregation partisan ideological talking points about a foreign policy issue? How does that help them to live more like Christ? In how many other “Bible” churches out there has “Biblical” become a code-word for an ideological platform that serves a purpose completely foreign to God’s mission even if it cherry-picks verses out of the Biblical text to justify itself?
Why Gender Hierarchy Makes No Biblical Sense to Me
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
My wife and I decided to do something bold for our wedding. Each of us preached while the other person washed our feet, rotating halfway through the sermon. The text we preached on was the controversial Ephesians 5:22-33 passage which says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord.” I’ve been thinking of our sermon lately as I’ve encountered the reviews of megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll’s new book Real Marriage, which apparently takes his conception of the divinely ordained inferiority of women to a new level. Rachel Held Evans is gentler in her review than conservative evangelical blogger David Moore. I’m not going to talk about a book that I don’t have time to read, but I thought I would share some of what my wife and I preached about as my contribution to the recent blogosphere conversation about marriage.
