Trinitas Blog

It is a not uncommon occurrence: a mother slowly shakes her head and says to the father, “I just don’t know where we went wrong.” Something her child has done provokes the lament, and the provocation can range from bed-wetting to grand theft auto. The good news is that more children are guilty of something on the bed-wetting end of the spectrum than the grand theft auto end of it, and so things may not be as bad as they appear in the moment. The bad news is that they are sometimes just as bad as they appear—or even worse—and it is just for the parents to reflect on their work.

Before you get depressed and stop reading, trust me. My goal here is not to make you feel like a terrible parent but to encourage you from the Word and from my own experience with a lot of children and parents over the years—not to mention more than a little hindsight from raising my own children. Learn from where we (and others) went wrong, and maybe there will be fewer woeful sighs ahead in your parenting.

One virtue (If only it were the only!) that is conspicuously absent among good people these days is courage. Oh, I don’t mean to say it has totally disappeared. It crops up from time-to-time, and often just in the nick of time, in some surprisingly stout-hearted person who does the right thing regardless of the repercussions, who takes a stand for everything that is good and right when others who could and should do the same stand shame-faced, head-hung in the background.

But why? Why is courage so hard to come by? One reason may be that we think about courage all wrong. Courage does not come with being tall or strong or dense; it comes with practice. Winston Churchill is credited as saying, “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” Like any other virtue, then, courage is something that we must, to borrow from the Apostle Paul, “put on.” We must first decide that we wish to be courageous, and then we must practice courage.

The Apostle Peter probably shocked his contemporary audience when he declared them “a royal priesthood” in 1 Peter 2:9. Can you imagine his converted Gentile audience, who had known only the rule of kings for their entire lives, now hearing themselves described as royalty for the first time? They must have thought, Huh? You talking to me? But then, maybe we react the same way to Peter’s message today. Just like those Gentile converts, we too are royalty. We are kings and queens in the kingdom of God, serving under the True King, Jesus.

The Christian faith is not based on karma or coercion. It is instead a faith of hope. Faith in Christ is the knowledge of and belief in the truth and effectiveness of His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. The knowledge of these things and belief in them give us hope for our own resurrection and ascension that we might spend eternity with God. Hope. Faith in Christ gives us hope, and that hope should change us.

“Let Your mercy, O LORD, be upon us, just as we hope in You” (Ps 33:22).

We are living through a difficult season. Few of us have actually been sick or have family and friends who have been sick, but we know of others—friends of friends, perhaps—who have been sick. Some have recovered, experiencing mild symptoms if any, and some have passed away. There is an actual physical illness among us, but there is also hysteria and chaos, whether intended or not, that make the situation far worse.

David’s rhetorical question from Psalm 11:3 has been heavy on my mind for several weeks: “If the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do?” Last week I urged readers to faith even in these troubled times when it seems certain that the foundations of all we know to be true are being destroyed. I am confident in calling God’s people to faith because verses 4 through 7 of Psalm 11 remind us that God is still in control, He is still the standard of righteousness, and He loves His people who perform righteous deeds. I encouraged readers to marinate themselves and their children in God’s word as a way of increasing faith.

Any sane person consuming news media during this first half of 2020 is likely to feel discouraged right about now. A pandemic would be more than enough to cast a pall over any year, but the response to the pandemic of 2020—politicized as it has been—has in some ways been worse than the virus itself. Add to all that uncertainty the civil unrest of recent days and the surprising Supreme Court rulings of last week, and we have more than enough reasons to think all is lost.

I met the most amazing young woman last week. She is a graduate of Baylor’s Honors College, specifically the Great Texts program, and is two years into her teaching career at Live Oak Classical School in Waco, Texas. It is not uncommon for classical educators to meet at conferences in the summer, but coronavirus has cancelled any such opportunities for the summer of 2020. Fortunately, this young lady is the niece of a Trinitas parent and was present at a social gathering to which I had been invited.