One of the most difficult things for us to do is the task of locating sin properly. One common mistake, one that we have addressed a number of times before, is the mistake of locating sin in stuff. This mistake thinks that sin must be resident in material things—in sex, in alcohol, in refined sugar, …
Ninth Commandment Issues
Okay, please bear with me for a moment — I have a string of quotations, and with some answers and responses from me interspersed. First, from his blog, Lane asks me this question: “I know, I know, this post comes from the self-proclaimed Fully Documented Anonymous Attack Blog, or FDAAB for short. You all will …
Preaching in the Graveyard
“Remember, you are not sent to whiten tombs, but to open them” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 314).
Scotch, Hotch, and Potch
Lane has taken a moment to answer my question here, and so I guess it is now my turn to respond. This is the way the controversy is framed by our opponents, and there are some basic structural problems with it. They say that if you want to affirm the gospel in the way our …
Lost Fire
“There is, no doubt, such a thing as feeding the brain at the expense of the heart, and many a man in his aspirations to be literary has rather qualified himself to write reviews than to preach sermons. A quaint evangelist was wont to say that Christ hung crucified beneath Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It …
So Spit on Your Hands, and Throw Your Necktie Over Your Shoulder
“If we are not zealous, neither will they be. It is not in the order of nature that rivers should run uphill, and it does not often happen that zeal rises from the pew to the pulpit” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 306).
A Reformed Mead Hall
In my previous Auburn Avenue post, which had to do with the concept of merit, a good discussion broke out. But in the course of the comments a couple stray points were raised near the end that I really wanted to get Lane’s response on. And because the recently re-published work of Robert Rollock had …
So Put Food on the Table, Man!
“Dogs often fight because the supply of bones is scanty, and congregations frequently quarrel becaue they do not get sufficient spiritual meat to keep them happy and peaceful. The ostensible ground of dissatisfaction may be something else, but nine times out of ten deficiency in their rations is at the bottom of mutinies which occur …
And Throwing Elbows
Yesterday the sermon was on competition.
Unintended Consequences
In the recent posts about global justice and the related microcosm issue of help for panhandlers, one of the points I have sought to make is that swell intentions are not even close to good enough. Here is another example of that principle, a little closer to home. In the latest Atlantic Monthly there is …