Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Father of deliverance, Father of all salvation, we worship You now through the great name of Jesus Christ. When we were blind in our sin, You loved us. When we lived in a way that despised Your ongoing kindness, You showed mercy …
Also An Act of God
When disaster befalls a city, the prophet Amos tells us, the Lord is the one who has done it. What has happened to New Orleans this past week is not something that slipped past God, or somehow got away from Him. He is the divine author of all things, and this truly was an act …
What Faith Does
The Table of the Lord humbles the honest, comforts the distraught, forgives the repentant, nourishes the hungry, establishes the church, preaches the gospel, summons the world, and overwhelms the devil. And of course the Table as a mere set of physical objects does none of those things—any more than the Word of God, considered simply …
Thoughts on New Orleans
The events of the last week on the Gulf Coast have been a gradually unfolding, slow motion disaster. Every day appears to be worse, along with each new day causing the realization to sink in deeper — this is the kind of natural disaster that has not occurred in our nation within living memory. But …
Meat and Potatoes Blues
In the most recent Credenda on the blues, I made this comment in passing. “How are we to make sense of all this as Christians? The blues, just like everything else we try to think about, are not neutral. Nothing is ever neutral. So how are we to evaluate what we listen to? Should we …
Going South and North At the Same Time
In his wonderful book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton points out the tendency non-believers have to throw any available rock at the Christian faith, never mind that the rocks might not all be consistent with each other. He points out that infidels, for example, say that Christianity disparages women and children, but then they turn around to …
Our Priest, King and Prophet
Our Father, great God of heaven, we glorify You through Jesus Christ our Priest, King and Prophet. He is our Lord, and on this day He rose from the dead, making all things new. Because He remade the heavens and the earth, because He is the Lord of the new creation, it was only fitting …
From Darwin to Hitler
“This was a central characteristic of progressive thought in the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. From Darwin, who provided the scientific rationale for such racism, to Margaret Sanger and her ‘human weeds,’ to George Bernard Shaw and the eugenics craze, to Hitler’s final solution, progressives have a lot to answer for. …
Preaching A Tiny Christ
The apostle Paul resolved to know nothing but Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 1: 22-24). I grew up in a tradition that interpreted this as requiring a simple gospel message every Sunday. So every seven days, the faithful saints gathered, and heard a message explaining to them how they could become Christians. And then …
More Than Just Forgiveness
“John’s vision not only says that Christ’s blood is available to forgive all sinners from every part of the human race, but he also says that these individuals are more than forgiven — they are made kings and priests, and they shall reign on the earth. Enslaved blacks in the ante-bellum South who came to …