“The faithful steward will make himself familiar with all the contents of his larder. The larder of Holy Scripture is so extensive, that even a life-time’s arduous study will not fully disclose either its riches or its variety . . . .The systematic preaching of the Word is impossible without the systematic study of it …
Women and the Prophet
“Even as a child growing up in Egypt, I chafed at the way Muslim society treated women. As I studied the Quran and Islamic history, I could see how the many restrictions placed upon women came directly from Muhammad himself. Again, this put me in a position of wondering whether the true God of heaven …
Hypocrisy of the Heart
“Such artists strained after emotions not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel. This, of course, is one of the sources of sentimentality; it is the tribute that vanity pays to compassion” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 119).
Sour Gifts
“Many men have excellent gifts, but they are in such sour, vinegary spirits that they are of little or no use in church and commonwealth” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 28).
Three Winter Quilts
Here is an inchoate thought or two related to at least one blessing that has come out of the emergent church movement. I don’t have anything really specific yet, but I think there really is something to this. Summarize it this way: conservatives have a talent for taking over edginess. I’ll talk about the emergent …
New Wine
We have seen that there are a series of five conflicts at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. We come now to consider the second and third of them. As you recall, the first concerned the authority of Christ to forgive the sins of the paralytic. We come here to the problem of associating with disreputable …
American Elizabethans
[Speaking of Nashe] “Its appeal is almost entirely to that taste for happy extravagance in language and triumphant impudence of tone, which the Elizabethans have, perhaps, bequeathed rather to their American than to their English descendants” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 412).
The One Who Trembles to Hear Need Not Tremble in Declaring
“Indeed, I am persuaded that the more the preacher has ‘trembled’ at God’s Word himself (e.g. Ezra 9:4,10:3; Is. 66:2,5), and felt its authority upon his conscience and in his life, the more he will be able to preach it with authority to others . . . True preaching is never stale or dull or …
Love at the Center
“Jesus and Muhammad describe the nature of God in very different ways—for Jesus, God is a loving father; for Muhammad, Allah is a demanding master. This description sets the tone regarding love for all their other relationships” (Mark Gabriel, Jesus and Muhammad, p. 151).
Doublethink
“Doublethink—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas and assent to both—is with us too, and will remain so as long as we have large bureaucracies that claim to act for our own good while pursuing their own institutional interests” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 112).