As I mentioned before, love is what makes a Christian community grow. Community is like a garden, and gardens contain many growing, beautiful things. But community is also the garden in which grumbles grow. Since the fall of Adam, there has never been a garden without weeds, and this is because our hearts are in …
A Cabin by a Pristine Lake
Love is what makes a Christian community grow—people are attracted to it. They gravitate to the fellowship, to the teaching of the Word, to the worship of God, and to the community that all this necessarily engenders. But precisely because love makes a community grow, so also a community growing makes love harder. It is …
Loving the Truth in Person
Either you love God and His people, or you don’t love God and His people. There really is no third way. The two great commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor. Loving your neighbor includes those who come to the Table with you here every week; it means loving your fellow church …
Death as a Way of Life
When a person drifts in the context of a sound and healthy church—a church in which very many people are not drifting, but are being nourished and fed—the reason that person is drifting is the direct result of not dealing with sin. And in the Scriptures, dealing with sin is not the same thing as …
When Sin Signs a Lease
Drifting away from soundness in the faith is always the result of a peace treaty of some sort. The Bible teaches us that in this world we must always deal with sin outside us in the world and sin within us. In that familiar triad that we call the world, the flesh, and the devil, …
Faith as Screen
When Christians drift away from a sound understanding of the faith, it usually begins first with them drifting away from what counts as understanding anything at all. If you believed the earth was flat, that wouldn’t make it flat. More surprisingly perhaps, if you believe it to be round, that doesn’t make it round. If …
Coolshame
Archimedes famously once said “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” If the devil were to go in for such practical mechanics, where would he stand, what lever would he use, if he wanted to move a Christian? We are talking what it means to not …
Lest We Drift
The church is a wooded island, and it produces three kinds of wood. The first would be the living grove, what makes the island an inviting place, lush and green. The second would be the dead wood, that which is not growing itself but remains in place, hindering the growth of the rest. And the …
Slow Drift
As we have noted before, there is a distinct sociological difference between a sect and a church. Both a sect and a church can be orthodox and Christian, but they necessarily have different pastoral challenges. A sect has tighter discipline, and disciplines over more things, and is in the very nature of the case smaller …
A Mind To
We all know that character, and moods, and particular virtues and vices are characteristic of individuals. But they are also characteristic of groups of people—generations, tribes, nations, churches. You know what it is like to travel around our nation, finding that one part of the country is particularly friendly, while another is particularly industrious, and …