Yesterday, I began a short series of sermons on Desire, Envy, Competition, and Ambition. The message yesterday was Desire Runs Deep.
In Which We Have All Majored
We come now to the words from which we derive the name of our little study — hamartiology, the study of sin, in which all of us have majored. Those words are hamartano and hamartia respectively. They are used so often in the New Testament that we will have to take our time in order …
So Stand Straight
“We do not go into the pulpit to slouch about, and to look free and easy, but we go there upon very solemns business, and our posture should be such as becomes our mission” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 281).
Ressentiment
“The twisted path from humanism’s soaring tributes in honor of the human divinity to the consequences of modern humanitarianism is best explained by the concept of ressentiment. When Nietzsche wrote his celebrated attack on Christianity, he transliterated this word from the French because he could find no German equivalent . . . When Scheler’s book …
Use the Right Standard
“Whenever we take the measure and weight of any man, we must be sure to use the canons and balances of heaven” (For Kirk and Covenant, p. 89).
The Font of Lasting Generosity
Schneider’s next chapter undertakes the very important task of reconciling two disparate strands of teaching in the gospels. He does well with this task too. First we find the well-known demands of an all-or-nothing discipleship. “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke …
Every Christian is Christopher
We have been working through the statement of the Westminster Confession on the blessings that attend a right observance of the Lord’s Supper. We come now to the fourth, which is our “further engagement in and to all duties which [we] owe unto Him.” This is another way of saying that by partaking of this …
Unity Unattended
In the book of Ephesians (4:3), Paul tells us that we should endeavor to the keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. He tells us to endeavor to do this because if we don’t, unity is not the kind of thing that can be put on auto-pilot. Unity unattended is disunity …
Jesus and Halliburton
I enjoyed Schneider’s next chapter, but don’t have a lot to say about it. That is probably because he is interacting with the claim of “radical Christianity” that Jesus completely identified with the poor in His Incarnation, a claim that I tend to take less seriously than Schneider does. To insist that Christ was impoverished …
When Ignorance Is a Sin
The word amathes means unlearned, and it is used once in the New Testament. Peter is talking about how the apostle Paul is sometimes difficult to understand. This means that there are things in his letters which unstable and unlearned people twist to their own destruction (2 Pet. 3:16). Here the problem is obviously not …