Growing in grace is like climbing a tree, as the Puritan William Bridge once observed. When you want to grow in grace, what do you do? Well, you start with the lowest branches, those which are close to the ground. This is another way of saying that you start where you are. There are doctrines …
How It Tastes
When we trust in God for our salvation, we need to be careful with what we do with that pronoun “we.” We often think that it is God’s task to save each individual soul, and then we assume that the whole operation is then handed over to the collective “us,” whether in the church, or …
Unraveled
One of the characteristics of unraveled societies is that they are not aware of it. Because a culture is coming apart into pieces, it becomes easy to identify (and blame) that other piece over there. Your piece of the Balkanization is just fine. The privilege of demonizing others is one of the perks of fragmentation. …
No, You Read the Title Right . . .
And this is the blurb I provided for a book by my friends Randy Booth and Rich Lusk. “I am happy to commend The Church-Friendly Family to you. Written by two experienced pastors, this book is a wonderful reminder that the Church is far more than just a support group for families. While we all …
Instead of Two
“Since I wrote Her Hand in Marriage, I have heard more than one courtship horror story. And more than once I have consequently said that the courtship model means that we have six idiots involved instead of two” (5 Paths to the Love of Your Life, p. 59).
Honor the Beast
“The identification of the ruling Roman authorities as ‘a blaspheming beast’ is not exactly a complimentary one, and yet for the Christians it was a very obvious one to make. When the Christians cultivated their open liturgical honor for the emperor, they were not doing so with their eyes closed. We might even say that …
Mood Preaching, Not Moody Preaching
“To fulfill your responsibility as a biblical preacher, make sure that you preserve both the meaning and mood of the original author” (Edwards, Deep Preaching, p. 137).
Losing the Creature You Worship
“Over the past several centuries, so many seminaries, parachurch organizations, colleges, and denominations have fallen into unbelief, that you would think we would know what it looks like by now. And yet, we must always remember the words of God to those who cannot see, and who in the name of their goddess reason, will …
An Evangelical Center
Life is right at the center of God’s purposes for this dead world of ours. But the way into this new world He is fashioning is quite similar to the way we got into the old world — we have to be born into it. A new world, a new creation, requires, of necessity, a …
A Tall Tree and a Short Rope
[Trigger warning: strident feminism pretending not to be] Sarah Moon writes here about complementarianism’s “ugly relationship with rape.” She poses two questions of us bad people, and they are as follows — first, how do we define rape? And secondly, what do we propose to do about it? Okay. I would define rape as having …