“But all preachers must also be historians in some sense, because we preach from the Bible, most of which is sacred history. The center of our faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event in history. When a professional historian sidles up to me and says that the event did not happen, it doesn’t …
Moralism Without A Cross
“Whenever religious teaching is detached from the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, it always degenerates into a vapid moralism. And when husbands instruct their wives without the framework of the atonement shaping their thinking, their instruction will exhibit only a pious cast of mind with the edges of each word smudged and blurred” (Federal …
Inescapable
“A man who is the head of his wife is preaching all day about Christ and the Church — his obedience or disobedience will determine whether his preaching is full of lies or not, but the very nature of his relation to his wife means that he is preaching, like it or not” (Federal Husband, …
Trinitarian Submission
“In our modern egalitarian world, submission is always seen as a form of losing or of being inferior in some way. But we fall into this error because we no longer think in a trinitarian fashion. Submission is seen as entailing inferiority because we do not understand the deity of Christ and His full submission …
Imitative Loving
“This means that our theology of Christ’s love will be determinative of how a Christian wife is loved. How a man understands ultimate covenant loving will settle how he sets about covenantal loving. How he understands the thing to be imitated will determine how and what he imitates” (Federal Husband, p. 10).
Bob’s Sunshine Bank
“Among the many words which our century has trashed (words like awesome and gay), this word federal most certainly heads the list. The word makes us think of big, centralized things, things that make a collectivist’s heart feel warm and cozy. We slap the word on institutions so little old ladies will deposit their money …
Unprovoked
“Anyone who undertakes to add to the number of modern books on marriage had better have some good reason. This is particularly true if the author in question is doing it for the second time and all apparently unprovoked. One would think our interest in marriage books would be waning by this time; like the …
Listen
“A few verses later, he says it again. ‘Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings: and the years of thy life shall be many’ (Prov. 4:10). And since his son was looking out the window, apparently with some kind of old covenant attention-deficit problem, just a few verses later, he says it once again. …
Tight Temple Quarters
“Another such god is the god of the republicans and democrats–the god of civic religion and prayer breakfasts. This god would have been happily served by a pragmatic pagan like Cicero. This is the god to whom some want to offer prayer in the government schools. Such prayers would not get past the little two-foot …
Gods of Soft Counsel
“Our culture swarms with little gods, like the frogs of Egypt. But the gods of Egypt do have the advantage of being relatively easy to identify. They are gods of antithesis. The gods of synthesis, the gods of gray and off-white, the gods which sidle up next to you in order to whisper devotional encouragements …