One of the most exasperating features of emergent church thinking is the constant tendency to set propositional statements over against narrative. Abandoning propositions, they are trying to recover the idea of pastor as story-teller. As I have pointed out before, this is like abandoning verbs and nouns in favor of sentences, or lumber for houses. …
The Centrality of Peripherals
Incarnation trumps abstraction. The things we do every day, the things we do all the time, matter to us far more than those things we might think (or say) are crucial elements in our worldview. This explains, among other things, why the worship wars go the way they do in church. Someone could attend our …
Godly Cover Ups
One of Jane Austen’s characters (somewhere) says that honesty is a greatly over-rated virtue. Of course we should not take this as a basis for justifying ungodly lies or other forms of unrighteous deceit. But at the same time, we should recognize that within the Church there are a number of verbal sins which are …
Covenant Renewal Worship
As we change our order of worship, we need to be mindful of the fact that we do not change for the sake of change — we are not merely rearranging the furniture to keep from becoming bored. That is a mentality that comes from restless spirits, who think that spontaneity is the justification of …
Marriage As Manifest Glory XXXVII
Introduction What does it mean to be pro-marriage or pro-family, or pro-life? In common parlance, we know what such phrases refer to but even here we must be careful. The basic Christian duty is to be pro-God, and align everything else in accordance with this. When we absolutize things like “life,” “marriage,” or “family,” we …
Look At This
Some of you may be interested in the work and ministry of Steve Beck, found here. But the thing I wanted to encourage you to look at is a DVD he recently put together that walks you step by step, mouse click to mouse click, in the making and selling of recordings. You can find …
Idleness and Gossip
Everyone knows that one of the sins of the tongue is gossip, but we are sometimes vague about what actually constitutes the sin. Gossip is not a sin that consists of simply passing on information. Saying something like, “Did you hear that Susan is engaged now?” is not gossip. Gossip is the sin of passing …
He Just Likes to Dance
In one of the talks I give on marriage, I use an example of the sin I call “pleading the dictionary.” This is where a husband uses one or more of the flexible features of human language to get his dig in, and then, when challenged, he retreats to “plead the dictionary.” He says something …
Another Source of Strife
Another source of strife is an inability to see a disagreement from the other’s point of view. An ability to do this is not a concession that this other point of view is correct, but it does show the flexibility of heart that is necessary for avoidance of intractable strife. Paul tells us that we …
Can Faith Be Bronzed?
Every word which men speak or hear in worship must either renew that word or cheapen it. God has determined to sanctify us through His Word, and therefore, because of our sinful inclinations, we tend to invent various shifts and devices in a vain attempt to keep this sanctification from happening. Of course, overt denial …