The most recent version of this post is available here.
“God is interested in our willing participation in his plan for our lives, not in micro-managing helpless automatons.” — Tom
- Home
- What We’re Doing Here
- F A Q
- Anonymous Asks
- Apocrypha-lypso
- Book Reviews
- The Commentariat Speaks
- DAMWWTIM
- Flyover Country
- How Not to Crash and Burn
- Inbox
- The Language of the Debate
- Letters from the Best Man
- Mining the Minors
- On the Mount
- Quote of the Day
- Recommend-a-blog
- Semi-Random Musings
- That Wacky Old Testament
- Time and Chance
- What Does Your Proof Text Prove?
Friday, October 23, 2015
Thursday, October 22, 2015
John Piper’s Exploding Cigar
Not John Piper |
Do you want to be a
Jew? John Piper thinks every Christian should:
“God is at pains to explain to you that you
are a true Jew. It is a great gift to us that he should tell us that an
essential part of our identity is that we are true Jews if we fulfil the obedience
of faith. Don’t reject God’s good gift.”
Why does it matter if
a Gentile thinks of himself as a Jew or not? It seems like a trivial issue to debate,
doesn’t it? Why would anyone go to as much trouble as Piper goes to in this sermon from 1999 just to convince Christians to get excited about being “Jewish”?
I sure don’t want to
reject any of God’s good gifts. But this particular “gift” is more like the
proverbial exploding cigar: it comes with more than you bargain for when you take it.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
/
John Piper
/
Reform Theology
/
Replacement Theology
/
Romans
/
Supersessionism
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Recommend-a-blog (14)
Scott and Mychael Klajic
are the duo behind the blog, with the experience of eight years together and four children
to show for it. The pair previously wrote about Christian marriage at the
now-defunct Courtship Pledge website,
abandoned after a major technical glitch erased two years of work. The new
site is nominally about “God’s hierarchy for marriage” but though nearly every
post intersects in some way with the topic, relationships do not seem to be the
site’s only (or even its primary) focus.
Not by a long shot.
Labels:
Marriage
/
Recommend-a-blog
/
Relationships
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (2)
What is a Jew anyway?
Specifically, does a Gentile who converts
to Judaism become a “Jew”? Many people today say so, and quite a few religious
Jews agree with them. There is even a Judaic ritual called giyyur by which, it is alleged, a Gentile becomes Jewish.
Tracey R. Rich says, “A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.
Now, if that’s a scriptural answer, there
are an awful lot of Jews out there. But the Bible does not appear to use the
word “Jew” that way. There is considerable elasticity in the term, but
in neither Testament does it dovetail perfectly with the
modern, secular usage or even the definition of many Orthodox Jews.
Curious? Let’s have a look at some history.
Monday, October 19, 2015
The Inside Scoop
Those in the news business are forever occupied with beating
one another to a story. Old media or new, success is measured in the ability to
get the inside scoop.
God, on the other hand, is not in the business of
broadcasting his secrets. Communicating is something in which he takes great pleasure, but not something he does
casually. His truth is for those who value it and understand its worth, not for
those who dismiss or trivialize it.
The value of God’s word is one of its repeated themes.
Labels:
Fellowship
/
Proverbs
/
Recycling
/
Solomon
/
Word of God
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Of All the Things I’ve Lost, I Miss Myself the Most
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Authenticity
/
Christ
Saturday, October 17, 2015
The Institutional Fix
Government should do something. That seems
to be the consensus.
Never mind what the issue is. Could be the
economy. Could be women’s wages. Maybe aboriginal affairs. Certainly
immigration. Definitely climate change. But if only those people we elected
would just get to it, things would be better.
People love the institutional fix.
Specifically, they love identifying a problem and ranting about it. These days,
personal responsibility begins and ends with firing off a critical blog post,
Facebook screed or nuclear Tweet. Whatever the problem may be, with any luck
someone else will deal with it. Hopefully they’ll start a program.
Labels:
Government
/
Responsibility
Friday, October 16, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Faith and the Fatherless
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
/
Parenting
/
Single Motherhood
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, October 15, 2015
“In the Church” and In the Body
Let me say that again:
the church meeting is not the church.
You would think that
Christians who have already succeeded in grasping the biblical distinction
between “church” and “church building” would grasp this further distinction intuitively, and it may
be that on some level we get it. But if we measure knowledge of any truth by
the number of Christians who are living it out daily in a practical way, my
suspicion is that some of us have missed the boat.
Labels:
Body of Christ
/
Church
/
Spiritual Gifts
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (1)
I like etymology.
Once in a while I encounter
a word I would have difficulty defining precisely if anyone asked me to. Sometimes
I’ll look up such terms and add them to my own vocabulary if they
seem likely to be useful. The process is almost always of some benefit, as you
get to see how words originate and what happens to them over time. It’s a
good feeling to be able to use words confidently and correctly.
But from a communication
perspective, there is no value in being technically correct about what a word
means when everyone around you thinks it means something else. And nobody should
want to be willfully ignorant. Somewhere in between technical accuracy and oblivion is a sweet spot
where we actually understand each other.
Labels:
Doesn't Always Mean What We Think It Means
/
Hebrew
/
Israelite
/
Terminology
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
What Is Job One?
An atheist who calls
himself “Pointman” is infuriated that Christians do not make it our first order
of business to take a public stand against the devastating effects of climate
change activism in third world countries.
He provides considerable evidence that the efforts of environmental extremists, far from helping, are actually hurting the poorest of
the poor. Western nations threaten to withhold foreign aid from countries that
permit the use of DDT, so millions in those countries die of malaria. Changes in North American laws under pressure from
environmental lobbyists incent farmers in developing nations to grow profitable
biofuel crops rather than food staples, leading to price increases of up to 75% in basic foods, and resulting in food riots, starvation, malnutrition and death.
Notwithstanding his penchant for hyperbole,
Pointman may well be right.
Labels:
Environmentalism
/
Great Commission
/
Priorities
Monday, October 12, 2015
That Was Then, This Is Now
The translators of our Bibles tell us that
the thing for which Esau traded his birthright to his brother Jacob was a bowl of lentil soup. The King
James that I grew up with reads “a mess of pottage”, and I still get a kick from that
now-anachronistic and quirky turn of phrase.
Oddly, there is even a Wikipedia entry for “mess of pottage” that nails the concept perfectly:
“A mess of pottage is something
immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in
exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely
more valuable.”
Those followers of
Christ who look primarily for blessing in this world are making the same sort
of trade Esau did.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
The Dating Scene
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Haggai
/
Prophecy
/
Zerubbabel
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Unleash the Monsters
What happens when you
turn scientists loose to solve the problems of humanity in a moral vacuum? You
get New York University ‘bioethicist’ Professor Matthew Liao.
Don’t take my word for
it:
What strikes me is how
perfectly reasonable a monster may appear when you don’t think too closely about
what it’s actually suggesting.
Labels:
Bioengineering
/
C.S. Lewis
/
Climate Change
/
Ethics
/
Genetics
Friday, October 09, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Ending the Gender War
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Donald Trump
/
Gender War
/
Masculinity
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, October 08, 2015
The Sub-Prime Mortgage From Heaven
Christians are used to
getting blamed for a lot of things. Imprisoning Galileo. The Inquisition. The
Crusades. But this is a new one.
Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic theorizes that Christians tanked the American economy:
“There is one explanation [for the 2007-2009
recession] that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture —
a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.”
Wow.
Labels:
Economics
/
Prosperity Gospel
Wednesday, October 07, 2015
Quote of the Day (9)
I haven’t done it in a
few years. The cultural distance between me and the current generation is
significant enough that I can’t imagine the sort of effort required to properly
bridge it, and the opportunity is not there in any case. Others are doing
the job, and God bless ’em.
But I’ve put in the
better part of a decade leading youth groups and/or teaching Sunday School and
I well remember the juggling act that comes from trying to please everyone with
an opinion about what you’re doing.
Labels:
Quote of the Day
/
Shepherds
/
Teaching
/
Youth Work
Tuesday, October 06, 2015
Your Alms Have Ascended
The things you do for
me stand a good chance of being forgotten.
I may not appreciate
them the way I should. That Christmas sweater was a little too red and a little
too heavy for me, so I never wore it. The gift card was for a shop I never go
to, and it’s still sitting on my shelf. The DVD was something I already had,
but I didn’t want to mention it.
I didn’t need what you
gave me, so I said a quick thank you and forgot about you.
Sorry.
Monday, October 05, 2015
Where Are The Results?
At the beginning
of the fiscal year, or more likely prior, you set a series of targets to be met
or exceeded and, come year-end, you stack up the goals alongside the actual
results and … then you figure out how to fudge the numbers for the
shareholders.
Too honest. Sorry.
But somewhere
between the delivery of the actual numbers from the accounting department and
the creation of the largely-fictional version that ends up in the annual
report, the truth about the current state of your company is known, if only by
a small group of men gathered in a boardroom.
Success — or
horrible failure — is quantifiable.
Not really so in
the church, is it? Not the way we’d like.
Labels:
Church
/
Habakkuk
/
Judgment
/
The Captivity
Sunday, October 04, 2015
I am the One
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Forgiveness
/
Guilt
/
Matthew
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)