Resentment is one of the most confused and confusing sins that we commit. Another person has wronged you and hurt you, or you believe that he has, and so you store up bitterness in your heart. But this bitterness pollutes and eats away at your own soul, not the soul of the one who wronged …
And He Will Flee From You
The message today was on the right response when desire, lust, gotta-have-it-now, has you by the throat. The text does not just say, “resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Many Christians have felt ripped off by God because they did resist the devil, and then again some more, and then they resisted …
By Popular Request
In the comments in the previous post, there were a couple of requests for me to amplify just a tad. So here goes. The NPP wants to say that Second Temple Judaism was fundamentally a religion of grace, contra those folks who tend to see it as a first century version of the monkish merit-mongering …
Two Kinds of Blamelessness
In a recent conversation with a friend about the New Perspective on Paul, we were talking about the center of Sanders’ contribution to that school of thought, the point which N.T. Wright regards as “settled.” This is not to say that Wright agrees with Sanders on everything, of course, and you may insert all manner …
Straight Out of Tennessee Williams
This letter to the editor ran in response to some stuff in our local newspaper about Trinity Fest. My comments are interspersed. “Wilson neither honorable nor brave” This is a title calculated to mortally offend the kind of man that Keely Mix takes me to be. And if I were a strutting embodiment of the …
Faith Alone, Faith Always
The reason there is a crisis in Galatia is because the saints have given the time of day to a teacher or teachers they ought to have ignored. Paul brings this basic problem home to the Galatian believers in a very pointed way. O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey …
Idol Place
“If the desert is the place of demons, the city is the place of idols” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 54).
The Closing of the Islamic Mind
“Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could supply an antidote to the slow poison of Islamic obscurantism. The Ottoman interlude concealed and postponed the latent tension between the view of world history as the fulfillment of Islam and its triumph everywhere on the one hand, and the reality of the …
That, and Singing Through Your Nose
“The truth is that Dylan, like most of his generation, learned most of his folk music from records . . . But to folkies bewitched by the blues, roughness epitomized authenticity” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 212).
Aluminum Discipline
“We must beware of a too great reliance on a systematic reconstruction of the various references to discipline in the New Testament. matthew 18 is not a paint-by-numbers kits, and we should not assume that when we get to ‘stage two’ in a discipline process that we are at the second rung of a metal …