Sermon Video Introduction: If Satan could successfully get us all to believe just one lie, what would that lie be? Is there an aboriginal lie, one that rests at the root of every twisted thought ...
Christ the Friend of Sinners
That Little Lizard Self Inside
Introduction: I want you to work with me on a thought experiment, and it is a thought experiment with two constituent parts. Weighed rightly, this leads naturally to a consideration of real gospel, permeated throughout with real grace. The first thing is that with this imaginary humanity that I am about to construct—in the second …
Audio Reading of Post
John Piper and the Fire in the Attic
Introduction: The best book of devotional theology I have ever read was God is the Gospel by John Piper. The first time I read it, as soon as I was done, I went back to the first page and started ...
These Vast Reservoirs of Guilt
Introduction: Along with Darwin and Marx, Sigmund Freud was one of the great shapers of the modern world. This was not exactly a stellar accomplishment when we consider the inchoate shapelessness of ...
Audio Reading of Post
Blood, Sap, and Salt
Sermon Video Introduction: As we look at the state of the culture around us, we sometimes feel like we are locked in the graduate school of sin, in what appears to be some kind of demented calculus ...
Like Taking a Header Into the River to Get Out of Some Drizzle
Introduction: So it seems to me that we are really in it now. The exact contents of "it" have yet to be revealed but, whatever "it" is, we are in it. I am not making any specific predictions, ...
Audio Reading of Post
Unforgiven Sin as the Key to Understanding Modern Politics
Introduction: Our central political problem today is that nobody has any idea of how to drain the vast reservoir of guilt that has been slowly and steadily growing for the last half century or so. It is now a massive reservoir, and all of us are living downstream from the towering dam of our constitutional …
Audio Reading of Post
Cold Law, Hot Gospel
Introduction: The law of God is like math. It doesn’t care about anybody’s hurt feelings. It is straight, and hard, and cold, and altogether righteous. But at the same time, when this cold, very cold law is resurrected in the body of Christ back from the darkness of the tomb, it comes to us as …
Mere Gospel
Introduction: When it comes to how we live our lives, making our day-to-day choices, the world only becomes a tangled and complicated place if we are drifting lazily into a dark confusion wrought by sin. Think about it for a moment. Keep it simple. There are only two kinds of people in the world—sons of …
Complicity and Crucifixion
Introduction: In the aftermath of Monday’s post on Rachael Denhollander, when my Twitter feed filled up with the customary vitriol, I thought that two things really had to be done. The first is that we need to explain and understand the depth of this animus, which can only be accounted for in terms of complicity, …