I am reading a book right now that promises to be enormously helpful — When Helping Hurts. Often poverty relief efforts are as well-intentioned as it gets, but the results unfortunately do not match the intentions. This book understandably begins with the biblical mandate to see the connection between the gospel and actually changing the …
Become Less to Matter More
For reasons I don’t need to go into here, I have been mulling this last week on godly ambition, and the desire to make a difference in the world. For, of course, there is a dangerous counterfeit here. Wanting to change the world is one of the most predictable and worldly things we can do. …
Lungs Full of Mountain Air
Living in community means that the very nature of the case requires that we submit to demands from outside our selves. These demands encompass every aspect of our lives, and this means that our use of money is included. No man is an island, as Donne put it, and so we don’t have the right …
Confusions About Economic Freedom
I have written many times that free markets depend on free men, and free men are not to be had apart from the gospel. Another way of putting this is that men who are slaves to sin will not be able to create or sustain any kind of significant liberty anywhere else. Freedom from sin …
Two Kinds of Mammon Folly
There are two kinds of folly when it comes to our attitudes toward money and the poor. The first is the only one that is usually recognized — the supercilious “let them eat cake” attitude. Scripture clearly identifies this as a very basic folly. But the other is also very common, and loves to robe …
Freedom From and Freedom To
In a recent post responding to William Cavanaugh, I said a few things about some current misapplications of the Pauline definition of freedom. True freedom is the freedom to obey God, and no one is truly, ultimately free without that freedom. Amen. A slave who has it is Christ’s freedman, and ought not to worry …
A Thumbnail Statement on the Trinity
Just a quick thumbnail statement on the Trinity. As Thomas Adams once said, “It is rashness to search, godliness to believe, safeness to preach, and eternal blessedness to know the Trinity.” A great deal of practical confusion exists concerning our relationship to our Triune God. Of course, Christians believe in the Trinity — but they …
Running on All Pauline Cylinders
I am listening to Ken Myers’ interview of William Cavanaugh on Mars Hill Audio. I get lots of book purchase ideas from listening to Ken’s stuff, and so I commend it to you. This interview with Cavanaugh was concerning his book Being Consumed, a book I have already read and reviewed here. But listening to …
Never Want Wherewithal
In my Lord’s Day readings, I came across two comments on generosity and giving that I thought would be edifying to pass on. “Then they took them, and had them to Mount Charity, where they shewed them a man that had a bundle of cloth lying before him, out of which he cut coats and …
Sell the Car, Champ
Let me begin with a definition of zero-sum thinking with regard to wealth, which I have referred to in this space a number of times. Zero-sum thinking assumes (in unbelief) that the amount of available blessings is necessarily fixed, and that it therefore follows that if one man gets a larger piece of the pie, …