As you know, next Lord’s Day, we will be moving to two services. The first will be at 8:00 am and the second at 10:30. We will try that out for a few weeks, and it is possible that we will move them both back to 8:30 am and 11:00. Let us know what you …
Stones for Bread?
When we ask God for bread, will He give us a stone? No, of course not. And when He has promised us bread, and we asked because of that promise, will that change anything? Still less. And when He has promised the bread of Christ, offered to every sinner who understands he needs salvation from …
Gerrit DeBoer, R.I.P.
One of the last times I visited with Gary, if not the last time, he was showing me a model of his “more efficient” wind generator. He was an industrious and hardworking man his entire life, and he was seeking to be fruitful to the very end of his life. God gave him that great …
Decorating Camels
I have begun to work my way through Gregory Boyd’s book, The Myth of a Christian Nation. This is not something I would ordinarily do unless I had some higher, selfless, and altruistic reason for it, that reason being an opportunity to fisk it here. So, here we go. The Introduction tells how the book …
John Wesley’s Hatband
In the second section of his first chapter, Hart takes “emotional and rhetorical opportunism” to task, and does so ably. He is not fond of the “triumphalistic atheist” who declares immediately that the “materialist creed has been vindicated” (p. 7) by natural disasters such as the Asian tsunami. “But the alacrity with which some seize …
So Don’t Be a Food Fusser
“The feet-on-the-stove stance of this book is a deliberate attempt to cure myself, and anyone else who will listen, of the nasty habit of worrying the world to pieces like a terrier with a rag . . . If some true believer in the gospel of haste comes along and asks us why we are …
Those Who Oppose
The servant of God must not be a striver, and yet he must correct the obstinate and proud. Paul tells Timothy that he must be prepared to meekly instruct those who oppose themselves (2 Tim. 2:25). The word here is antidiatithemai, and describes those who set themselves up in opposition. This is not because they …
And There I Abide
“Brethren, because I cannot think, I hide behind a doctrine which God has thought out for me; and because I cannot invent a hypothesis, I rest my soul on a self-evident fact; and because I cannot even be consistent with myself, I get behind the plain teaching of the text, and there I abide” (Charles …
Although That Understanding Is Coming Back
“Ritual sex and human sacrifice are stolen moments of power over, and temporary relief from submission to. They are, we know by hindsight, a mimicry of divinity, but pagan man did not know that. He experienced it as power sharing, negotiating with the gods. To placate a god by burning his children on its altars …
Slip Out the Back
“At the very least, this system [of recreational dating] is as much a preparation for divorce as it is for marriage. Whenever the other person starts to wear a little thin, you just slip out the back, Jack” (Her Hand in Marriage, p. 11).