A good question arose in the comments of my previous post, and I thought an adequate reply to it needed some room to spread out. It is a great question, and it illustrates why this discussion is not equivalent to an irrelevant attempt to get a do-over of some ancient battle or other. This whole …
Spiritual Disciplines: Eat
INTRODUCTION:So there are three imperatives we are considering as we look at the spiritual disciplines. They are breathe, eat, and work. We have already seen the need for the gift of breath, and we will now look at the charge to eat. THE TEXT:“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of …
No Picky Eaters
The apostle Paul teaches us that we are all one loaf (1 Cor. 10:17). We are one body, one loaf, one congregation. We symbolize this by symbolically partaking of one loaf. Now if it happens that we have more saints gathered than can be fed by one loaf, no matter. The Lord once took five …
Buttery Lessons
God has created us in such a way that we must live in accordance with a word. We must live by a law, by a standard. There is no other way for us to function. When we fell into sin, we discovered the possibility (or so we thought) of living by another standard than the …
With a Bit of Menthol
As everyone knows by now, one of my very favorite activities is defending myself against charges of racism and/or racial insensitivity on the Internet. I have decided that this will be periodically necessary, at least until I die, but I attribute this more to cosmic forces than to any nefarious plot on the part of …
More Than Some Overdue Library Books
Kudos to Rand Paul for the filibuster on domestic drone strikes. The thing we have to understand about slippery slopes is that, if you have a ripe one, it is slippery all the way down. The first thing to note is that Rand Paul was not engaging in a mere political stunt — he was …
If It Were a Pancake
Steve McSwain, “Author, Speaker, Thought Leader, Spiritual Teacher,” has written a piece over at HuffPo that requires some sort of response. From the rigor of argument displayed in his piece, one guess could be that he is most likely a mentor of spiritual formation at a place somewhere in LA with a name something like …
Make a Rude Face
I have recently put together the pieces of a blunder I made repeatedly over the course of a number of years. One sample of this foul deed can be found on page 108 of The Case for Classical Christian Education, but I know I made the mistake in a number of places, mostly in talks. …
Four Warnings
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) The Basket Case Chronicles #107 “Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell …
Snarls and Snarling
We have seen that the devil baits his hook with sinful pleasures, and then, when the hapless sinner bites, he gives a deft tug on the hook of accusation. Now the fish might well protest, when being hauled into the boat of condemnation by the ruthless fisherman, that the worm was not his idea. “Why …