“What is distinctive about the contest between myth and gospel, therefore, is that myth is fragile and survives only when its premises are accepted uncritically, while the gospel can be trashed and betrayed and corrupted almost beyond recognition without fatally compromising its inherent demythologizing power. Time and again, the gospel has been turned into a …
A Fourth Decade of Psalms/Psalm 40
Introduction: While all the psalms are messianic, this is a great and glorious messianic psalm. The New Testament plainly declares it to have been fulfilled in Christ, and, given this, we learn a great deal about what Jesus came to accomplish. The Text: “I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and …
I Have Not Hid Your Righteousness
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! I waited patiently for God; He stooped and heard my cry. He lifted me from a horrible pit; He lifted me from miry clay, He put my feet on His own rock, And set my feet in His own path. A glorious …
Always Bright and Shiny
We wrestle not against flesh and blood, St. Paul tells us, but rather against principalities and powers. These principalities have an embodiment and manifestation in the worldly power structures that surround us, and it is therefore a central responsibility of ours to assemble in worship of the triune God. This is because worship of Almighty …
Gracious Eating and Drinking
The Lord’s Supper is made up of participles—eating and drinking. The Lord’s Supper is not made up of material elements—bread and wine. The bread and wine are a necessary part of it, certainly, but the partaking of Christ happens in the action, motivated by evangelical faith. But the common life, the koinonia, the partaking together, …
That Same Table
Jesus made Himself known to the disciples at Emmaus in the breaking of the bread. When they returned to Jerusalem, they made a particular point about relating this aspect of the story. Now we know that the Lord deals with us in this Supper, but we sometimes assume that the only sins He deals with …
Neither Dead Works Nor Dead Faith
Faith is a gift of God, lest any man should boast. With and in this faith, all of life is sacramental, and the two sacraments proper are clear and unobstructed meetings with God in Christ. But without faith, everything becomes blurry, and religion is reduced in principle to shamanism. The faith that God gives is …
Making the World Safe for Fornication
“Peggy Noonan concluded after looking at public policy crusades during the twentieth century, that the real goal of every liberal movement is to ‘make the world safe for fornication.’ Get enough fornication going and you get a lot of people too frightened to approach God because of their guilt . . . As with the …
Except What It Means
“Young people today are desperately trying to vandalize the image of God that they carry about, despite themselves, in their bodies. God gave long hair to women as a glory and a covering — showing that the Lord is near — and yet bewildered, unprotected, and lost women now cut their hair with hedge clippers …
The Blinders of Myth
“Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and gospel . . . Myth — and the primitive religious cosmology it narrates — mutes the victim’s voice. It fills the eyes and nose with incense and the ears with incantations. When the myth is firmly in place, even those closest to the victims, the ones …