I have said kind things about Ron Paul in the past, and I will continue say them in the future. He continues to be one of the people I could vote for when Ringling Bros. finally brings the gaudy parade to my state. But he whiffed it last night in the debate when asked how …
Undomesticated Grace
“God’s grace is a tsunami that will carry us away and deposit us in places we would not have anticipated — and all of it good. We analyze this carefully and say that we want our grace to be true and pure water, just like that tsunami, but we want it to be a placid …
And You Don’t Call Yourself
“A man can be gifted without being called and sent, but a man cannot be called and sent without being gifted. God supplies both the calling and the gifts to fulfil that calling” (Murray, How Sermons Work, p. 13).
Out of Our Hands Entirely
“We are afraid of grace getting carried away, and so we want to slap some conditions on it . . . Grace has a backbone and knows how to define itself. Grace is not the word that we are to use as the ‘open, sesame’ of the Church. Grace is not something we do. Grace …
What God Doesn’t Do Isn’t Done
“Supernatural work must be done by a supernatural power . . . This unction gives to the preacher liberty and enlargement of thought and soul — a freedom, fullness and direction of utterance that can be secured by no other process” (Olyott, Preaching That Gets Through, pp. 22-23)
The Ultimacy of Right Reason
I want to expand a bit on what I said about logic and the character and nature of God. First, the problem. If logic is external to God, and is something that He obeys or conforms to, then we are saying that there is another God, senior to Him, whose dictates He must somehow obey. …
An Earthy Solution
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) The Basket Case Chronicles #61 “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband” (1 Cor. …
Grace Is Not That Kind of Test
“Grace is one of the most difficult things in the world for sinners to grasp. And as soon as we realize that it is difficult, we turn the ‘grasping of it’ into a contest, giving those with the ‘right answer’ a ‘best in show’ award. But grace doesn’t follow our rules. Grace means that some …
A Scalpel, Not a Club
“Powerful preaching is like surgery. Under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, it locates, lances, and removes the infection of sin” (Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, p. 95).
God Is Who He Is
I am going to file this under Retractions, mostly because I don’t have a category called Complicated Retractions. This one has to do with the philosophical “schools of thought” called nominalism and realism. In brief, nominalism is the view that only particular things exist, with a general name (nomen) given to those particular things which …