Very cool article in the Times Online (UK) from columnist Matthew Parris. Parris reflects on the missions work being done by Christians in Africa, and concludes that though he doesn’t believe in God, there is something being accomplished there that simple aid programs cannot do. A quote…

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.”

HT: Justin Taylor

Well, the NFL regular season came to an end Sunday, and while some coaches have already had the axe drop on their futures, 12 teams are preparing for their shot at a Super Bowl. With an overpowering, then collapsing, then come-back-and-win-it-at-the-end 33-31 win over New Orleans, the Panthers earned their first NFC South title since 2003 and their first playoff bye since 1996. Now, we wait for our second round opponent – either Minnesota, Arizona, or Atlanta – to come to Charlotte for a Saturday night showdown on January 10th. Anything can happen in the NFL’s second season, but the opportunity is there for a return to the Super Bowl for my Panthers, which will hopefully produce a different result from their last trip. Did your team survive for playoff time? Who do you think will be punching a ticket to Tampa? Let me know in the comments.

New movies are usually released to theaters every Friday, but who’s got 10 bucks these days to drop on a movie that may well be a load of crap? Given those odds, each Friday I offer an alternative on DVD that you can rent at your local video store (or in some cases, avoid at all costs). Some will be new releases, others you may have to hunt for, but all of them are available to light up your small screen should it be a lazy Friday night.

Based on the music of ABBA, Mamma Mia! tells the story of a young bride-to-be named Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) who lives with her mom, Donna (Meryl Streep), helping her to run a hotel on a Mediterranean island in Greece. She desperately wants to have her father give her away at her wedding, but there’s a problem – she doesn’t know who her father is. After reading her mom’s diary, she comes up with three possibilities – Sam (Pierce Brosnan), an architect, Harry (Colin Firth), an uptight banker, and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), and adventurer and writer. Unbeknownst to her mom, she sends each of them an invitation to the wedding, certain that she can figure out who her real dad is before the ceremony. When they all show up, the entire event is thrown into a tailspin.

The premise is entertaining enough, and all the actors (Brosnan, Firth, and Skarsgård especially) do a capable job of making it fun. The music is almost annoyingly catchy (I dare you to get “Dancing Queen” out of your head in less than an hour), and the light and campy tone, while a bit much, keeps this in a ballpark in which it can be an enjoyable musical. Therein, however, lies the problem. This is a musical…and nobody can sing. The producers seemingly decided to cast the film with name actors rather than actors with musical talent, and it shows, sometimes painfully. Seyfried is the best voice in the bunch, but when everybody else belts out a number, you can’t help but notice that they’re at best decidedly average. Brosnan, much as I like him, is absolutely awful. I mean, really, really bad. After seeing the movie, I decided to check out a few reviews and see if anyone else was thinking the same thing, and this quote from critic Matt Brunson pretty much sums it up – “[Brosnan] looks physically pained choking out the lyrics, as if he’s being subjected to a prostate exam just outside of the camera’s eye.” It’s that bad. Most of the rest of the cast are varying degrees of mediocre, but that’s just not good enough when the draw of the film is its music. There were several moments when I thought, “Huh, that’s catchy,” but none where I thought, “Wow, that’s really good.” That just doesn’t cut it. Director Phyllida Lloyd, whose previous work was confined to the stage, doesn’t seem to realize that this is a movie and not a Broadway production, with her cast painfully overacting at points.

Look, I understand that I’m not the target audience for this film. My mother-in-law assures me that at the screening she attended, the entire theater (mainly middle-aged women) was dancing during the credits. If you’re a fan of ABBA or musicals and this looks fun to you, by all means, take a look. It wasn’t boring, and it was, at times, entertaining. However, where it lacked, it lacked in areas that a good musical simply cannot lack. That, at the end of the day, is what kills it for me. But hey – I took a chance. – ** (out of four)

As you enjoy this evening with family and friends, I leave you with “A Big God For Little People – Seven Christmas Eve Meditations.” It was written by John Piper in 1980, and I found it a great tool for focusing my thoughts on the significance of Christ’s birth. Give it a read, and may God’s grace dwell in you richly this Christmas.

D.A. Carson has long been a favorite author of mine. Ever since hearing him give a series of lectures during my freshman year of college, his writing has had a great impact on my spiritual life – most notably the way I think about the love of God. For that reason, I picked up a used copy of one of his books I hadn’t read – A Call to Spiritual Reformation. This book is a study of the prayers of the apostle Paul, intended to help us to reevaluate and reinvigorate our prayer lives.

This was a bit of a curious book from Carson. It’s obviously written with the layman in mind, with each section ending with questions for study and reflection. On an organizational front, this would be a great book for a small group study in the local church. On a content front, it also seems tailor-made for such an endeavor. Time after time, Carson offers insights into the discipline of prayer that the church definitely needs to hear (I say this because I definitely needed to hear them). Some of the middle chapters started to feel repetitive, but the book’s final chapter was incredibly good, with several instances of excellent insight into unanswered prayer. He is better than most at examining theological truths that are not only hard to understand, but hard to accept. My favorite Carson writing is his material dealing with aspects of God’s love that often don’t feel very loving to our human hearts (I highly recommend The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God and Love in Hard Places), and I think he is equally adept at offing counsel on a prayer life that feels like it’s hit a brick wall.

However, the curious nature of the book comes from the fact that, though it seems like a perfect fit for a lay group study, Carson’s writing may be over the head of much of the audience. Carson is an incredibly smart guy. However, I felt at times that the way he wrote wouldn’t really connect across the spectrum of theological literacy. The book seemed to have the pastoral heart of his love books, but the academic tone of Exegetical Fallacies. It was a combination that didn’t always mix well. In final analysis, though it’s not perfect, and it’s not my favorite Carson book, it’s definitely worth a read for someone who is struggling to learn how to pray. Just bring your pocket theological dictionary.

New movies are usually released to theaters every Friday, but who’s got 10 bucks these days to drop on a movie that may well be a load of crap? Given those odds, each Friday I offer an alternative on DVD that you can rent at your local video store (or in some cases, avoid at all costs). Some will be new releases, others you may have to hunt for, but all of them are available to light up your small screen should it be a lazy Friday night.

Pegg plays Dennis Doyle, a security guard at a women’s clothing store who epitomizes the word slacker. His life’s regret is having left his pregnant girlfriend Libby (Thandie Newton) at the alter five years prior. He misses her and he loves his son Jake (Matthew Fenton), but he can never find it in himself to do anything with his life. That changes, however, when Libby begins seeing a new boyfriend, Whit, (Hank Azaria) who is everything Dennis is not – driven, athletic, attractive, wealthy and successful. When Dennis begins to realize that Whit is gaining a better presence in his son’s life than he has, he decides that he has to make a change. Since Whit runs marathons for charity, Dennis decides that’s what he will do. Coached by his best friend (Dylan Moran, who Pegg fans will remember from Shaun) and eccentric landlord (Harish Patel), Dennis sets out to prove to himself and his family that for once in his life he’s capable of finishing something.

As I said, the story here is nothing innovative. Lovable loser trains hard to compete athletically against big, bad, champion. You’ll be treated to the same training montages, crises of confidence, and dramatic finishes you’ve come to expect form a hundred other films. What sets Run Fatboy Run apart is not what it does, but how it does it and who does it. Schwimmer is a pleasant surprise in his first turn behind the camera, pulling off all of the above conventions in a way that never feels cheap and overused. The cast is excellent, especially the dynamic between Pegg and Moran. Azaria ends up mainly playing the straight man, which I didn’t expect, but he does a great job, as does the rest of the supporting cast. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, and the movie does a good job of balancing the more subdued British humor the cast plays to with the more straightforward gags that an American audience expects. Comedy is an extremely subjective genre to evaluate, and those easily offended by sexual humor may be more uncomfortable than humored by some of the jokes (though not on the level of a Wedding Crashers or even the Austin Powers films), but Heather, myself, and the friend we watched it with laughed and laughed a lot. This was a really fun film, and I’d certainly recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of Pegg’s previous work. It’s no Hot Fuzz, but it’s a nice holdover until the conclusion of Pegg, Frost, and Wright’s “Blood and Ice Cream” trilogy arrives in a couple years. – ***1/2 (out of 4)

Run Fatboy Run is rated PG-13 for some rude and sexual humor, nudity, language and smoking.

This weekly topic is an effort to recap the Wednesday night Bible study I teach at Sola5, my youth group. I hope it serves to help us all in contemplating the ceaseless riches of God’s grace as revealed through the Scriptures.

Last night was our final youth gathering before Christmas, so we took the opportunity to celebrate the birth of Christ – and to take a hard look at the place that he has in our lives. We opened by remembering Christ’s coming through readings from Isaiah 9 and Matthew 1, and then spent time in reflection as we listened to “Amen, Amen” from Sojourn Community Church’s fantastic CD Advent Songs (currently available as a free download through NoiseTrade). After singing “O Holy Night” together, we began our time of study by considering the anticipation that often accompanies Christmas.

Remember back to your childhood. Doubtlessly, you could recall great (and often humorous) memories of the long wait for Christmas morning to arrive. My students had many great stories, from trying to rewrap presents they’d dug into in the middle of the night to hitting the stairs in such a frenzy that they fell and rolled all the way to the bottom. Why did we do so many crazy (and often stupid) things on Christmas as kids? Because our thinking was completely consumed with anticipation for what was to come. What sort of anticipation grips our hearts, however, at the thought of the birth of Christ – the coming of our savior? In Luke 2:22-38, we examined the life of a man named Simeon whose expectations were sky high – and they completely dictated the way that he lived his life.

We know very little about Simeon, save that he was old, righteous, and devout. He would have been quite familiar with the Old Testament Law – God’s expectations for how we are to live. However, we are also told that he was waiting expectantly for “the consolation of Israel.” What a strange thing to look for. Israel was, after all, the chosen people of God, the ones to whom he had revealed himself and entered into covenant relationship with. They were his favored nation. Why, then, were they in need of consolation – of comfort, of lifting up? Simeon knew the answer. As a devout man, he not only knew the Law’s commands, but he knew of his own inability to keep those commands. He, like all of Israel, stood guilty before God – a perfect God, as perfect in his justice as he is in his love. This fact was hammered into his mind and heart by a ritual system where animals were constantly sacrificed as a reminder of the people’s guilt. Yet he, like all the Jews, looked to God’s promise of a savior, of one who would redeem his people. The promise can be traced all the way back to Genesis 3, and it finds echoes throughout the prophets. Simeon waited with eager expectation for the Messiah to come. God, in his grace, had revealed to Simeon that he would live to see the birth of the Christ child. For this moment he yearned.

Following his birth, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to fulfill the Law’s rituals for a firstborn child. As they entered into the temple, the Lord revealed to Simeon the nature of the child they carried. As he held the long promised savior in his arms, Simeon proclaimed that salvation had come to earth – a light to the Gentiles who had until now dwelled in darkness, and a new hope for the people of Israel. He could not but proclaim the coming of Christ, for it was the most important event in the history of the universe. He proclaimed the hope of his birth. He proclaimed the sorrow and pain that would accompany the task of redeeming people from sin. We see in the final few verses that he was not alone, an old widow named Anna spread the news of Christ’s birth to all those in Jerusalem who were eagerly anticipating it.

How should anticipation factor into our Christmas? After all, we look not forward but back, back to the birth of a child more than 2000 years ago. However, even for us today, the promise of Christmas has still yet to reach its full fulfillment. We live having experienced the promised grace of Christ, lavished upon us through his death and resurrection, but we still look forward to the consummation of all things, to the time when, as the hymn says, “in his name, all oppression shall cease.” We’ve experienced the beginning of the Christmas story, but we still eagerly await its ending. Are you waiting for it? Does the promise of Christ’s return even register as a blip on your radar, much less the dominating factor around which your life is built? Why do we celebrate Christmas? Moreover, why do we file into sanctuaries week after week to worship? I told my students last night that I have little interest in wasting their time. It boils down to this – if the Christmas story is true and Christ is who he said he is, than he is everything, and every aspect of our lives, our thoughts, our relationships, our time, our finances, our careers, our affections, should be constructed around him. He is the only hope that we have of being accepted by God, sinful as we are. If Christ is not real, if the manger and the virgin birth and the wise men are mere fairy tale, then we are wasting our time. Christianity carries as much significance as the platitudes on the candy hearts on Valentine’s Day. Better to sleep in on Sundays and get an early start on the NFL pregame shows. There is no third option – he’s either everything or he’s nothing. So I ask you – examine your heart and mind. Do you believe in the Christ of Christmas? The Christ of the cross? The resurrected Christ? This Christmas, enjoy the abundant joy that Christmas brings – time with family, the wonder of the season, the festivities and the gifts. However, never for a moment forget why we celebrate. Never for a moment forget why we live. Christ is all. Without him there is no hope. With him is joy and purpose beyond our minds’ farthest ability to comprehend. Glory in him this Christmas, and let his glory shine through you.

Check out the full sermon, preached at my church on December 7th, here. Great stuff.