“I don’t think that I’m a good Christian. I know I’m not. But even if I’m a bad one, I am one.” — Vox Day
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Saturday, January 12, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (41)
There’s a little something for almost
everybody in this week’s selection of proverbs: children, parents and seniors, alcoholics
and other people with out-of-control habits, and most especially their enablers.
Even the envious get a quick name-check.
Never let it be said that the Bible isn’t
practical …
Labels:
Discipline
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Self-Control
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Thirty Sayings
Friday, January 11, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: Does Your Building Matter?
In which our regular
writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: I’m prowling
the Internet, as is my wont, and encountering discussion on the subject of
whether a church building can impede one’s efforts to grow a local church. Take
for example this meditation, from Abby Stocker at Christianity Today:
“Our worship spaces matter. The music, preaching, and
community obviously influence our church experience, but building styles also
communicate something to the congregation about what is proper in worship. A
central stage outfitted with a drumset probably means the music will be
emotional and modern. Feel free to wave your hands, dance, however the Spirit
leads you. Kneelers will probably be dedicated to congregational, possibly liturgical,
prayer. Space for a mosh pit signifies ... you’re probably not at, say, a small
intimate gathering based primarily on discussion of a text.”
So here we are, left to consider how the apostle Paul might
have felt about a mosh pit. Immanuel Can, please help me out here.
Labels:
Building Up
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Church
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Edification
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Recycling
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Dear Preacher: On Calvinism and Pride
This isn’t a complaint, just a reflection. My point is not
to object, but rather to expand the range of possible answers to a question you
raised a couple of weeks back. Would you bear with me while I do that?
You gave a message on the subject “The Sovereignty of God”. I agree that this is an essential topic and for the most
part, I found myself rejoicing in your take on it.
Labels:
Determinism
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Free Will
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Neo-Calvinism
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Recycling
Wednesday, January 09, 2019
Cheap Contrition and Hardened Hearts
“Rend your hearts and not your garments.”
There is a vast difference between the public displays of remorse we so regularly see in the media and actual repentance. The
former is purely external and serves the purpose of notifying one’s community
that the party subject to censure acknowledges his faux pas and hopes for a quick end to the unpleasantness of public
disapproval so he can return to his former way of doing business as
expeditiously as possible.
The latter is a matter of the heart before God.
Labels:
Forgiveness
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Joel
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Luke
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Repentance
Tuesday, January 08, 2019
Top 10 Posts of 2018
Lots of things happened in 2018. Billy Graham went to be with the Lord. April and May were record high-traffic months for the blog, as you can see from the number of posts they placed in our annual Top 10. Our readers continued to show interest in how the church ought to deal with people who claim to be
Christians but live sexually immoral lives, in the limitations of platform
ministry and in the ongoing effects of sins that can’t be undone.
To top it off, Canada’s most infamous public intellectual popped up in four of our ten
most-read posts, where he was both praised and critiqued, just as he was in
much of the secular media in 2018.
Labels:
Coming Untrue
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New Year
Monday, January 07, 2019
Anonymous Asks (21)
Anyone interested in the answer to this question may find it
useful to first read two previous posts in this series (numbers 18 and 20), which
concern finding the will of God with respect to marriage, college and careers. Much
of what the New Testament teaches about the “call” of God remains the same regardless
of what it is we may think we are being called to, so for the sake of those who
have read them already, I won’t recycle what I said there ad nauseum.
That said, scripture says a little more about the calling of
God with respect to missions than to other areas of life.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Great Commission
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Missionary Work
Sunday, January 06, 2019
Getting in the Driver’s Seat
“My people inquire of a piece of wood, and their walking staff gives them oracles.”
Idolatry is stupid. There, I said it.
It’s hard to imagine that any craftsman who ever put tools to wood, stone or metal really believed his artistic creations
had the power to determine outcomes or influence reality. These men could
hardly miss the fact that they were manufacturing a commodity. They were
marketing a commercial product, not consciously giving worldly form to some arcane power in
order to enable its devotees to focus their otherwise-diffuse religious
attention. And if idols are indeed merely human constructs, then worshiping
them is stupid.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons people do it.
Labels:
Demon Possession
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Demons
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Hosea
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Idolatry
Saturday, January 05, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (40)
In his short story “The Rich Boy”,
writer F. Scott Fitzgerald commented that “The very rich are different from you and me.” I never watched Dynasty or Dallas, and I’ve
been in few very rich people’s homes in the course of my life, but I’m pretty
sure he wasn’t wrong. Their conventions are different, their habits are
different, their way of thinking is different.
Even their temptations are different, but we can still learn something useful from considering them.
Our second set of five of Solomon’s “thirty
sayings” have a fair bit to do with power and money.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Money
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Proverbs
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Thirty Sayings
Friday, January 04, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: Two Promises
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Kingdom of Heaven
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Matthew
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Peter
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, January 03, 2019
Passing Thoughts on Fred Phelps
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Fred Phelps
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Homosexuality
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Judgment
Wednesday, January 02, 2019
Inbox: Thoughts in Progress (2)
God has dealt differently
with mankind during different eras of human history. That is not disputable. It
is evident to anyone who reads the Bible with anything more than cursory
attention.
How we think about this truth
is not one of those issues too heady and esoteric for anything but the rarefied
atmosphere of a roomful of full-time theologians. It determines how the average
believer reads the Old Testament, how he uses it, and the place he gives to it
in the Christian life. It may affect how he thinks about the nation of Israel. It
molds his expectations about the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ. It
certainly impacts how we read the Sermon on the Mount.
And it does all these things and others to us even if we have not consciously developed our theology with
respect to the various periods of human history.
Labels:
Covenant
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Dispensationalism
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Hebrews
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Inbox
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Jeremiah
Tuesday, January 01, 2019
The Dreaded New Year’s Day Post
Oh no. Not New Year’s Day again. Did I mention I hate writing “event” posts?
Yeah, I did. Well, here we are again anyway. It’s January 1 in a new calendar year, and
many among our fellow Christians are doing the same sort of reassessment almost everybody tends to
do this time of year. Those who aren’t are probably feeling better about
themselves than you and me, but we’ll salvage a bit of delusional cred,
at least in our own heads, by marking them down a notch or two for egregious lack of
self-awareness.
Hey, this “taking stock” stuff needs to be
done sometime, right? If there’s a better time to do it, I can’t think
when it might be.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Anonymous Asks (20)
I suspect the answer to this is “maybe”.
If that sounds a little fuzzy, it’s because life is like
that. If God has a specific, personal will for you about things like which university
you should attend or whether plumbing would be a better career choice than
medicine, he has not revealed it in his word, the Bible, which is where you and
I would normally look for guidance.
Further, the era in which we find ourselves has
a notable shortage of legitimate prophets, and experience shows that people who
talk a lot about “feeling led” to do this or that often end up making
questionable decisions. I can understand if that leaves followers of Christ looking around for clear direction about what to do.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Will of God
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Inbox: Thoughts in Progress (1)
The process of coming to grips with some of the great ideas in scripture and how best to understand them is far from easy or instant. More than a high IQ or a great memory, it takes desire, persistence and most of all ... time.
“Read, pay attention, pray, think and wait … and while you’re waiting, read some
more” is sound advice for the young Christian who wants to learn, but it’s a
difficult thing to sell to early 21st century Westerners who can ask Google a
trivia question on their phones and get what passes for an answer in nanoseconds.
If you want to know where the nearest pizza place is and how late it’s open, that’s
fine. But Google can’t tell you how to find oblique references to the Church in
the Minor Prophets when you’re doing your morning reading, or even if you
should expect to.
I mean, sometimes you’re not even at a stage where you’d know the right question to
ask it.
Labels:
Adam
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Covenant
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Dispensationalism
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Inbox
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Noah
Saturday, December 29, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (39)
I’m going to work my way through all thirty
of these longer “sayings” in chapters 22-24 of Proverbs, not least because
I’ve skipped so lightly over the last ten chapters, but also because, well,
they’re just that good.
There’s much more in each of these sayings than
I can possibly bring out in a few lines, and every one of them is worthy of
serious meditation.
Labels:
Diligence
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Thirty Sayings
Friday, December 28, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: All Greek If You Want It to Be
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In an article appropriately entitled “Premarital Sex: Is It A Sin Or Not?” Charles Toy of TheChristianLeft.org contends it’s … not:
“There is no passage of the Bible that references premarital sex as a sin against God. The association between sin and premarital sex is a new Christian idea. The only possible reference to premarital sex being a sin in the Bible is in the New Testament. This premise although, is generally dismissed by theologians because the Greek word πορνεία, or sexual immorality is commonly incorrectly translated into the English word fornication.”
Tom: In our earlier discussion, we discovered we agree that Mr. Toy is wrong about the
association between sin and premarital sex being a “new Christian idea”. It
actually goes back to Genesis. So his first point is inaccurate.
Labels:
Interpretation
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Premarital Sex
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Recycling
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Self-Controlled or Self-Condemned
A few years ago, I had several Facebook exchanges followed by
a long phone call with an old friend I hadn’t seen since my mid-twenties. Now
in his late forties, he had suddenly become passionate about the Christian
faith. It was all he could talk about. Initially, I found his new
enthusiasm infectious. I was delighted to hear he was reading the Bible for
himself.
After an hour or two back and forth, however, it became
apparent that his newfound interest in the word of God had a very specific, narrow
focus bordering on obsession: mining Bible numerology for clues to understanding
the past and the future. The moment I tried to get practical with my old friend,
our conversation hit a brick wall.
Why was that, I wondered?
Labels:
Doctrine
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Self-Control
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Titus
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Semi-Random Musings (11)
“Have mercy on those who doubt; save
others by snatching them out of the fire; to
others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.”
To treat a medical condition helpfully, a doctor must first be an accurate diagnostician. If a physician fails to correctly
discern the root cause of the problem, nothing he prescribes is likely to solve it. If he fails to correctly assess the
current progress of an affliction, he may offer a solution that would have been helpful two weeks ago but will
do nothing useful now. And if he fails to note the attendant risks associated with the problem, he may contract a communicable
disease himself and spread it instead of restraining it.
A single approach to sin in the lives of others will not do. Some sins are infectious; others are merely repulsive. Some sinners need a sharp rebuke, others gentleness.
Labels:
Hosea
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Jude
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Semi-Random Musings
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
To One and All, A Mary Christmas
“… the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
So sing the children in John Lennon’s wretched ditty. I really don’t know
why he bothered himself about Christmas when he also wanted to “imagine there’s
no heaven”. But each to his own. I’m sure he’s thought better of that since.
At Christmas time, I can’t imagine a more dismal question. Another year
over, Lennon accuses, and you haven’t done anything. The poor are still starving,
the world is still at war. When are you going to get off your haunches and be
worth something?
Ah, there’s nothing like Christmas pudding and the sounds of self-flagellation
to improve the seasonal mood.
Monday, December 24, 2018
Anonymous Asks (19)
“I keep praying the sinner’s prayer. I’m so anxious. Am I saved or not?”
I have some bad news: I’m probably the worst person to answer the question of whether or not you are really saved. In
fact, I suspect nobody else can tell you that either, since salvation is a byproduct of faith. Faith is not something we human beings are particularly good
at measuring, either in ourselves or in others, since we cannot see into the heart, very often even our own.
As for me, I actually had to look up the “sinner’s prayer” to see what it is. I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing
to be found in the Bible, at least not under that name.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Assurance of Salvation
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Repentance
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Resting and Standing
“But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall
stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.”
The very last verse of the book of Daniel is a personal promise from a mighty angel to an Old Testament saint
three
times called
“greatly loved”. It assumes something the Old Testament refers to rarely and about which Judaism today says next to nothing: a future for godly men and
women beyond this present life.
The angel doesn’t formally teach this so much as he simply takes it for
granted: “You will lie in your grave for a bit, then God has something specific
in mind for you after all that.”
I wonder what Daniel thought about it, but not even the greatest Bible expositor or translator can tell
me that. The book of Daniel ends there. As usual, God gets the last word.
Labels:
Daniel
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Resurrection
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Revelation
Saturday, December 22, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (38)
If you were here with us back in the second installment of this series on Proverbs, you may recall that for ease of reference
I divided the book into seven sections and an introduction. We have now
reached section 3.
With perhaps one exception I can currently recall, section 2, the longest in the book, is filled with two-line
proverbs. The advantage of two-liners is that they are tremendously memorable.
The disadvantage we discovered is that in the absence of context — and
proverbs are by their nature decontextualized — the briefer a sentence in
Hebrew, the more difficult it is to discern its meaning.
That’s a pretty significant disadvantage.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Thirty Sayings
Thirty Sayings
The following is my own breakdown of the
divisions between the Thirty Sayings found in Proverbs 22:17-24:22. It differs
from some others in that it seems to me Solomon occasionally adds
editorial comments to his sons that are unrelated to any specific “saying”.
I believe these to be more general in nature and simply reiterate the
desire he expresses in his introduction that they take seriously what he has written to them.
Alternatively, they may introduce specific sayings and add force to them.
I have noted these asides in brown.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Thirty Sayings
Friday, December 21, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: Virtual Fellowship
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
A few days ago, I watched a popular YouTube video one of our readers passed on.
It was intended as a spoof of lazy, millennial, hipster Christians who have
figured out how to avoid the inevitable complications and commitments of church
life by going to “virtual church”. By themselves. From bed. Provided they can
work up the energy.
Tom: It’s actually quite entertaining, and if you can watch it without cracking up, you have more
self-control than I do. In fact, to really get the picture, you should
probably watch it first, if you’re that sort of reader.
Labels:
Church
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Fellowship
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Relationships
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, December 20, 2018
It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
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Christian Life
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Eternal Reign
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Psalms
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Reverse Engineering the Faith
“I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the
saints.”
Conservative scholars generally date the book of Jude to
between A.D. 66 and 90. In his book The Untold Story of the New Testament Church, Frank Viola opts for a likely date of A.D. 68. William MacDonald uses internal evidence to place authorship between A.D. 67 and 70. I have not come across much that would incline me to argue with either man.
All these estimates place Jude as one of the very last books of the New Testament to be written and distributed to the
first century churches.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Responsibility and Blame
I do a lot of
intercessory praying, and probably so do you.
You know the sort of prayer I mean. Say, for instance, you are friends with a Christian couple experiencing
marriage difficulties. You did not introduce them. You did not choose the one
for the other or recommend one to the other. You did not officiate at their
wedding ceremony and you certainly have nothing to do with the issues that make
their marriage dysfunctional. The ultimate outcome of their current domestic
turbulence, good or bad, will not affect your life in any significant way
beyond the occasional moment of empathy or concern.
You have no dog in the hunt, so to speak.
Labels:
Achan
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Authority
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Daniel
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Guilt
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Responsibility
Monday, December 17, 2018
Anonymous Asks (18)
There is a relatively modern disease out there in the world called oneitis. It’s
as visible as dermatitis, at least as
distracting as tinnitus, and it can
probably do a great deal more damage than either in the long run.
The idea is that there is one person on the
planet who is a perfect match for you; one who completes you, and only one, in the absence of
whom you will never quite be completely fulfilled. Ergo, oneitis. It’s a common Hollywood trope
and the subject of romance novels, but it does not come from the Bible, I can
assure you.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Decision-Making
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Marriage
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Will of God
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Real Paul and Fake Paul
Marcus Antonius Felix was the procurator of the Roman province of Iudaea between A.D. 52 and 58.
Secular history tells us he was a Greek, known for his cruelty and fond of bribes. His rule was
characterized by political unrest, which he put down ruthlessly. He married three times, his middle wife being
a Jewish divorcee named Drusilla who died two decades later in the famous first century eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
It would not be wildly out of line to suggest Felix’s
“rather accurate knowledge” of The Way was likely a direct consequence of this second marriage.
Labels:
Acts
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Andy Stanley
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Apostle Paul
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Book Reviews
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Richard Dawkins
Saturday, December 15, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (37)
Assorted
Proverbs (Proverbs 22:1-16)
Where Rich and Poor Meet
“The rich and the poor meet together;
the Lord is the Maker of them all.”
the Lord is the Maker of them all.”
Many translations read “The rich and poor have this in common”. I think this is the correct sense. The wealthy and the impoverished
certainly pass one another by in society (it would be hard for the rich to
enjoy their riches without servants, for instance), but you can hardly call
what they are doing “meeting together”. There are few points of agreement or
association between them, and the poor have a scarcity of remedies available to
do anything about it. There is no negotiation to be had, and the
occasional revolution provides the only possible relief. Ask the French.
Labels:
Adultery
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Borrowing
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Friday, December 14, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: A Zipper-Lipped Life
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Science
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Sexuality
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Social Justice
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Inadvertent Agents of Blessing
A little over 600 years prior to sending
his Son into the world, God began to make obvious preparations for his next
step in reconciling a fallen world to himself through Jesus Christ.
These weren’t God’s first steps in his
program of salvation, of course, and for the most part they were not seen as
movements forward at all by those who played a part in them, but they are
obvious to us in hindsight, looking back over the centuries.
After all, how would the gospel have spread
so effectively throughout Europe and Asia in the first century if there had
been no Judean Captivity?
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Now We Are Five
For the record, I tried pawning this one off on both Bernie and IC. No luck with that, so here
goes ...
Five years and 1,837 posts ago, December 11, 2013, Bernie published a little online meditation entitled
“Making Straight Paths” under the unlikely sobriquet of “Statweasel”.
Whatever he had in mind at the time, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t this — or at least it wasn’t exactly this.
That’s one of the beauties of collaborations: they have the potential to be more than the sum of their parts; the results often surprise everyone involved. Another is that when you throw your back out, somebody else is usually on hand to step up and shoulder the load. A third is that when you are accused of speaking out of turn, there is always another potential scapegoat available at whom you can point the finger if
you need to: “IC made me do it!”
Labels:
Coming Untrue
/
Thanksgiving
Monday, December 10, 2018
Anonymous Asks (17)
I don’t know about you, but more than once I have found
myself wishing I had committed more of the Bible to memory when I was
young. It’s much, much easier to memorize things in your youth than in middle
age. As you get older, new information, names, places and details become harder to
retain. Over-40s can still memorize new things, but it takes 20-30% more time for us to do it.
Hey, we’re old. Time is one thing we don’t have enough of.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Memory
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Scripture
Sunday, December 09, 2018
Does God Judge Nations?
A question from a list of what Andy Stanley
refers to as “old covenant leftovers”, various ways he believes the modern
church mixes what he calls “obsolete” theology with the New Testament teaching of
Christ and his apostles:
- “Why would a Christian believe God judges nations at all?”
Stanley intends this as a zinger, but I’m
not at all sure it zings. It may be a bullet point in a bulleted list, but
it has the pinpoint accuracy of a wet snowball lobbed by a lethargic six-year-old
in a too-tight snowsuit.
Labels:
Andy Stanley
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Book Reviews
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Judgment
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Nations
Saturday, December 08, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (36)
Some situations are not in our control. For the average man
or woman, this is often the case. We may take comfort in the knowledge that our
heavenly Father is able to do for us far more abundantly than all that we ask
or think.
More often, though, we might observe that the course of our
lives is a product of choices we have made day after day when we got out of bed
in the morning, or when we found ourselves with our backs against the wall.
Three more-or-less random proverbs speak to these
situations.
Labels:
Diligence
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Power
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Proverbs
/
Punishment
Friday, December 07, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: A Hot Mess
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
/
Pastors
/
Too Hot to Handle
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
What Kind of Disciples Are You Making?
God tests men’s faith.
Women’s too. It’s what he does.
Why? Because faith is
hugely important to him. It might be the most important thing of all. As
scripture tells us, “without faith it is impossible to please him.”
Impossible. Not difficult, very difficult or in the 99th percentile of difficulty. Completely
impossible. It cannot be done. Faith is critical to any relationship with God.
Labels:
Andy Stanley
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Book Reviews
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Discipleship
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Faith
Tuesday, December 04, 2018
Unhitched and Unhinged
It is important to grasp that Andy Stanley’s desire for believers to “unhitch” our Christianity
from the Old Testament, a plea he articulates in his new book Irresistible, is not limited to how we preach the gospel. Stanley is calling for the comprehensive
abandonment of the Hebrew roots of our faith.
This is what makes his idea such a poison pill. Those who swallow it will come to regret it.
Labels:
Andy Stanley
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Book Reviews
/
Discipleship
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Scripture
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Witnessing
Monday, December 03, 2018
Anonymous Asks (16)
“I have a friend at my public high school and she isn’t really walking with God
anymore and the clothes she is wearing are not God-honoring at all. She says
she is close to Him but she’s really not. What do I do?”
Of the twenty to thirty kids who came and went more-or-less
regularly from our 1980s youth group, I’m guessing perhaps 30-40% are still
walking with the Lord today. Of the remainder, some are living morally decent
but secular lives. Some would still call themselves Christians but don’t really
fellowship with other believers anymore. Some are in a major mess, or in the
process of trying to climb out of it.
Almost every serious Christian goes through this with a
close friend at one point or another. It is very discouraging to witness
someone else’s spiritual decline, especially when your own heart and life are
deeply invested in their welfare.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
/
Backsliding
Sunday, December 02, 2018
Getting Unhitched
Andy Stanley wants us to “unhitch the old from the new”.
By “old”, he means our Old Testament. By “new”, he
means ... okay, you get that.
By “unhitch”, he means declaring the Old Testament so obsolete,
incorrect and potentially faith-destroying that we distance ourselves from it
rather than try to explain, defend or rationalize it to others.
To say the least, Stanley’s new book, Irresistible: Reclaiming the New that Jesus Unleashed for the World, is a bit of a grenade in the baptistery. It also sounds to me like a sustained argument for intellectual cowardice, but I’ll leave that to Stanley’s readers to decide.
Labels:
Andy Stanley
/
Book Reviews
/
Old Testament
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Witnessing
Saturday, December 01, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (35)
Our Bible’s Solomonic proverbs are roughly 3,000 years
old. The ones the king of Israel preserved from other sources are even older. Still,
many remain surprisingly useful and informative — even when we attempt to
apply them to the goings-on in a modern commercial office building.
Here are three that still work. Mostly.
Labels:
Age
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Relationships
Friday, November 30, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: Baptized Into What?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Baptism
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Present Perfect
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
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Christ
/
Law
/
Salvation
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Devout … and Out
Lydia of Thyatira was a devout woman, a worshiper of God. When the Lord opened her heart, she
became a convert to the faith. Many devout Greeks in Thessalonica were also persuaded by the message of Paul and Silas. Titius Justus was yet another devout man. He demonstrated his nascent faith by giving Paul shelter
when the apostle was opposed and reviled in Macedonia.
But not all devout people responded favorably to the gospel when it was presented to them in the first century. In Pisidian Antioch, the “devout” women served as
shock troops for the Jews persecuting Paul and Barnabas.
In ideological conflicts, we call such
people “useful idiots”. They believe in what they are doing, but are
grossly misinformed or insufficiently attentive. They are being cynically manipulated by others.
Labels:
Acts
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Devoutness
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Tribulation
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
The Merchant of Menace
We don’t get a lot of detail about pre-Genesis
Satan in our Bibles, though few things have had a more dramatic and
far-reaching influence on our world than his interference in God’s creation.
There is no straightforward literal retelling of the history of Lucifer’s
rebellion to be found in either Old Testament or New. Rather, we are treated to
a series of vignettes that cast light on various aspects of the demonic rebel
heart. They illuminate Satan’s real nature by comparing him to historic figures
and to the sort of people we know very well indeed: characters that populate our
literature and people whom we can observe all around us.
But Satan is also a deal-maker, a trafficker, a trader and a businessman. Perhaps we are less inclined to think
of these things as intrinsically evil.
Monday, November 26, 2018
Anonymous Asks (15)
I was a missionary’s kid. My first few years of public
school were spent in another country, with a dominant culture that was anything
but North American. I missed the Beatles, Star Trek (until it was syndicated) and the Adam West Batman TV show. I missed Woodstock. I heard about the U.S. putting someone on the moon from halfway across the world and days after it
happened. I didn’t play hockey or football or baseball. When I returned to
North America, I didn’t know any of the bands that were popular and I had
an obvious British accent. I wore the wrong clothes and had the wrong
haircut. To top it off, in school I was placed with kids I was well ahead of
intellectually but well behind culturally and interpersonally.
All of this created pretty much the perfect storm of
Grade 5 nerd-dom. Socially speaking, I couldn’t do anything right in
school. Not a thing.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Self-Image
Sunday, November 25, 2018
They Ate and Drank with Him
“God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who
ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”
Based on his personal experience, Peter could have finished this sentence any number of impressive ways. He could have said, “God made him
appear to us ... who saw with our own eyes
the rolled-back stone and the empty tomb,” or “... who witnessed him perform miracles,” or “... who were shown the marks of his crucifixion in his hands and his side,” or even “... who saw him
taken bodily into heaven and heard the testimony of angels about it.”
Instead, he talks about sharing food with the risen Christ: “God
made him appear to us who ate and drank with him.”
Labels:
Acts
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Breaking of Bread
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Fellowship
Saturday, November 24, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (34)
In raising his children, my father maintained a keen sense of the big picture. He would always encourage my mother
when things seemed most hopeless. I can assure you that happened with
regularity: my father traveled, and Mom had an unvarnished, highly realistic,
frequently-reinforced view of all the basest aspects of male teen behavior.
Somehow she survived. Hope, maybe.
Labels:
Children
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Discipline
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Friday, November 23, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: Heresy and Clerisy
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Atheism
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Gretta Vosper
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Heresy
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Total Depravity: Can’t We Come Up With A New Term?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Neo-Calvinism
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Sin
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The Fall
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Total Depravity
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
An Iceberg in the Gulf of Mexico
I sat in an office meeting last Saturday morning listening
to my fellow managers discuss internal company changes that were, to everyone
there, more than a little disconcerting. The afternoon shift supervisor had a
clear note of panic in his tone as he anticipated what personnel moves upper
management might be contemplating.
Understandably. Nice guy, but he’s got a doctorate in
something esoteric that’s all but useless in the real world and I’m quite sure
hasn’t the slightest idea what he’ll do if he’s suddenly unemployed.
I’m not about to tell you that I’m a whole lot better
qualified myself, or that looking for another job has any great appeal to me.
In fact, there are hundreds of thousands, and I suspect millions, all across
North America who are staring down similar situations these days.
It’s not just potential unemployment that’s scary, is it.
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Having It Both Ways
Charles Cutler Torrey was an American
historian, archeologist and scholar. In 1901, he founded the American School of Archeology in Jerusalem and taught
Semitic languages at Yale for almost 30 years.
Eighty-eight years ago, Torrey’s record was as credible as any other secular authority whose job was analyzing and dating ancient
manuscripts. Then his book Pseudo-Ezekiel and the Original Prophecy (1930) was released, setting out his theory that
the canonical book of Ezekiel was actually written much later than originally thought, in the third century B.C.
Torrey’s book remains of sufficient interest that it was reprinted both in 2008 and 2013. Amazon calls it “culturally important”.
Labels:
Archeology
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Ezekiel
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Textual Criticism
Monday, November 19, 2018
Anonymous Asks (14)
“How do you stay on a spiritual high?”
Hmm. I think we might be asking the wrong question here.
Ezekiel was probably never closer to God than the day his wife died, but I suspect that day was in many ways the lowest point of his life. A “spiritual
high” it was not.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Christian Life
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Credentialism and Truth
“As they were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them, greatly annoyed because they were
teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the
resurrection from the dead.”
The Jewish religious authorities came teeming out of the woodwork to harass the apostles for two reasons. Primarily it was the public proclamation of resurrection through Jesus that irked them. Resurrection was a huge bone of contention for Sadducees in particular, who did not believe in it. Adding the name of
Jesus to the mix, a man the authorities had only recently had put to death, only compounded the problem.
But we should not overlook Luke’s observation that they really did not like the apostles teaching the people.
Labels:
Acts
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Apostle Paul
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Authority
Saturday, November 17, 2018
How Not to Crash and Burn (33)
Antisocial behavior, innuendo, laziness and
false confidence: there’s a lovely quartet for you.
Misty water-colored memories. Four more ancient proverbs, each of which
reminds me of somebody I know or knew, usually more than one. Sometimes
they remind me of me. Times change, people don’t. Not really.
Thankfully we have the word of God to guide us, because not too many of us seem to learn much from history.
And they don’t really teach history anymore anyway.
Labels:
Gossip
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Security
Friday, November 16, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: Feeding the Gators
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Popular Culture
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Revenge
Thursday, November 15, 2018
The End of Evangelism
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Gospel
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Witnessing
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Doctrine Worked Out
Jesus Christ was manifested in the flesh, giving us a visible, tangible template for what godliness looks like in action,
and an example to follow. He was vindicated by the Spirit, demonstrating that resurrection
power is available to transform human lives. He was seen by messengers, meaning
we can believe what we hear and take it to heart because it has been repeatedly
substantiated. He was proclaimed among the nations, meaning that he does not
play favorites with men, and neither should we. He was believed on in the world,
meaning God’s plan for this planet does not merely involve taking people out of
it, but transforming it. And he was taken up in glory, meaning that we can look
forward to an eternity in which we will share that glory with him.
No theological point is without practical consequences.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Drawn Away
“But refuse to enroll younger widows, for when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith.”
It’s not just young widows who need to
worry about being drawn away from Christ by worldly passions, and it’s not just
women more generally. The symptoms and objects of earthly desire vary from
person to person, but the unshakable conviction that the grass on the other
side of the fence is somehow greener than the grass on my side is a lie of the
devil we must all contend with.
Here, the specific passion in view is not anything evil. In and of itself, the impulse to marry is not abnormal or
unhealthy. Everybody wants to know and be known, to feel secure, to have
someone to care for and to care for them.
Labels:
1 Timothy
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Marriage
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Service
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Temptation
Monday, November 12, 2018
Anonymous Asks (13)
“If the stars are so far away and it would take millions of light years for them to be seen from
earth, why do we see stars?”
Ah yes, the perplexing problem that the appearance of age
raises for creationists.
The standard difficulty is not about whether it would have
been possible for God to cause starlight to provoke its usual reaction from
Adam’s retinas in a nanosecond rather than taking light years to travel to
earth from the moment the stars were created. Obviously someone powerful enough
to speak the universe into being could make both light and human nerve endings dance
to any tune he pleased.
No, the standard complaint is moral rather than practical;
something like “Wouldn’t it be a bit deceptive of God to bend what we perceive
to be the established rules of science?”
No.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Creation
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Miracles
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