Letter to the Editor: Re: Your comments on Rom 13. This is really beneath you, Doug. It's like you tries to jam as many fallacies into two paragraphs as you could manage. 1. Genetic fallacy. ...
The Worth of Souls
“There is a power which lies at the center of all success in preaching, and whose influence reaches out to the circumference, and is essential everywhere . . . Where it is largely present it is wonderful how many deficiencies count for nothing . . . Without this power preaching is almost sure to become either a struggle of ambition or burden of routine. With it preaching is an ever fresh delight. The power is the value of the human soul, felt by the preacher, and inspiring all his work.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 183
That Tenacious Bell Curve
“Everywhere the human race goes, it drags a bell curve around with it . . . one half of all medical doctors graduated in the lower half of their class, right?”
Ploductivity, p. 98
Testimony or Nothing
“The philosophers Hume and Kant, in a frenzy of high conceit, helped to banish ‘testimony’ from the modern world as a reliable source of knowledge. We want an idolatrous way of knowing that what we think is indubitable. But we are finite, and so it has to be testimony or nothing. Jesus is Lord, so it is testify and live or languish and die . . . Jesus is under your breastbone and throughout the congregation. That is what we are talking about . . . If He has no testimony concerning us, then we can have no testimony concerning Him.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 124
Escaping the Cult of Nice
Introduction: I want to begin by saying that evangelicals really are nice, and that this is their problem. The second thing to say is that the top strata of the evangelical leadership elite ...
Real Forgiveness
Sermon Video Introduction: Everyone knows that the Christian faith revolves around the forgiveness of sins. But because there is a gospel logic involved in it that eludes every form of carnal ...
Should Have Said “When”
“This is the sinful pattern. God gives wealth, and man takes credit for it himself. If someone else comes along later and blames man for creating all this wealth, and demands that we have ourselves a little ‘social justice’ around here, he is just creating an extra layer of sedimentary silliness. And by this point, we don’t need any extra layers of silliness.”
Ploductivity, p. 96
Preaching to the Telos
“The service is not a zero-sum game, where the sacrament must give way to the Word or vice versa. Word and sacrament go together the way cooking and eating do. Services with great preaching and no sacrament are like celebrity chef television shows, where a lot of good food is prepared but not eaten. And sacramentalists are the ecclesiastical equivalent of a raw foods movement, where you come to church to get your puny carrot.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 122
So Get Cracking
The Primacy of Truth
“To claim that men should believe what we teach them because we teach it to them, and not because they see it to be true, is to assume a place which God does not give us and men will not acknowledge for us.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 178