Browse By Topic
Assorted
Aged saints can tell you what your peers don’t know or won’t say
In late 1785, the 26-year-old British Member of Parliament William Wilberforce secretly met with 61-year-old John Newton. Wilberforce had very recently encountered the grace of Christ. Deeply convicted about his squandered youth and self-serving ambition, the young MP seriously considered resigning from Parliament to enter the ministry. Uneasy of mind, he visited Newton – the slave-trader-turned-clergyman – under cover of darkness.
Newton encouraged Wilberforce to remain in Parliament and continue his parliamentary career as a Christian. Newton would later tell Wilberforce, “It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of His Church and for the good of the nation.” Following the meeting, Wilberforce stated that “when I came away I found my mind in a calm, tranquil state, more humbled, and looking more devoutly up to God.”
Two years later, Wilberforce would boldly declare that:
“God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”
Newton’s prescient advice to his younger brother in the faith shows us what it looks like to live out the biblical mandate for older Christians to mentor younger Christians. The much older Newton had turned to Christ three decades earlier and had much more experience in the Christian life than his newly saved counterpart. In consistency with the example of Scripture, he used his hard-earned wisdom to guide a young believer in need of direction.
We need Newton, not Tate
Sadly, our age has undermined the mentorship role of the elderly. Popular culture idolizes youthful attractiveness and athletic achievement over the wisdom gained in old age. Worse, the world portrays the outward decay of the elderly as an imposition on those who are still enjoying the fleeting pleasures of youth. As a result, care for the elderly is kept away from the family and offshored to a professional class. This is poignantly exhibited in the rise of euthanasia, now Canada’s 4th leading cause of death. If true life consists in beauty, youth, and health, then life itself must be ended once these qualities have disappeared.
However, as with all other attempts to reorder God’s creative design, the removal of the elderly from societal influence has produced dire consequences – an emerging generation whose primary influences are their own peers rather than seasoned mentors.
Popular online influencers, such as Andrew Tate, have filled the mentorship gap among young men with a false and sinful masculinity. Speaking to Tate’s growing influence, John Stonestreet writes,
“young men, when left to be taught by assertive online influencers eager to avoid the feminist ditch, can be driven straight into the pimp ditch. They must instead be taught through real relationships with fathers, pastors, friends, and mentors who are willing to live out all that is distinctive about God’s design for men.”
This problem is not unique to young men – social media is dominated by celebrations of a false femininity that devalues the dignity of godly womanhood and instead encourages young women to pursue licentiousness.
Called to speak
For the Christian, however, gray hair is not the gutting sign of approaching death, but the hard-won crown of a life spent in service to God (Prov. 16:31). With Heaven as the horizon, there is deep value in a life well-lived – the lessons from which may be shared with those who are young.
In this way, the Apostle Paul instructs his own younger disciple in the faith, Titus, about the relationship between older Christians and younger Christians (Titus 2:2-5):
“Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”
The priority of mentorship between old Christians and young Christians is clear. Just as the eye cannot say to the foot “I have no need of you,” so also the young Christian cannot say to the old Christian “I have no need of you.”
Rehoboam foolishly listened to the council of his childhood friends rather than the mature instructions of his father’s advisors. We too are susceptible to surrounding ourselves with similarly aged peers who affirm our decisions and never rebuke our errors. But godly young people require godly, aged mentors who are committed to speaking directly and truthfully. Wisdom earned in old age provides the mature Christian with the hard-earned right to speak difficult truths that may not as readily flow from the lips of a young Christian’s peers.
The willing reception of this gift, however, is only one part of the equation. The gift must also be offered, which requires diligent instruction on the part of the aged and a refusal to listen to a culture which tells those in their final stage of life to hide away until death comes.
Wise, aging Christians have been called to deliver godly exhortations to young believers. With such exhortations, mature believers are paving the way for a new generation of the Christian church and the never-ending proclamation of Christ’s glory. Gray hair truly is a far more noble crown than the fleeting bravado of youth.
Keeping the fire flickering
After nine years of laboring against the slave trade with very little success, a wearied, 36-year-old William Wilberforce wrote his old friend John Newton and questioned whether he could continue the fight. The now 71-year-old Newton replied:
“It is true, that you live in the midst of difficulties and snares, and you need a double guard of watchfulness and prayer. But since you know both your need of help and where to look for it, I may say to you, as Darius to Daniel, Thy God whom Thou servest continually is able to preserve and deliver you.”
Wilberforce did not quit and, on March 25, 1807 – some dozen years after Wilberforce’s disheartened letter to Newton – Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
A society that scorns the exhortations of aging and faithful men is a society where young men such as William Wilberforce flicker out in discouragement. But, thankfully, God delights in using aging Christians to encourage young Christians in the faith. Godly old men and women must not relinquish that duty, and young men and women must not despise these lessons. In this way, aging Christian believers can fulfill their integral role in the victorious history of Christ’s Church.
News
Saturday Selections – Feb. 15, 2025
Charles Darwin's birthday was Feb. 12, so for this edition we are marking that event by featuring a collection of very different rebuttals. Click on the titles for the linked articles.
Your cells are constantly being recycled and repaired... even as they keep running
Every day your DNA experiences 10,000 lost letters of code in every single cell of your body. Your body is like a library of information... that's constantly on fire. As fast as the environment burns down your DNA, a host of DNA "librarians" in your cells builds back what was being burnt down.
That means that, right from the beginning, our DNA needed these repair mechanisms. But these mechanisms need all sorts of DNA to be formed. It's a chicken and egg dilemma – which came first? Both need to have been in place from the beginning, and couldn't have evolved one at a time.
Better science without Darwin
When you presume that all the life around us came about by random mutation, acting without design or purpose, then you're not liable to look to Nature for brilliant design. And devotion to Darwin might have you falling for all sorts of mistakes, like believing that much of our DNA is just junk left over from our previous evolutionary incarnations. Or you'd be liable to look for and try to point out flaws in our design.
But you'd be wrong.
What if, instead of looking to Nature for bad design, scientists starting looking to it for Inspired design? That's what the field of biometrics is all about – looking to Nature for inspiration, because of the brilliant engineering on display.
Evolution can't explain why we blush
Does blushing make you fitter? Nope. In fact, an argument could be made that this honest unconscious reaction might put someone at a disadvantage. That's why Darwin was perturbed by it, because even blushing exposes the insufficiency of his evolutionary theory.
The astonishing self-organizing human embryo
You start as a single cell that then subdivides into all sorts of other different types of cells. But how does the one decide to become all the others? "...how exactly does an organism without any central control self-organize?" The more we learn, the more apparent it is, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
The Darwin devotion detector
Some years back author and scientist William A. Dembski crafted a test that paired statements – one devoted to Darwin, the other not – that could be used by a person to gauge how devoted or not they might be to Darwin. I think this 40-question test could be used by Christians in university to confront classmates willing to listen (interested opposition, not fingers-in-their-ears fools) to expose to them their blind devotion to Darwin, and how it isn't anything to do with science. Here's one pairing, as an example, with the first showing Darwin devotion, and the second lining up better with reality.
- Darwin’s theory of evolution is as well supported scientifically as Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
- Putting Darwin’s theory of evolution in the same league as Einstein’s theory of general relativity is an affront to the exact sciences.
The age of the arches
As the article above notes, Arches National Park has about 2,000 natural rock arches, with roughly one collapsing each year and none forming. So, unless there were millions of arches to start, that makes it seem that these are not the millions of years old they are purported to be. And the article below highlights how they were not formed as they were purported to be either.
Today's Devotional
February 20 - The plea of Haman
“Haman stayed to beg for his life from Queen Esther, for he saw that harm was determined against him by the king.” - Esther 7:7
Scripture reading: Esther 7:7-10
What irony for Haman! Earlier he gave the honour that he had expected to Mordecai. Now he bears the shame he had reserved for Mordecai. In triplicate, shame comes to Haman.
First, >
Today's Manna Podcast
A Two-for-One Deal
Serving #759 of Manna, prepared by Clarence VanderVelde, is called "A Two-for-One Deal".
