“And believe me, the lordship of Jesus over everything will always have opprobrium heaped on it. Who wants to be a nutter? Keep it respectable, champ. Keep your head down. Read those books, certainly. Enjoy them in your study, friend. No harm in that, but don’t go to extremes. Keep your head down. The only …
And Dale Did a Good Job
“Redemptive-historical preaching, as commended by many today . . . requires preachers to act as though the first three chapters of Ephesians had been written by the apostle Paul and the last three chapters contributed by Dale Carnegie” (Empires of Dirt, p. 255).
Getting Evangelicals Born Again
“The proclamation of grace without an actual movement of the Spirit’s grace is nothing but tiny works, cerebral works, the work of sitting on your butt listening to sermons about it . . . The experience of grace is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ actually saving people. Of course, we tell them about …
The True Law/Grace Divide
“For a legal heart, everything is law. For a gracious heart, everything is grace. When the Spirit is moving among a people, you do not stumble them by telling them how to love their wives, bring up their children, work hard at their jobs, and so on. No reason to snip out the last three …
There is a Narrative Arc Here
“The Church and the unbelieving culture are not two static realities that have to be balanced somehow, but are rather characters in a story. The Church and culture are not two pieces of furniture that have to be permanently arranged in accordance with the laws of feng shui (Empires of Dirt, p. 249).
Coming, Not Going
“God cannot be worshiped rightly in any culture without that worship challenging and dislocating all idolatries. To focus on the right worship of God is to declare war, it is to throw down the gauntlet. This is because when we worship God rightly, we have ascended into the heavenly places in order to glorify the …
Let Us Be Frank
“Anybody who thinks that the secularists don’t guard their prize institutions ferociously is being naïve. But I understand what they are doing—they have to guard them because a large number of Christians have them under siege” (Empires of Dirt, p. 246).
Learning to Cycle
“There is a linear aspect to history, and there is a cyclic aspect to it. The linear aspect is fundamental, and the cycles are subordinate to that line. The line, overall, is going up, which means that each repeated cycle represents a new advance—we are better off at the end of the tenth cycle than …
Very Sad, Really
“An airplane in the construction hanger at Boeing does not fly nearly so well as an airplane in the sky, captured by the secularist jihadis, who are going to crash it into the skyscraper of civilization to the defiant cry of ‘Orgasm Akbar!’ Sometimes my illustrations just take on a life of their own. Nothing …
And Some in Aramaic
“Now I don’t mean to indicate that the Christian faith is devoid of self-righteous fussers. Alack and alas! But at least our fussers have actually no excuse. They have memorized the Heidelberg Catechism in the original Greek, and so they should know” (Empires of Dirt, p. 237).