Christmas in the Philippines

Caroling is popular here. Small mobs of kids walk around singing bad renditions of English Christmas songs.  Most of the time we hear 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas'. They will stand outside of our gate for about twenty minutes singing "we wish you a merry chis-mas, we will you a merry chis-mas, we wish you a merry chis-mas, and a happy new year! Advance merry chis-mas! Advance happy New Year!". This happens every night. Sometimes twice a night, with the same mob. They are begging for money or food. Sometimes they even come up and just say, "Hey, merry Christmas, give me money!".
One night we decided that we would tell kids to come back on Christmas Eve and we would hand out something then. While I was talking with these kids, I asked them what they were wanting. "Bisan unsa" (whatever). What were they going to do with it? "Magdala ko ani sa simbahan" (I'll take it to the church) Wait, the catholic church? Quick nod. Are you catholic? Violent head shake and a loud "dili!" (no). Something tells me they weren't really going to the church....

With that little story we are ushered into the Christmas season in the Philippines. Lights were going up way back in October (no respect for Thanksgiving here either!) and around the middle of November is when the caroling started. As far as we have learned, Christmas may be celebrated by families here, but unless you are Catholic, Christmas is more or less off limits in the church. So there are no decorations or Christmas trees up. No Christmas Eve service is planned, and no Christmas hymns will be sung, for the most part. With our church back in Texas being such a HUGE part of our lives, and with all the Christmas and Advent stuff they have going on even now, it is another big glaring reminder of the cultural differences between the US and the PH.

Another big holiday deal for us is the familial aspect. Even while living in Texas we would be back in Arkansas for Christmas Eve with one grandparent, Christmas morning with another, and Christmas dinner with yet another. The whole two days was spent with family and just hanging out with each other. But now we are here without our families and that is going to be difficult on us this year. I'm sure we will try to video chat with everyone, but it won't be the same.

Now, before anybody reading this thinks we're moping around here, just hold on a moment! We were in a tight spot emotionally a little while ago, but now we are getting back out and about, back on our feet, and everyone is feeling much better. But we still have to be able to make Christmas traditions anew in the face of our new cultural living situation. There are things that we just won't be able to do, like any sort of Christmas light house hunting via car, or eggnog, or ugly Christmas sweaters(we could but we would dehydrate very quickly)!
But we have to, in my mind, do two things with regards to Christmas: the first is make sure that the reason we are wanting to celebrate is more than just cultural or familial tradition and the second is that we need to be able to adapt to what we can do and make family traditions of our own that are not necessarily rooted in all of the American cultural Christmas trappings.

If we are only wanting to celebrate Christmas is because that's what we have done in the past, a tradition, like the Fourth of July, then we have a problem. If it is because we are wanting to praise God for the gift of His Son who came to earth so that He could die for us, then that is something different all together right?

And the traditions that go along with the holiday are important too. Is what we are doing merely an American holiday tradition? Or is it something that is rooted in the biblical story of redemption and the Gospel?

This past week we had a time of worship and fellowship with some other missionaries here and Hollie led a discussion about the theology of the song 'O Come O Come Emanuel' and how it really points to the reality of Christ and the Incarnation and how through Him alone we have the hope that defeats the tyranny of Satan and his dominion of death and hell. Something we need to do as Christians is take our own holiday stuff and check it against the Bible, to see if what we are doing is merely culturally Christian or if it is rooted in the Gospel. If it's not, do we really need it to be an essential part of our Christmas celebration (nice addition maybe but that's about it right?)?
Anyway, Hollie talking about this song reminded me that even an amazing song like that need to be grounded in the biblical story and point us to our hope in Christ.

Isn't that the real reason for the season?

A Theology Post.

This is a theology post. That means that it is supposed to be theological in nature, and have some level of smartypants theological content. But, then again, isn't everything we as Christians do supposed to be theological in nature? Isn't everything supposed to be centered in and around the study of God and how that plays out in our daily lives (which is what theology really is)?

Think about this: How do you think about theology? How to you think about God day in and day out? How do you think about how your family culture is shaped by your faith? How does our Christian faith in the finished work of Christ factor into how we do our jobs? Raise our kids? See those outside the faith?

We in the West are so compartmentalized in our thinking that we tend to literally only set aside Sundays for the worship of God. We have our work-life, our family-life, and our church-life. This is saying essentially: This way of me operating and living and my morals or actions are this way during this time and they are different at other times. And even as we protest that we may think back to how, subtlety, our thinking and actions may be different depending on the situation we find ourselves in.
If we find that we are being "more spiritual" on Sunday mornings (because we can't forget about that great American idol, Sunday night football) and Wednesday evenings than when we are sitting down with our co-workers during our lunch breaks on Tuesday...that's a problem.

Why?

Because in 1 Corinthians 10:31 we see that we are to do everything for the glory of God.

Now in context, the verse is involved in the conversation Paul is having with the Corinthian believers about offending the conscience and Christian liberty. In the larger context of chapter 10 it is nestled at the end of the chapter in which idolatry and meat offered to idols (and therefore eating meat and offending the conscience of someone) and so part of the take away from chapter 10 is the need for believers to look out for the weaker brother and to help strengthen him/her in the faith by helping to bear their conscience. This is essentially Christian living, which, if you read the New Testament, is never done in isolation. We have freedom in conscience, but it is for the service of our fellow believer. We don't eat meat offered to idols because it may burn the conscience of a weaker brother, causing him or her to stumble into sin. We see in this chapter and specifically this verse, that we are to live this way for God's glory. When we start to live this way, with God's glory as the reasoning for doing x, y, and z, we begin to lose the separate compartments that we have built into our lives. Everything we do begins to lose it's own inherent in your face urgency and fades into a daily day long pattern of seeking to bring glory to our Savior and King as we seek to strengthen our fellow believers.

Now how in the world are we supposed to do that? I mean, we have so much fighting against us don't we? The busyness and urgency with which we find our days seems to almost beg that it is impossible to break the cycle of compartmentalization and to see everything as something that can be holy is just hard to do. But there is freedom in fighting through that fight. There is freedom in finding out that doing the laundry in a way that is to bring glory to God (simply seeking to do it well to serve your family and therefore serve God) begins to make the chore itself seem less like a chore over time.

It turns into a joy to do the dishes (by hand!) or the laundry or balance the checkbook, or doing that report for your boss, whatever it is. There is holiness and grace to be found in seeing things as means to the end: glorifying God.

But now hold on, this can still be refined a wee bit more can't it? I mean, doing things for the glory of God? That could be a Jewish phrase, or even a Muslim command, so how does doing things for God's glory look explicitly Christian? Ah, that's a good question, don't you think? What makes our actions "Christian"? Have you ever thought about that? When we reflect on the questions that I posited at the beginning of this post, one thing keeps coming to mind: the finished work of Christ on the cross on our behalf.

Obviously, Christ is what makes us Christian and not Jewish or Muslim. Christ is what makes us believers in the true God and not the false god Allah or the misunderstood (and false) view of God that the Jews have. But it is not simply Christ that we find ourselves anchoring to, but it is the totality of who He is and what He has done. We rest not in the simple person of Jesus of Nazareth the carpenter, but Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who took on the flesh of man, lived the life of perfect obedience to God's Law and because of His Innocence and Perfection, took the place of sinful men on the cross so that through His death, and His glorious resurrection, we may get back everything that was lost in Adam. We rest on this work, on this Person. This means that when we are doing things for the glory of God we are not doing anything to satisfy anyone or anything and attempt to bring about our own salvation or justification, heck, even our own sanctification. We do things for the glory of God and subsequently the love of our neighbor because we have been saved and justified through the work of faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross. We aren't trying to earn anything (heaven forbid!) but everything we do, when done for the glory of God is us rejoicing in His mercy and goodness and trying to show that same to our neighbors.

So how do you think about theology? How do you make your life revolve around Christ and His cross? I don't think it will necessarily look the same for everyone, and that's ok. But we need to prayerfully seek God's glory and set time aside to seek His face and to try to pray through orienting our lives around Him. We need to take the time to fight the fight of de-compartmentalization of our lives and seek to see everything as a means to glorify our God and King through resting in who we are inside of Christ. This means that the best way to be a Christian architect is not to only design beautiful churches, but to do the job in an exemplary way that shows that you take pride in your gifts and talents that God gave you and that you use them to help others and love them in the same way that God loves you.This is being Salt and Light. This is being a Christian. We also need to remember that we if we are Christian architects that we are Christians first that happen to have a job as an architect. The best way for you to be a Christian mother or father or ad executive or whatever it is, is by doing everything out of a love for God and neighbor (whoever that may be) and seeking to bring honor and glory to the God that redeemed us and to seek to do so as consistently as possible throughout our whole lives. We need to seek to love and to show God's love to everyone we meet, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to seek to lift up and strengthen the family of God that we meet day in and day out through love.

All for the glory of God.

Review of The Distinctives of Baptist Theology

NOTE AND DISCLAIMER: I am a horrible theologian and I am even worse at summarizing complex theological systems in very short space, so take what I am writing here as a feeble best attempt, and buy the book so that you can get a much better explanation.

This short book (about 200 pages) written by Pascal Denault is a fantastic comparison between the two basic forms of covenant theology inside of what could be labeled as forms of Puritan federalism, which are ways of understanding how God has dealt with humanity through history. Mr. Denault (a French speaking Canadian Reformed Baptist Theologian) does a great job outlining the Presbyterian model of covenant theology and the Baptist model and does so from not only primary sources but  he uses  Scripture within the primary sources to highlight the differences between the two in favor of Baptist covenant theology.

Now I suppose I may need to back-up a bit and explain what in the world I'm talking about. Most of us know what a covenant is: a formal agreement between two (or more) parties who agree on certain stipulations and are expected to uphold their end of the agreement. The most notable biblical covenants would be the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant. In these covenants God says that He will do A as long as those benefiting from the covenant does B (or in the case of the New Covenant, Jesus does A and B on our behalf). These covenants, and others, are the basis of God's relations with humanity throughout  history according to Covenant Theology. This is over and against dispensation theology, in which God deals radically different with humans in each and every epoch of human history. To give a bit more of an example, Covenant Theology posits that God deals the same way with all humanity throughout time, and the covenants that pepper the biblical text and salvation history do not change how God deals with us. Dispensational theology would actually say that in any given epoch or dispensation of time, God deals with humanity (in terms of how one is saved) in very different ways. With this very truncated background of these two basic systems of how the Bible is laid out we can continue our talk about the book!

So Denault starts with covenant theology, which was the basic theological framework that theologians were operating with until the 19th century, and shows the internal struggle between English Dissenters during the 17th and 18th centuries between these two differing types of covenant theology.

The Presbyterian model essentially says that what we would call the Covenant of Grace was in effect and operating during the Old Covenant of Moses. This means that the people were saved under the Mosaic covenant as it related to grace as it was given through faith. When we get to the New Covenant under Christ we don't really have a new covenant, but a different version of the old one that had been in effect for thousands of years beforehand. This is the basic foundation of infant baptism within the Presbyterian churches(more or less, see the disclaimer at the top). Since all babies were brought into the covenant under Moses and then some had faith and were counted as believers and some were not, Presbyterians were able to justify infant baptism by recognizing that covenant still being in effect but viewed and administered differently under Christ. So where Israelites had unbelieving children inside the covenant community under Moses, Presbyterians can (possibly) have unbelieving children in the covenant community under Christ.

This model of covenant theology was not quite in jive with how the Baptists viewed the New Covenant under Christ. Hanging out extensively in Hebrews, Denault and the Baptists show that the New covenant under Christ is indeed a brand new covenant of grace that only those who will experience salvation can actually be members of the covenant community of believers. Basically the Covenant of Works was for Adam and the Garden of Eden where salvation was possible under following the Law that God had given him. The Mosaic Covenant (along with Abrahamic and Noahide and others) were shadows that pointed to and promised the Covenant of Grace, but did not bring it about. That was done by Christ on the Cross by His blood. The very newness of the New Covenant is so radically different from the Old that it makes sense that it is so new and special and could only do things that the old covenants pointed to, like actually saving those who were inside the covenant community, or to put another way, only those who are being saved (and nobody else) are inside the covenant, and therefore inside the covenant community.

Denault uses the actual writings exclusively from both Presbyterian and Baptist theologians from England during the 17th and 18th centuries to explain and show what each side believed without really putting words into either sides mouths. He deals fairly with both sides and quotes verbatim and simply reiterates what was already said quite clearly by both sides, even when they use Scripture to back up their claims. This book was a good, quick read (even for all the semi-heady concepts), and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has ever looked as a baptist church and a presbyterian church and wondered what the real difference was. This book helps explain probably the single biggest difference between the two groups. Denault did a very good job, and this book is definitely worth your time.

So if you want to actually understand any of what the book is really about, or if you want to argue with your Presbyterian friends and prove infant baptism as being biblically inconsistent, then pick up your own copy here.

Missionaries, Misconceptions, and the dashing of Idols

This is the first actual bit of "work" that I've done in a few weeks. I've been doing some meetings here, scheduled some stuff there, but I haven't been doing any reading or writing or anything that feels....substantial. 

There are reasons for that, of course. We've been busy with life stuff. Meeting with friends, holiday stuff (we did Thanksgiving here!) and sickness has taken it's toll on our schedules with work and homeschooling. So yeah, this feels good, to sit down and write something. It feels good to put some thoughts to keyboard and process some of what has been going on, and if you haven't noticed, processing what we are going through is really kind of the point of this blog, along with stateside contact, of course.

In October, Rudy, our translator, took some well deserved time off to go spend time with his family in another city and all of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, culture shock hit. Hard. We were suddenly struck with some of the little difficulties of living in the Philippines. We had more or less a month to sit in our house, not go anywhere or do anything really noteworthy. During this time a sort of weird grumpiness set in. We bemoaned silly things, like the lack of lunch meat, or the fact that I would wound or seriously maim someone to get my hands on some spinach, or some of the cultural situations that we would find ourselves in that really were not that out of the ordinary. But we were suffering from culture shock. We were missing America. We were missing the comforts and the American-ness of our home culture.

Some of you guys were able to see Hollie's video at SRC about her struggle with comfort and that idol here on the ground. That is a snapshot of what we have been going through for the past two months with the almost daily onslaught of creeping thoughts of "why?"

Why are we here? What in the world are we doing? Do we really need to be here? Is this the work God actually called us to? Nobody (seems to) even really wants us here, so why bother? Why not just go home and hide in a hole of shame and failure?

Why in the world were we going through this?

Aside from the fact that culture shock can happen to anyone, missionary or not, we were feeling like we were under attack and a general feeling of uselessness and a drain on resources of the church that lovingly kicked us out of the country almost a year ago. It was (and in some ways still is) an identity struggle we were going through. We were struggling with our identity and how we were wrapping ourselves up in "the work" instead of Christ. We were caught up in the feel and flow of what was or was not happening with work and that seemed more important that resting in Christ and our identity that is hidden with Him. We should have been  resting in the knowledge that we are redeemed in Christ and that through and in Him we have finally found out who we really are and don't have to worry about keeping up with the performance of work or status or some sort of ministry facade. Instead we were worrying about the outer, the facing, the facade of what being a "good" missionary is, what our performance looked like and what we thought we should be doing. We, like so many Western Christians, have/are in the process of getting rid of this romantic view of international missions and what in our mind it should look like. We had this misconception and this wrong-headed view that we needed to be suffering more, being more on the front-line of mission work (you know, where the super dangerous and unreached people are, where there are few to no established churches) and not working here because there are lots of buildings and groups that call themselves "church" and I mean really, do we even need to be here?*

We were also going through a slow process of God dismantling our idol of mission work. Because we were struggling with misconceptions and our identity, we ended up in one way or another, turning being a missionary into an idol. Something we rested in. Something we found our security in. Instead of that beautiful and glorious rest from the race and the grind and the day to day flow of junk that we constantly wade through, the rest that we can only find in Christ, we ran headlong into that flow of junk. We turned our performance and identity as a respectable and upstanding citizens of the kingdom as missionaries into a trap and a snare, something we would check ourselves against and became chained to. We are not missionaries first and foremost. We are not that even secondly or thirdly! We are missionaries at like a fifth tier. There are more important things that that that we have as part of who we are. Yet because of the busyness of language school, acclimatizing to the culture (as best we could) and planning a trip for this past summer, we never really had the chance to check ourselves and see what and where we may be slipping into idolatry. It was only when we had a chance to slow down and be quiet in October into November that we were finally able to hear the convicting voice of the Holy Spirit telling us that we needed to pry the lump of dirt that we had lashed ourselves to out of our hands and drop it. We needed to let go of the pressure and the idea that we had of what all of this past year and the next few years means. Has it been easy going since coming to this conclusion? By no means! But we are continually in the process of being redirected from looking at ourselves and our circumstances (that we chose to come to!) and reorient everything around Christ. We have to. We can't survive here without being wrapped in and around Christ. Heck, we couldn't survive anywhere this side of heaven without being orienting our lives around Christ and the rest that He gives us.


'Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the
surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For
his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count
them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be
found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that
comes from the law, but that which comes through faith
in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on
faith— '
(Philippians 3:8-9)

Christ is what is worth knowing. Christ is worth losing everything and being able to let go of everything that we have. Christ is what makes all things, even good things, seem like rubbish compared to the knowing of Him. Through this knowing we gain Him and His righteousness, this righteousness does not depend on us at all, and so we don't have to perform works of the Law (because we can't measure up) or measure up to the standards of the little L law that we suffer through societal pressures (because we can't measure up to that either). We rest in Christ through faith, we get God's perfect righteousness through faith, and nothing we do...or don't do.
It is precisely because of Christ's work on our behalf that we are able to get His righteousness through faith. And because of that we can let go of the pressures that we have put upon ourselves and we can rest in knowing Him. Everything else can fall into their proper place when we put knowing Christ at the center of it all. This is our justification. This is our salvation. This is the most transformational aspect of Christianity, and it is often one of the most ignored aspects.

We need to recover this. We need to rediscover the freedom and joy that we find when we orient our lives around Christ and the cross and His finished work on our behalf. We have to do this. We have to be able to fix the anchor of our lives on the Rock and no matter how and what happens to us, no matter the storms and troubles that we face, we can rest secure that our anchor holds. This has nothing to do with us, but everything to do with the One we are anchored to.

So remember to pray for us as we are still learning and relearning this important lesson. And remember this lesson yourself the next time you are trying to measure up to your job, or your neighbors, or the idea of yourself in your head, or what you think being a Christian is. Remember Christ and that He is your rest and your righteousness.


*The answer is yes, because God called us and had placed us here, so of course this is where we need to be.