Jessa Duggar, one of the daughters in the famous Duggar family of 19 children, recently made the news for beginning to date, only in the Duggar family teens do not “date”, they “court.” Says Mom Michelle, “Courtship is not just about having fun…You are really considering if this person could be your life partner — you pray about it and see what happens. …” The whole topic of dating versus courtship has been a big debate in Christian circles ever since Joshua Harris released his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris’ book was met with another Christian’s book I Gave Dating a Chance, highlighting how difficult it is to decide if the Bible is in favor of “dating” or “courting.” The question, though, should not be dating or courting. Actually, there is a far more important question to be asked involving one’s goals and perspective of success.

Success, according to most daters and Mrs. Duggar cited above, is based on whether or not I find a spouse. It is about finding ME a spouse, to find someone with whom I can spend the rest of MY life. As Mrs. Duggar said “YOU are really considering if this person could be YOUR life partner.” In essence, that means that the entire dating or courting process revolves around ME, finding ME a spouse!  While obviously no one dates or courts unless they are looking for a spouse, this has sadly become the end all, the goal, the ultimate intention, the number 1 priority, and the criteria for determining success. Did I find a spouse? Dating and courting in this way is inherently and Biblically selfish!

In defense of Mrs. Duggar and her daughter and all other Christian daters/courters, this selfishness inherent in our modern methods of courtship is so subtle that no one even notices how such a perspective twists and perverts the dating and courtship process. The reality, though, is that there are other callings in dating/courting that are higher callings for the Christian than the quest to find a spouse. We know that having our lives built on the foundation of God’s Word, under the authority of Jesus Christ, means that our primary goal in all of life is to glorify God, but somehow, we have forgotten that Scripture dictates our secondary goal in all things should be to serve others before ourselves.

Jesus said that the second greatest commandment after loving God is to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Paul says in Philippians 2:3-4 to “count others more significant than yourselves” and to “look not only to [your] own interests but also to the interests of others.” Again, the Apostle Paul says in Romans 15:2 “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” In 1 Thessalonians 5:11 he writes, “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” Christians are called to take the focus off of themselves and focus on others!

The Christian life can be summed up in the children’s Sunday School acronym “J.O.Y.” which stands for “Jesus, Others, then Yourself.” Yet, by making the secondary goal of dating all about finding myself a spouse, we have made dating God-focused, then Me-focused, taking the acronym “J.O.Y.” and making it “J.Y.O.” This simply is not that to which God has called us. To elevate our own interests over the interests of others is selfish and stands in opposition to the commands of our authority, Jesus Christ.

In order to realistically have the goal of serving others in dating, in order to realign our goals of dating and put “J.O.Y.” in the correct order, we need to radically change our whole perspective on dating or courting. We should not be evaluating the success of our dating relationships by whether we find a spouse but whether we can honestly say, “I served the brother or sister in Christ that I was dating/courting.” This in no way guarantees the outcome of a relationship will be marriage, but it does honor God in that the goal is to edify the other person. In fact, this should be true of all of our relationships, whether they be friendships, work partnerships, or in our families. In all of our relationships with other people we should be striving to glorify God and serve others. That’s the argument Paul makes in Philippians 2, calling us to have the mind of service that Christ has towards His people. Finding a spouse may be why we started dating, but that goal cannot be elevated over striving to serve the other person.

In this way, a relationship that did not end in marriage will be “successful” in the primary goal of glorifying God, the secondary goal of edifying the other person, and the tertiary goal of discovering whether or not the other person is a future spouse. If these goals are rearranged, it is possible that God is glorified and we discover whether or not the other person is a future spouse but the other person was not edified. In this second scenario, we are the only one served in the relationship. We end up tearing others down in our quest to find a spouse, treating them simply as a means to an end. Ironically, if we marry the person we date selfishly, we have potentially hurt our own spouse! This scenario also calls into question if we understand what it truly means to glorify God while dating. Can we glorify God while stepping on others to achieve our own end?

The question is not “should I court or should I date?” The question is “whom am I trying to serve while I court or date?” How will we measure success–I found a spouse or I edified a brother or sister in Christ? To this end, I actually wrote a small book on this topic that hopefully gives specific ways daters and courters can begin to apply the goal of service to others while they date or court. If you would like a copy, simply request one using the comment section below.

Fall is upon us again, that magical time of year when a blogger’s thoughts turn toward the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award! Nominations have been opened for this year’s award. Keep your eyes on Jay’s blog, because I’ve been saving up ideas for people to nominate all year. I’ve only nominated an Al winner once, but this year I have such a great lineup of ideas, I feel like I might be able to go over the top again!

In keeping with the noble ideals that were established with its original institution, The Al honors people who improve the human condition. It tends to focus on people who wouldn’t normally get recognized with awards for their humanitarianism, because they happened to make a profit from their good deeds or are looked down upon by the professional do-gooder class for some other extraneous reason.

Last year’s winner was George P. Mitchell, who commercialized hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). He demolished American carbon emissions – we are now hitting the Kyoto treaty targets even though we didn’t sign the treaty – while also expanding energy reserves available to all, lowering the price of energy, and (for good measure) reducing the international power of the oil dictators, tilting the balance of geopolitics in the good guys’ direction.

Submit your nominations to Jay by leaving a comment on his blog or sending him an email. Who will win this year? Stay tuned to Jay’s blog to find out!

Last week I used Job as an example of how the church challenges the world for cultural leadership. Job describes how he was a cultural leader before he was stricken by the adversary’s plagues. He says that people looked to him as a source of wisdom (i.e. as a cultural leader) because he served the needs of those around him – especially the poor and the marginalized.

But the question might be asked: why then is he no longer a cultural leader after he’s stricken? In fact, as soon as he comes under attack the whole culture turns against him. In last week’s post I was looking at chapter 29; most of chapter 30 is about how Job is now laughed at and despised. Here’s a small sample: “And now I have become their song; I am a byword to them. They abhor me; they keep aloof from me; they do not hesitate to spit at the sight of me.” (v. 9-10)

The answer, of course, is that human culture in a fallen world is always hypocritical to some extent. Every culture affirms moral norms of behavior that it wants people to follow; because of God’s common grace, those norms mostly align with God’s natural revelation of moral goodness to humanity. They never align completely with God, and in some cases they go far astray; the alignment that Paul famously observes in Romans 2 is only a general pattern. And (as Paul goes on to observe) every culture fails to actually uphold even the imperfect standard it sets for itself. In a fallen world there is never a “Christian culture” in the sense of a culture that can be simply identified with Christianity. There are cultures that are highly influenced by Christianity, and cultures that explicitly profess allegiance to Christianity. (They are not always the same cultures!) But no culture is simply the same thing as Christianity.

In Job’s case, the culture appears to have had a Pharisaical approach to the relationship between virtue and prosperity. It is one of the broad, overarching themes of scripture (especially in the wisdom literature) that in general and on the whole, virtue leads to prosperity. Affirming this pattern as a general truth is usually necessary to preserve our doctrines of creation and providence; without it we tend to lapse into a Gnostic dualism that views the material world as evil. However, some cultures Pharisaically raise this general correlation between virtue and prosperity into an absolute law; those who are not prosperous must be unvirtuous.

There is, alas, no cure for this condition until Christ returns. A Christian life must necessarily bring us into conflict with human culture in some respects, and there will always be people ready to pounce on any opportunity to stigmatize and marginalize the church. Part of the struggle for cultural leadership is accepting this and lamenting it without resenting it.

At a recent breakfast this week a friend of mine lamented the number of churches in our area that preach the so-called “Prosperity Gospel.” These churches teach that if we trust in Jesus, tithe regularly, and support the church’s mission, God will pour out incredible financial blessings upon us. For evidence, just look at that fancy car the pastor drives. My friend asked why no one every seems to realize this simply does not work. Most of the people in those churches do not become rich, no matter how many years they give their money. And if some do question why they are not financially blessed, they are told it is because they do not have sufficient faith or because they are not mature Christians yet. Keep waiting, keep trying, keep giving, and God will bless you richly. Don’t ask questions, just send in your check.

And then suddenly it hit me. We ‘evangelicals’ have our own prosperity gospel. Rather than telling people that if they simply send in their check they will prosper financially, we give people the five steps or seven secrets to spiritual prosperity. Much like a preacher in a congregation who proclaims a prosperity gospel of financial blessing we tell our church members that if they will simply follow tips from Scripture or put into practice easy techniques, they will spiritually prosper. We tell fathers that if they stop losing their temper but instead respect their children and love them unconditionally, both they and their kids will spiritually prosper. We tell women that if they will simply love their kids more they will feel less stress and anger and have more patience. If wives would have unconditional respect for their husbands and husbands unconditional love for their wives, marriages would spiritually prosper. If men would stop idolizing their jobs they would feel less pressure and spiritually prosper at work. If people in our churches would simply do these things, they will spiritually prosper. For evidence, simply look at the pastor.

On the one hand, there is an element of truth to all of these. If you stop sinning, you will spiritually prosper. On the other hand, you won’t stop sinning! In a very real way, we often make the mistake of attempting to boil down the Christian life into a series of easy to follow steps when the reality is that these steps are simply more Law. The Law, though, can only condemn; it has no real power. When we offer our congregations more Law as the so-called ‘secret’ to spiritual prosperity, we are offering them as big of a lie as the financial prosperity Gospel. They will grow frustrated because they keep trying to ‘do’ but aren’t prospering. Our churches will be filled with people who think that they are not prospering because they haven’t the faith or the spiritual maturity and some day as they grow older they will finally master these seven steps and begin to spiritually prosper. But none of that is true!

Instead of giving Christians the ‘evangelical prosperity gospel’ of “do this and you will spiritually prosper” we should giving them the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, because the Gospel has the power to transform lives. Do you want to prosper spiritually? Know Jesus and the gospel. Know that you have been adopted into Christ’s family and given an eternal inheritance with the saints in heaven. Know that God sees you as holy and blameless. Know that God is at work in your through the power of the Holy Spirit, transforming you and making you more like Christ. It is knowing the Gospel and having our faith increased by the Gospel that changes how we live and causes us to spiritually prosper. It is the power of God’s grace and the power of the Spirit of Christ at work within us that causes us to prosper. It is through understanding our sin, repenting of our sin, and turning in faith to Christ again and again that we prosper. It is not what we ‘do’ that makes us spiritual prosper but understanding and believing what Christ has ‘done’ that makes us prosper. Rather than pointing to our pastors as spiritual giants who spiritually prosper by what they do, our pastors should point to themselves as chief sinners and chief repenters who boldly proclaim and believe the Gospel because it is only in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that there is true spiritual prosperity.

In my forthcoming book I argue that Christianity can and should be a leading influence in human culture. We do this not by seizing control of the institutions of culture and imposing Christianity on people by force, but by acting as cultural entrepreneurs.

A good example of what I mean can be found in Job 29. This passage follows the famous passage on wisdom in chapter 28, which is one of my favorites in all scripture. I had never paid close attention to chapter 29, though, until the other day when I realized what was going on in that chapter. The ESV editors label the passage beginning with chapter 29 and running through the rest of Job’s discourse as “Job’s Summary Defense.”

Job begins the passage by lamenting for the social position he held before his downfall:

² “Oh, that I were as in the months of old,
as in the days when God watched over me,
³ when his lamp shone upon my head,
and by his light I walked through darkness,
⁴ as I was in my prime,
when the friendship of God was upon my tent,
⁵ when the Almighty was yet with me,
when my children were all around me,
⁶ when my steps were washed with butter,
and the rock poured out for me streams of oil!
⁷ When I went out to the gate of the city,
when I prepared my seat in the square,
⁸ the young men saw me and withdrew,
and the aged rose and stood;
⁹ the princes refrained from talking
and laid their hand on their mouth;
¹⁰ the voice of the nobles was hushed,
and their tongue stuck to the roof of their mouth.
¹¹ When the ear heard, it called me blessed,
and when the eye saw, it approved,
¹² because…

Let’s stop there for a moment. Before he was stricken, Job was a cultural leader. People looked to him for wisdom. And the word “because” in verse 12 indicates that he’s about to tell us why people looked to him for wisdom. Was it because he was smarter? Was it because he was wealthy and successful? No doubt those factors were important, but Job does not identify them as the main source of his cultural leadership. Instead, he points to something else:

¹² because I delivered the poor who cried for help,
and the fatherless who had none to help him.
¹³ The blessing of him who was about to perish came upon me,
and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.
¹⁴ I put on righteousness, and it clothed me;
my justice was like a robe and a turban.
¹⁵ I was eyes to the blind
and feet to the lame.
¹⁶ I was a father to the needy,
and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know.
¹⁷ I broke the fangs of the unrighteous
and made him drop his prey from his teeth.

Job was a cultural leader because he served human needs. The connection is reinforced in the following verses, where Job seamlessly transitions back from his deeds of service to his position of cultural leadership. “Men listened to me and waited and kept silence for my counsel…” etc.

We become cultural leaders not by seizing control of institutions but by inventing new ways of serving human needs and proving that they work better than the anti-Christian alternatives. We are able to invent new ways of serving human needs because the Spirit has empowered and equipped us in unique ways – through the revelation of the Bible that gives us “inside information” about how the world works, and through the transformation of our hearts and lives. When Christians and Christian institutions serve human needs better than secularists and anti-Christian institutions do, people stop looking to them for leadership and start looking to us.