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 …
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 …