Social Media and Borrowed Motives

Mike Leake

kev-costello-548721-unsplashI spent last week in Dallas, TX with my family. I didn’t intend to take a week off from writing and social media; but I did, and I’m glad. I don’t think I realized how much I had been running on fumes. The Lord has been doing several things in my heart over the past couple of weeks and I needed my pen to be silent. One thing I read before vacation was this little gem tucked away in the minutes from an 1801 meeting of the Eclectic Society of London. This from a Rev. J. Clayton:

If we live much in company, we soon begin to borrow motives from men. Retirement will be the detector of borrowed motives. The things which buoy up another in an impaired state, will be seen by us in their nullity. (Eclectic Society, 213)

Clayton’s comment was in response to a question on the type of preaching which is most conducive to preventing a decline in religion. Clayton noted that a ministry which “comes down in particulars” is to be desired over more broad and general preaching. The particulars to which he was referring is the explicit gospel of Christ. Such preaching has a tendency to “gradually impair”. What Clayton means is that the more we go along without seasons of retirement and meditation we will get entangled in other people’s passions and find ourselves distracted from the gospel.

Frankly, I’ve been guilty of this. I cannot go into details but I found myself having a bit of a whine fest with the Lord a couple weeks ago. I was complaining about things I have little to no control over. So much of my time and thought space was given to these “borrowed motives” Clayton was referencing. I lamented to the Lord that I wanted to be spending my time on things like evangelism and discipleship. I believe his response to my spirit was simple, “Well, why aren’t you?”

Borrowed motives, that’s why. And I couldn’t really see them until I got away. And I needed to mostly unplug from social media as well. No checking blogs. No following the latest sagas. I even found myself disengaging from all the hubbub surrounding the SBC Annual Meeting. I went to sessions, voted for the things I was passionate about, met with a few friends, but more than anything I spent my time drawing near to my family as I drew near to the Lord.

There are so many agendas and motives which we can borrow from social media. There is an outrage every day. There are numerous conversations we can jump into and throw our weight around (no matter how feathery). Likewise, there are plenty of agendas within our local churches and communities to get us all tied up in knots. We can spend months, years, even decades living out of the motives of others.

It’s probably a bit laughable that I spent a little over a week mostly off social media and I’m writing as if I spent 40 days in the wilderness. But this isn’t the end of the journey for me, hopefully just another leg of pursuing deeper faithfulness in Christ. Social media and blogging, I believe, does have a place and is a tool to be used for ministry. But I’m realizing that my roots aren’t as deep as I would like them to be. That’s one of the dangers of social media/blogging, you can appear deeper than you are. You can trick yourself into think that your roots are deep when really your passions and your motives are just borrowed from one day to the next. Having an opinion, or thinking you have to have an opinion, on everything doesn’t lend itself to depth.

I needed this time off to see which motives are borrowed and which ones are mine.

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Read This! 06.07.18

Mike Leake 2 Comments

4 Questions: Tim Challies and Justin Taylor on Blogging

I enjoyed reading this.

5 Reasons I Read Authors With Whom I Disagree

I try to do the same.

It’s Submission, Not Subjection

Very helpful distinction.

I Sold The Babylon Bee

His reasoning here is quite interesting.

On Peace and Progress in the Southern Baptist Convention

Yes, may it be so.

A Warning To Those Who Work With Words

Worth heeding.

Dangers of Non-Christocentric Preaching: A Displaced Gospel

Amen.

Five Truths from 10 Years of Discipleship Research

It’s true, if we aren’t making disciples we aren’t doing church.

The last two churches I’ve served I’ve noticed this. Seems like an “A” crowd and a “B” crowd and they both come about every 1-3 weeks:

Doubt Always Looks For a Place to Land

Mike Leake 2 Comments

Doubt is always looking for a place to land.

I’ve been spending a bit of time with my dear friend, Obadiah Sedwick, and that truth is what I’ve learned. There are many things in your life which you believe are true, the things which you agree with. Then there are also many things which you believe are false, or things which you do not agree with. Some of these are grounded in actual truth. Some of them are mere opinions. The land in the middle is what Sedwick, called doubtings:

Doubtings properly stand between them both. They are not plainly the one, or plainly the other. If I may speak freely, I conceive them to have a [hint] of either; they are medium, a middle thing, as your mixed colors are which you cannot style directly white or directly black.

When Sedwick spoke of “doubtings” he was referring to four different types. One type of doubt is the one which truly believes but isn’t sure exactly how something is going to happen. It’s like when you watch a superhero movie. You know the hero isn’t going to die, you just aren’t sure how he’s going to get out of the pickle he’s in. Another type of doubting is where we trust the object but not necessarily ourselves. This is when you believe God is communicating something to you, you know He has the power to do it, but you aren’t quite sure you trust yourself to hear correctly. Sedwick also believes there is a type of doubting which is plainly evil. This is the type of doubt that actually questions the goodness and character of God. All those are properly doubt, but not the type of doubt I’m referring to today.

The fourth kind of doubt, the one I’m considering today, is the doubt where you are hanging in suspense. The one where you truly aren’t sure about something. You really do feel caught in the middle. It might be a question of conscience or it might be a question of character. This type of doubt is disturbing. It’s the kind of doubt that keeps you up at night.

Such doubt is always looking for a place to land.

I picture in my mind a plane which is running out of gas and looking for a place to safely land. Whatever field it finds the pilot is going to take it. We don’t like being up in the air in our doubts. Humanity cannot thrive with inquietude. As Sedwick would say, “it ever inclines towards a determinate object”.

This is why it is absolutely vital for us to be grounded in the Word and in the gospel. We’re responsible for the landscape of our minds. The more time we spend in God’s Word and meditating on the truth of God the more likely we’ll create a good landing space for our doubts. But if we’re consistently spending our time in arguments, foolish controversies, atheistic babblings, mind-numbing entertainment, shallow social media, and worldly musings then we cannot expect our doubts to find safe landing ground.

Don’t misunderstand me. God’s Word is powerful. His keeping power is unstoppable. And the gospel does win out over darkness. The gospel does free us up to be able to engage secular thought and such. However, it is Christ and His Word which give us the power to do this. If we slowly mute the gospel, spend more time in secular thought instead of God’s Word and expect to win the war it isn’t going to happen.

Doubts always look for a place to land.

And doubts are going to come. You cannot live in our culture and be faithful to the call of the gospel without putting yourself in the path of doubt. It’s going to happen. Questions will arise. The issue, though, is what type of landscape are we building for that plane to land on.

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In Defense of @BethMooreLPM “Little Girl Arise”

Mike Leake 2 Comments

Last week when an email from Paige Patterson was released, wherein he said he wanted to meet with an alleged rape victim in order to “break her down”, Beth Moore tweeted this in response:

I’ll be honest and say that at first reading I thought this was a bit of a strange passage to use in defense of her point. But then I saw a couple of days later many taking her to task for her exegesis of this passage. One gentleman even said, “This is exactly why she is unqualified to teach Scriptures”. This statement, her critics have said, has absolutely nothing to do with misogyny and she has ripped this passage out of its context to make her point.

This caused me to pay a bit more attention to her tweet. I wanted to know if she really did exegete that passage improperly. But first, I think it would do us well to actually engage (exegete) what she is saying and the point she is making.

I believe love calls us to give our brothers and sisters in Christ the fairest reading possible. (I’m not always good at this). To me the fairest reading of what Moore is trying to say is that mortal men have a tendency to break people down whereas Jesus’ ministry is life-giving. And it’s likely a call for us to follow the way of Christ and not the way of mortal man.

So can you get that from this text?

One of the most helpful things that I’ve learned in biblical interpretation is that we must keep a text in its context. (This is what folks are accusing Moore of not doing). But when we say keep a text in its context it is helpful for us to think about context in terms of three horizons. This comes from Richard Lints:

The biblical text has three interpretive horizons: the immediate context of the book (or passage), the context of the period of revelation in which the book (or passage) falls, and the context of the entirety of revelation.

Let us, then, consider each of these contexts of Mark 5:41. The immediate context is Jesus healing of the bleeding woman and this raising up of Jairus’ daughter. When I preached through Mark I taught our people how much Mark likes sandwiches. He loves to tells stories of similarity and have a meaty points right in the middle. This is one of those instances. The bread here is the raising of the little girl and the meat of the sandwich is the healing of the bleeding woman.

Every bit of these passages points to the helplessness and the hopelessness of the situation and the fullness of Christ in conquering the unconquerable. The story of the bleeding woman shows the inadequacy of every treatment she had tried. But one touch of the garment of Jesus and she was healed. Likewise, Mark writes in such a way that the hopelessness of Jairus’ daughter is loud. “She’s dead. Don’t bother the teacher anymore. Nothing we can do”. Then Jesus comes in an does what only Jesus can do; namely, raise the dead.

So the immediate context of the story points to the exceedingly great power and authority of Jesus. Which fits in with Mark’s overall account of who Jesus is. “Truly this man is the Son of God.” How do we know? Not only because he died and rose from the grave but because of all these things that he had done which showed that he was the one who was promised. This is where it fits in that second context. Jesus is the life-giving Messiah who was promised.

It’s no accident that Acts 9:36-43 read somewhat similarly. The apostles are carrying on the work of Jesus. What’s the work of Jesus? The word used here is the same one used of Jesus’ resurrection. His resurrection is a first-fruits of our resurrection. He truly is making all things new. So, when we pan out to the third context—the entirety of revelation we see that Jesus is the promised Messiah. He is the one who would give life and heal all that is broken by the fall. Mark 5:41 is a tiny slice of this greater truth. Jesus gives life where there once was death.

So yeah—the immediate context of Beth Moore’s tweet doesn’t quite square up. But what if she’s making a wider point and using that text as just one little slice of this great truth. Jesus is life giving and calls little girls to “rise up” whereas mortal men have a tendency to bring death? Well, that seems to fit a little better.

Sure, the main point of that text is about a little girl who was physically raised from a physical death. But how would you preach that passage? You’d preach it by pointing to the greater work of Jesus and how this narrative shows us who he is. And a far application of that passage might truly be that Christ heals us where we are broken. For Jairus’ daughter she needed life where there was only death. And Christ alone could do that. Perhaps a far application for us would be to say that where you’ve been broken down by rape and abuse in Christ you can find healing and indeed “rise up”.

A side note to this, that I believe needs to be mentioned, is that I wish that we would do a much more charitable job of exegeting our brothers and sisters in Christ. Let’s read them with a benefit of the doubt. It’s a sign of a good interpreter to consider genre. Twitter is a genre. It’s used to make quick points and not full expositions. It’s really not the best medium for doing good Bible study. But it’s certainly a decent place to make short and even poetic points. Reading a tweet like Beth Moore’s charitably—or even asking questions about what specifically she’s meaning by this—would be helpful. It’s wrong to expect a full exposition or to accuse her of being a false teacher simply because she took a far application from a wider horizon instead of the immediate application from the immediate context.

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