You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing [fair play and harmony between individuals] and forgetting the other two [internal correction and the purpose of human life]. When people say in the newspapers that we are striving for Christian moral standards, they usually mean that we are striving for kindness and fair play between nations, and classes, and individuals; that is, they are thinking only of the first thing. When a man says about something he wants to do, “It can’t be wrong because it doesn’t do anyone else any harm,” he is thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what the ship is like inside provided that he does not run into the next ship. And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to begin with the first thing, with social relations. For one thing, the results of bad morals in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day: war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work. And also, as long as you stick to the first thing, there is very little disagreement about morality. Almost all people at all times have agreed (in theory) that human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to one another. But though it is natural to begin with all that, if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go on to the second thing—the tidying up inside each human being—we are only deceiving ourselves.

Mere Christianity, 71f.

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

Mere Christianity, 71.

The October issue of First Things also includes a thoughtful reflection by R. R. Reno on Kerouac’s book On the Road.

These are the paragraphs from the article that I found most thought-provoking:

The Beats were quintessential bohemians who felt the plain-Jane expectations of middle-class American life as an infecting, constraining force. Wife, career, mortgage, children, savings accounts, and quiet suburban streets: These were realities overlaid by the deadening expectations of conventional morality. Escape was essential, and, although Kerouac and the other Beats lacked Rousseau’s clarity about the constant impulse of human nature to accept and submit to social authority, they intuitively recognized the need for dramatic acts and symbols of transgression.

. . . . . . . . . .

In 1957, the New York Times review hailed the novel’s publication as “a historic occasion.” The review trumpeted that On the Road offers “the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principle avatar he is.” Of course, as David Brooks so cleverly observed in Bobos in Paradise, we’re all weekend beatniks now. The counterculture of transgression that dominates On the Road has thoroughly colonized our middle-class world.

Transgression and marginality have become the new normalcy. The bohemian rejection of social convention was first theorized as a normal stage of psychological development (“adolescent rebellion”), and more recently it has been made into both commercial fashions and academic dogma. Aging rock musicians go on tours and play their songs of youthful lust and rebellion to graying Baby Boomers . . . . College professors theorize transgression as an act of political freedom. It’s easy to see that Kerouac’s road that leads from the Beat fantasies of primal innocence to our own day, where white boys from the suburbs dress like drug dealers, girls like prostitutes, and millionaires like dock workers. Crotch-grabbing rap singers play the role of well-paid Dean Moriartys.

. . . . . . . . . . .

It is as if we very much want to believe in Dean, but, like Sal at the end of On the Road, we know we cannot rely on him to give us guidance. We want to believe the promises of bohemian life—to live according to our own innermost selves—but we are surrounded by the sadness of disappointed hope. The transgressive heroism of our imagination now looks as tawdry as daytime television. Bohemianism becomes banal and disappointing as it becomes dominant. We suffer the failures of the countercultural project even as we surround ourselves with its music, its rhetorical postures, and its fashions.

These paragraphs raise this question: If the current culture’s music, postures, and fashions reflect a “banal” and “tawdry” culture of transgression seeking to escape from conventional (and oftentimes Biblical) morality, then should not the church reject this culture’s music, postures, and fashions? Should not the church be culturally distinct in ways that point the surrounding society beyond its own cultural failures toward the culture of shalom that Christ will establish at his return?

Question: In what do the godly reveal their holiness?

Answer:

1. in hating ‘the garment spotted by the flesh’ (Jude 23). The godly set themselves against evil, both in purpose and in practice. They are fearful of that which looks like sin (1 Thess. 5:22). The appearance of evil may prejudice a weak Christian. If it does not defile a man’s own conscience, it may offend his brother’s conscience; and to sin against him is to sin against Christ (1 Cor. 8:12). A godly man will not go as far as he may, lest he go further than he should.

Thomas Watson, The Godly Man’s Picture, (1666; rpt. BoT, 1992), 33.

Pastor Minnick has several times suggested prefacing a time of Bible study with the reading (and praying) of a stanza from Psalm 119. Reading these stanzas prior to study in the latter part of Exodus has proved remarkably helpful. This section of Exodus (and much of Leviticus and Numbers which follows) can seem as dry as the wilderness Israel was traversing if it is read superficially.

Yet consider some of the things the Psalmist says in the opening stanzas of this Psalm: “My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times” (119:20). “Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors” (119:24). “In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches” (119:14). “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart” (119:1-2). Surely when the Psalmist wrote of God’s rules and his law, the Pentateuch was at the forefront of his mind.

For the Psalmist, the law was not dry. It was like a stream of water that causes a tree to prosper with unwithered leaves and abundant fruit. The man who delights in the law so that he meditates on it day and night is a blessed man (Ps. 1:1-4).

How can the psalmist be so bold as to declare, “I will keep your statues” (Ps. 119:8)?

Note how he concludes the verse:  “do not utterly forsake me.”

“Heart-work is hard work, indeed. To shuffle over religious duties with a  loose and heedless spirit will cost no great pains, but to set yourself before the Lord, and tie up your loose and vain thoughts to a constant and serious attendance upon Him, will cost you something. To attain a facility and dexterity of language in prayer and put your meaning into apt and decent expressions is easy; but to get your heart broken for sin while you are confessing it and melted with free grace while you are blessing God for it, to be really ashamed and humbled through the apprehensions of God’s infinite holiness, and to keep your heart in this frame not only in, but after duty will surely cost you some groans and travailing pain of soul. To repress outward acts of sin and compose the external part of your life in a laudable and comely manner is no great matter. Even carnal persons, by the force of common principles, can do this. But to kill the root of corruption within, to set and keep up a holy government over your thoughts, to have all things lie straight and orderly in the heart, this is not easy.”

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart (SDG, 1998), 9f.

Robert Trail wrote, “Some ministers of meaner gifts and parts are more successful than some that are far above them in abilities; not because they preach better, so much as because they pray more. Many good sermons are lost for lack of much prayer in study.” . . . The church today desperately needs such preachers whose private prayers season their pulpit messages. The Puritan pastors jealously guarded their personal devotional time. They set their priorities on spiritual, eternal realities. They knew that if they cased to watch and pray constantly, they would be courting spiritual disaster.

Joel Beeke, Puritan Reformed Spirituality (RHB, 2004), 164.

[Keeping the heart] includes earnest supplications and instant prayer for heart-purifying and rectifying grace, when sin has defiled and disordered it. So Psalm 19:12: “Cleanse thou me from secret faults”; and Psalm 86:11: “Unite my heart to fear Thy name.” Saints have always many such petitions pending before the throne of God’s grace. This is the thing which is most pleaded by them with God. When they are praying for outward mercies, perhaps their spirits may be more remiss; but when it comes to the heart case, then they extend their spirits to the utmost, fill their mouths with arguments, weep, and make supplication: “Oh, for a better heart! Oh, for a heart to love God more. Oh, for a heart to hate sin more and to walk more evenly with God. Lord, deny not to me such a heart whatever Thou deniest me! Give me a heart to fear Thee, love and delight in Thee, even if I beg my bread in desolate places.”

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart (SDG, 1998), 7.

Flavel’s description of autonomous man is worth pondering:

Man by degeneration has become a most disordered and rebellious creature, contesting with and opposing his Maker as the first cause by self-dependence; as the chief good by self-love; as the highest Lord by self-will; and as the last end by self-seeking. So he is quite disordered,, and all his acts are irregular. His illuminated understanding is clouded with ignorance, his complying will full of rebellion and stubbornness, his subordinate powers casting off the dominion and government of the superior faculties.

Sins like self-dependence, self-love, self-will, and self-seeking do not always asset themselves in notorious ways. By showing how each of these sins is rebellion against the Lordship of the Creator, Flavel strips them of their disguise and enables us to see the sinfulness of sin.

Source: John Flavel, Keeping the Heart (SDG, 1998), 5.