Lord and Father, God and Savior, we know that gratitude in the heart needs opportunities for ritual expression, and we thank You for this chance to show our thanks to You. Father, we thank You that the Sabbath is not a fast day, but rather a feast day. We thank You that we have the …
Right Out of Central Casting
This is a covenant table. God has established Jesus Christ as the Lord of the covenant table, and one of the central features of covenant living is the feature of blessings and curses. The sinful mind and the foolish heart war against this. But God is not mocked—men reap what they sow. Of course God …
Thou Art the Potter
Remember that the Lord makes all things new, and this includes us. We come to worship the Lord, not to fashion ourselves according to what we think He might want. We come to worship the Lord, not to assume that we need not change at all. In worship, we present ourselves to God, as clay …
Not an Aberration
“Putting all this together, we might surmise that Islamic terrorism, though most immediately arising from the eighteenth-century Wahhabi movement and therefore a divergent stream of Islam, is in continuity with Islam as a whole” (Peter Leithart, Mirror of Christendom, p. 7).
The Demand for Originality
“The demand for ‘originality’—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time ” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 121).
The Jackhammer of God
“If our hearts were a slab of concrete, and we wanted to keep them that way, our desire to have them caressed with a feather duster would exhibit no love of tenderness, but rather the contrary. The one who really wanted a tender heart would be calling for the jackhammer. Hard words, hard teaching, are …
Psalter, Claymore and Bagpipes
The first chapter of The God Delusion is divided into two sections. The first section is entitled “Deserved Respect,” and talks about scientists like Einstein, Hawking, and others who use religious terminology to talk about the whoa-factor when it comes to just how cool the universe actually is. It is beyond dispute that lots of …
Johnnie, M’Boy
The book I have been commenting (Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry) on makes it very clear that the imputation of the active obedience of Christ (which I hold) has to be considered a sine qua non of Reformed orthodoxy concerning justification (which I don’t hold). If you would like to read a very short article …
Kind of Tacky to Point Out
In Chapter Two of Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry, David VanDrunen continues to sound the alarm. The doctrine of justification is “under fire” (p. 25), being attacked (p. 25), there are “three distinct lines of attack” (p. 26), and he concludes that “justification is indeed under attack” (p. 57). He desires to describe the views …
Breaking a Bad Habit
For many centuries, the Church has been cultivating the bad habit of seeing this time of communion a time of introspection. But if there is anything that is a barrier to communion, it is the self-absorption that we have come to associate with this meal. So, as you come, do not curl up into a …