Letter to the Editor: You and Toby got into a bit of a tiff with the Warhorn Media guys last year, which finally settled down when you posted "On Leaving a Church Over Masks." Unfortunately, ...
Letters in Early October
So Don’t Mess It Up
“Remember, wealth is a blessing, and what you do with it matters. What you do with wealth will either keep it a compounding blessing, or it will wreck everything. But when it is first poured out on you, it is a blessing.”
Ploductivity, p. 51
Imitative Builders
“When the Spirit moves among God’s people, they start to build. This is because they are imitating Him, and He is building us. We are living stones. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to be doing the work we are doing.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, pp. 61-62
Like a Tabloid Tarantula
Introduction: "Let heads of those who hem me inBe overwhelmed by their own lies . . ." Psalm 140, Cantus Christi An adage is a phrase that contains ...
Audio Reading of Post
Impersonal Laws Do Nothing
“We are accustomed to think about the world in quasi-Deistic terms. Sure, God made everything some time long ago, but things happen now because of impersonal natural laws, right? Gravity pulls things to the floor, centrifugal force pulls them out to the edges, and the law of supply and demand determines the cost of zippers. But the biblical doctrine is actually one of creation and ongoing providence. All of it is personal.”
Ploductivity, p. 49
Name Against Name
“In Deuteronomy, the people of God were told to exterminate the Canaanites. This was a God-ordained ethnic cleansing. Particularly they were to go after the idolatrous worship, and note this—and ‘destroy the names of them out of that place’ (Dt. 12:3). But nature abhors a vacuum even here, and this was done so that the name of God might be established in the land (Dt. 12:5). God was going to select a place to put His name.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 59
Okay, Eight More
Organized Poverty
“Grinding poverty can certainly come about through natural disasters—famines and so on—but the thing we really need to be on guard against is organized and coercive poverty, by which I mean socialism.”
Ploductivity, p. 48
Open Carry in Worship
“So we worship in a fortress. But the metaphor should never run away with us. This does not mean we should walk around in here like we were an armed garrison—open carry in worship would make a liturgical statement, one that we don’t want to make. That statement would be that we consider all the others here to be potential enemies, not brothers and sisters. We are in the sanctuary, not in an Old West saloon. Concealed carry is different, and no more a problem that having a church building with a sprinkler system installed in case of fire. We would not be dubious about open carry at church because we were afraid of guns—far from it. The problem is liturgical, not practical. This is a secure fortress, and so we never want to install our anxieties into the liturgy. Here we are foreshadowing the time when we hang the trumpet in the hall, and study war no more (Is. 2:2-6).”
Let the Stones Cry Out, pp. 57-58
File This One Away
“It is a strange thing to say, but when the number of any public body exceeds that of forty or fifty, the whole assembly has an element of joyous childhood in it, and each member revives at times the glad, mischievous nature of his schoolboy days.”
Arthur Helps, as quoted in Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 139