Schizophrenia is no less schizophrenia if one of the voices happens to be talking sense. Hard schizophrenia is no less difficult if murderous insanity is linked up tight with weird, pathetic, and arbitrary scruples. In fact, if such an arbitary pattern is applied long enough, one may detect a method in the madness. I am …
The Song of the Bow
Introduction Remember that the book of Samuel is all one book, and we stopped in the middle of it (at our conventional break between first and second Samuel) simply for the sake of convenience. The same great narrative continues, as God establishes His kind of rule, and does so in His way. The Text: “Now …
So Look Around in Love
One of the central things we are called to remember in this Supper is the fact that God has brought us to one another, and not just to Himself. Now He has brought us into fellowship with Him, and we rejoice in it, but He never does this in isolation. “The Lord gave the word: …
Secularism and the Blood
This is Ascension Sunday, the day on which we mark the ascension of the Lord Jesus to the right hand of the Ancient of Days. We confess explicitly on this day what we affirm on every day, which is that the Lord Jesus has been given universal authority over every nation. As a consequence—because we …
Kind of a Pushover
“If Bill had been a local potentate centuries before, and his city was under siege, and he had been told by the randy and imperious besieger to ‘Surrender all your gold, and let us ravish all your women,’ Bill would have appeared above the city gates to say something along the lines of ‘Okay!'” (Evangellyfish, …
Liberty in Dying
“Once a man has come to Jesus in order to be put to death, he may then (after the fact) do as he pleases. But unless he has died, nothing he does (however technically correct) will be right” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 80).
Cart and Horse
“A preacher of the gospel has certainly no business preaching morality apart from the gospel . . . He must first call men, as an ambassador for Christ, to be reconciled to God, must insist upon the indispensible need of regeneration through the Holy Spirit. Then, speaking to those who are looked upon as regenerate, …
Other Meetings Can Be Like That Too
“His moral authority was apparently stuck, like an oil-soaked T-shirt down in the sump pump, and this made it hard to control the flooding in this elder-meeting basement of his” (Evangellyfish, p. 145).
Mature Authority
“The problem is not that right-handed, straight-line authority is evil — it is most necessary for Congress, judges, soldiers, policemen, and parents teaching toddlers. But it is not the most mature expression of authority, and to believe that it is the only kind of authority for both mature and immature means that one is a …
Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish
[Speaking of certain errors] “Slight and hasty refutation is often worse than none” (Broadus, Preparation and Delivery, p. 97)