1. Great themes and affirmations begat celebration.

2. Gratitude begats celebration, eg, when peoples cry and needs are met and answered, they celebrate.

3. Space for congregational participation. Seriously engage congregations in acts of celebration the way the Afro-American congregations do.

4. Sensitive timing of truths presented as emotions are slower, deeper and require more time to stir and move. Avoid erratic emotional movement. don’t get so carried away on the first sub-climax there’s nowhere higher to go later.

5. Vital and creative new insights should be given relatively early in the message and subsequently developed and illustrated to the point of acceptance and emotional involvement. Then it may be celebrated. New insights should not be freshly projected in the sermonic climax.

Celebrative material include: positive affirmation eg God is good to us; philosophical or abstract thought like the problem of evil cannot be celebrated; poetic statement, rehtorical adornment, language that expresses deep feeling; intonation in speech- pitch, tone, varietyl imaginative not literal rigidity;deeply involved speaker as celebration must begin in the pulpit first; moving personal experiences; KJV psalms; hymns and poetry.

2. for Paul, “old man” is Adam; “new man” is Christ.

3. “Old self” denotes our relationship to Adam; “new self” denotes our relationship to Christ.

“Conversion marks a decisive break with Adam and a new connection with Christ (Rom6:6). But the Adamic influence is still active, holding the power to attract us despite our new and unbreakable relationship to Christ. Hence, we must continue to avoid falling into the habits of the “old man” and to seek resolutely to let our new self, our Christian identity, rule our thinking and acting (Eph 4:22-24)- Douglas Moo

Fourteen days before the war began, General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of the central command, made a daring move called the “great left hook.” This sweep of forces flanked the Iraqi army. It was a great move, but it forced the Marine Corps to move 140 kilometers to the northwest and locate a new logistic space at the Gravel Plains.

There was no water. For fourteen days we had engineers digging desperately to find water. We went to the Saudi government and asked if they knew of any water in this area, and their answer was no. We brought the exiled Kuwaiti government down to our command post and asked, “Do you know if there’s any water in this area?” They said no. We went to the Bedouin tribes and the nomads, the people who lived in that area, and said, “Do you know where there’s water on the Gravel Plain?”

They said, “There’s no water there.” We kept digging wells hundreds of feet deep — to no avail.

Every morning at 7:15 a.m., during my devotional time, I asked the Lord to help us find water. On the Sunday before we were to enter Kuwait, I was in a chapel Service, where we were praying for water, when a colonel came to the tent and said, “General, I need to show you something.”

We drove down a road we had built through the desert from the Gravel Plains to the border of Kuwait. About a mile down that road, the officer said, “Look over there.” About twenty yards off the road was a tower that reached fifteen feet into the air. It was a white tower, and at the top of the tower was a cross. Off the ends of the cross were canvas sleeves used in old train stations to put water into train engines. At the base of that cross was an eight-foot-high pump, newly painted red. Beside that pump was a diesel engine, and beside that, four batteries still in their plastic. On the engine were an On button and an Off button.

I pushed the On button, and the engine kicked over immediately. I called one of my engineers and asked him to test the flow coming out of the pipes. An hour later he said, “Sir, it is putting out 100,000 gallons a day.”

— General Charles Krulak, in a message
given at the Leadership Prayer Breakfast,
Wheaton, Illinois, October 2000

The statistical trend is clear enough, but the question is more complex than may first appear. The Washington Post reported on June 6, 2010 that 25 percent of American households were mixed-faith in 2006, according to the General Social Survey. That represents a significant increase from the 15 percent of such households in 1988.

But, what does mixed-faith mean? It could mean the mixing of relatively similar Christian denominations, or it might mean the mixing of two very different systems of belief.
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As Naomi Schaefer Riley reported, “In a paper published in 1993, Evelyn Lehrer, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that if members of two mainline Christian denominations marry, they have a one in five chance of being divorced in five years. A Catholic and a member of an evangelical denomination have a one in three chance. And a Jew and a Christian who marry have a greater than 40 percent chance of being divorced in five years.”

That paper by Professor Lehrer is truly interesting. In “Religious Intermarriage in the United States: Determinants and Trends,” published in the journal Social Science Research, Lehrer acknowledged that the span of differences “corresponds to a continuous variable.” In other words, there is a huge difference between a marriage where a Presbyterian marries an Anglican and one in which a Baptist marries a Mormon.

Lehrer defined a couple as religiously intermarried if, for example, an Evangelical marries a Roman Catholic, or a spouse allied with a liberal Protestant denomination marries someone from “an exclusivist group.” She then allowed, “Unions involving members of two ecumenical Protestant denominations are treated as homogamous.”

All this points to a very interesting pattern. Part of the rise in the statistics about mixed-faith marriages is due to the increasing secularization of the liberal Protestant churches and denominations. To that must be added the huge increase in interfaith marriages among liberal Jews, and the more ecumenically minded among other religious bodies.

Lehrer documented the fact that the more conservative faiths were not intermarrying at rates anywhere near the more liberal groups — and for understandable reasons. When the level of doctrinal commitment is low, the barriers to interfaith marriage are correspondingly far less significant.

Nevertheless, even with all this taken into account, it turns out that marrying outside the faith is one of the most significant risk factors for divorce. Citing the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, Riley reported that “people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.” Riley referred to this fact as “an open secret among academics.”

Professor Lehrer described what she called the “large destabilizing effects” associated with mixed-faith marriages. Why is an interfaith marriage at such risk? The answer, in terms of the academic perspective of Professor Lehrer, is that “religion influences many activities that husband and wife perform jointly.”

Or, as Naomi Schaefer Riley observed, “The differences between husband and wife start to add up.” Seen in the context of the decisions that couples have to make in the course of life together, this is surely an understatement.

Putting all this together, it is clear that theological differences really do matter. These belief systems develop into worldviews that do have real consequences. It is not primarily a matter of which holidays the family observes, but how the children are raised, how the major decisions of life are framed, how the priorities of the couple are aligned.

The sociological evidence points in one clear direction — toward the inherent instability of true mixed-faith marriages. Even among the more liberally minded, the tensions remain.

For Christians, the issue is not settled by sociological data, however. In 2 Corinthians 6:14, the Apostle Paul commands that Christians must “not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” This command reaches far beyond marriage, but it certainly includes the covenant of marriage within its span. Paul’s principle is clear: The Christian’s commitment to Christ is determinative of his or her other commitments. A believer must not marry an unbeliever, for this violates the very logic of the Gospel and the believer’s union with Christ.

The believer in Christ acknowledges him as Savior and Lord, with an allegiance that exceeds any earthly commitment. When two believers are married, they share this mutual commitment and are commonly dedicated to the Lordship of Christ. Their worldviews and allegiances merge into the strength of mutual discipleship, and the big questions of life are answered by their common faith in Christ.

In contrast, the mixed-faith marriage lacks this mutuality of faith and commitment. Worldview divergences and issues of contrasting beliefs are almost surely to hit where they matter most — in relation to the most significant questions of life.

The sociological research presents a clear case for social concern, but the Christian case against mixed-faith marriage emerged long before the academic discipline of sociology. That case is rooted in the logic of the Gospel itself, and in the reality of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The Christian case against mixed-faith marriage does not end with the question of marital survival or divorce. To the contrary, the Christian concern about marriage has nothing less than eternity in view.

This is my response to the question posed this week to the panel at “On Faith,” a project of The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine. My response is published there.

Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Interfaith Marriages Are Rising Fast, But They’re Failing Fast Too,” The Washington Post, Sunday, June 6, 2010.

Evelyn L. Lehrer, “Religious Intermarriage in the United States: Determinants and Trends,” Social Science Research, 27:245-263 (1998).

Eventually the younger brother joined the elder at the same boarding school. One day in a cruel mob action typical of adolescent and crowd mentality the student body ganged up on the younger brother, mocked him, abused him and tore off his shiert to reveal his hunch back. As so often happens, they projected upon this strange and different youth their own inned idiots which they sought to destroy in hurting him.

The older brother was aware of what was going on. He could have gone out and faced this mob of cruel, sadistic students. One word from him would have put a stop to the whole spectacle. He was a leader. He could have acknowledged the strange one as his brother, but instead he remained in the chemistry laboratory doing his work. he betrayed his brother by what he failed to do. Is not the ultimate in betrayal the refusal to go out with love when the other needs us?

The brother survived, but was never the same again. He kept to himself and no longer sang, returning home to the family farms. Meanwhile the elder brother had become a soldier in World war 2, stationed in Palestine. One night, lying outdoors gazing into the starlit night, he realize what he had done to his younger brother in their school days. His heart told him he would never have peace until he went home and asked his brother for forgiveness. And so he made the incredibly difficult wartime journey from Palestine to South Africa and met his brother. They talked long into the night. he confessed how he had betrayed him by what he had not done. They cried together, embraced, and the breach between them was healed.

Something else happened that night. As the elder brother was falling asleep, he heard the beautiful voice of his younger brother singing once again. Van der Post writes that the task of every human being is to make the universal, concrete; the general, specific. By aengagin in a concrete act of contrition, the elder bro acted out his love for the younger ba dthereby released each of them from his emotional prison. By his concrete act of caring he brought healing and wholeness to his brother, to himself and to jthe relationship.

Becoming like Christ is analogous to this. Believe you are whom Christ declares you to be, even if it feels like you are a hypocrite and are wearing a mask. One day it will be reality.

Most of us live out our lives in relative obscurity. When we have hurt another, when we have failed, when we have grievously wounded it is kept in a small closed circle. But imagine if the thing you most regret were to be splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the world. Imagine if that one dread moment became the thing that defined you. John Plummer doesn’t need to imagine. It happened to him.

stretched out, her flesh afire. He had done that to her. For twenty- four years he looked for her, trying everything he could just so that he could tell her that he had not meant this dreadful thing. It was more than wanting. It was a need that ate away at him until he lost his wife and his health and his hope.

Phan invited John to meet her at her hotel later that evening. Sitting side by side she once again assured him of her forgiveness. In her grace she had set him free. In one encounter she had ended twenty four years of anguish for a man who had longed for release.