“There may be some commotion as a result, but cowardice in the pulpit has never been anointed by God” (Mother Kirk, p. 237).
Christ Hidden in Your Calling
Yesterday I preached on the importance of seeing Christ in your vocational call. We need to learn how to see Christ giving to us through the vocational work of others, and we need to learn how to see Christ giving to others by means of our work. You can listen to it here.
King David Returns
Jesus comes now to the outskirts of the City of David, and does so in all authority. He is the Son of David, arrived to claim His inheritance. Bartimaeus has set the stage for this by calling upon Jesus as the Son of David, and Mark emphasizes the point by how he cites the praises …
The Bane of Clever Preachers
“The devil is a greater scholar than you, and a nimbler disputant; he can ‘transform himself into an angel of light’ to deceive. He will get within you and trip up your heels before you are aware; he will play the juggler with you undiscerned, and cheat you of your faith and innocency, and you …
Not Called Limousine Liberals for Nothing
“The first duty of the modern intellectual, wrote George Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls..’ Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that mesmerized the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them from accepting the most obvious and evident truths …
The Devil’s Stragglers
“For example, the biblical pattern of evangelism was not at all like our modern method of picking off the devil’s stragglers, but rather a pattern of bringing the good news to household after household” (Mother Kirk, p. 236).
Conflict with Christians
The latest round of slander against us has come up with a new one, or at least an old one expressed in a new way. This slander is the argument for the necessity of anonymity, for if our local critics identified themselves, so the thinking goes, we would send some deacons around to bust their …
Questions for Louisiana
Just a couple of brief comments. The last week has been revelatory on the Louisiana Presbytery front, to put it mildly. Now I can ask for clarifications all I want, and am unlikely to get them from any official source. Why should I? I am not a player in this, but I am a commentator. …
Scandals are Interchangeable
One of Girard’s conversation partners (Jean-Michel Oughourlian) says that it “is obvious that bringing to light the founding murder completely rules out any compromise with the principle of sacrifice” (Reader, p. 179). Well, no. Our task here is to point to some of the reasons why Girard falls into this either/or trap. “That is indeed …
Sinning Against Thoughtfulness
We are living in a generation of great upheaval and change. One of the results of this is that many Christians have found themselves in a slippery place, not knowing quite how to behave. As the gospel works through a culture, that culture is transformed, and many external cultural aids to godliness are developed. This …