The most recent version of this post is available here.
“Love often manifests itself in giving people what they can’t appreciate and don’t want, and
in demanding from them precisely what they most want to retain for themselves.” — Tom
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Monday, May 22, 2017
Sunday, May 21, 2017
A Better Word
“Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
Washed in the blood. I’ll
be frank: that’s kind of a grisly image, though a very popular one in late 19th
and 20th century hymnology. If some of our modern churchgoers cringe
at the mental picture it conjures, we can hardly blame them.
Elisha Hoffman’s lyric
presumably riffs on Revelation 7, where John sees an innumerable multitude
of worshipers in front of the throne of God and is told, “They have washed their
robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
In Revelation it is
the robes that are washed in the
blood, not the worshipers themselves. Hoffman probably understood this, though
his title is a bit too ambiguous for me.
What we do find much
more often in scripture is sprinkled
blood.
Labels:
Blood
/
Christ
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Sacrifice
/
Sprinkling
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Nice Getting to Know You ...
My youngest son was
fired not too long ago. Well, “fired” is a harsh word for something that was actually
done with unusual politeness. The Asian manager of the donut store where he’d
been working for three weeks let him know at the end of his shift that, “Uh,
it was really nice getting to know you, but you don’t need to come back
next week.”
Hmm. Okay then.
Labels:
Church
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Discipleship
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Elders
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Leadership
Friday, May 19, 2017
Too Hot to Handle: Religious Freedom, Limited
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Freedom
/
Government
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Letters from the Best Man (2)
The following is absolutely fictional and
increasingly common. There is no Brad and definitely no Jill, in case that is not obvious. There are, however, way too many people in their position.
Dear Brad,
Glad to hear that
Sunday did not go as badly as you thought it might. I’ve been praying and will
continue to do so.
As I mentioned in my
previous email, the elders accepting your resignation from teaching Sunday
School is normal. Don’t take it personally. They haven’t heard Jill’s side of
the story yet, and they never will if she doesn’t come back to church. Suppose
they had refused to accept your resignation out of some kind of misplaced
loyalty, then later discovered that Jill really left you because you had an
affair at work or something insane like that? I know you didn’t, but these
things do happen in the real world. They are being responsible to the Chief Shepherd and doing their jobs. The truth will come out in due course,
trust me.
Meanwhile, you’ve done
the right thing and the Lord is honored in it.
Labels:
1 Peter
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Divorce
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Letters from the Best Man
/
Marriage
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
The Flitting Sparrow
Just more hot air ... |
In any case, we’re not big on curses in our modern world.
Oh, I don’t mean profanity: as a culture we’re pretty much over the top with
that, as anyone with Netflix will easily confirm. But the real deal — the
Old Testament “God is gonna getcha” kind of curse — is rare. And that’s a
good thing, I think.
All the same, some curses are very powerful indeed. One or
two are even of historic import.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
You Don’t Want To Be ‘That Guy’
I suspect a bunch of them were kind of like we tend to be.
You know how you can sing a hymn 100 times and on the 101st time it
suddenly dawns on you what the writer was trying to communicate.
The same words were all there before; they all meant the same thing they mean when you figure
them out, but somehow you sang them over and over again from childhood without
really processing them. Maybe you were reading the music and trying to figure
out if you should go for that high note or drop down an octave for safety’s
sake; or a kid down the pew was fidgeting and kept dropping crumbs from the
cookie you wish her grandma hadn’t given her; or you were somewhere else
entirely in your own head, possibly contemplating missing the NFL pre-game show.
Whatever the distraction may have been, you sang those words
but didn’t register them. You missed the point.
I’ve certainly done it enough.
Labels:
Acts
/
David
/
Psalms
/
Recycling
/
Revelation
Monday, May 15, 2017
Letters from the Best Man (1)
The following is absolutely fictional and
increasingly common. There is no Brad and definitely no Jill, in case that is not obvious.
There are, however, way too many people in their position.
Dear Brad,
I am so deeply, deeply
sorry to hear that you and Jill have separated. Standing up for you was a
privilege and an honor. It’s been … what, almost a decade? But I still vividly
recall that crazy, way-too-lengthy conversation we had in the Four Seasons
lounge after the wedding rehearsal when everybody else had gone to bed, and I
haven’t the slightest doubt that when you took those vows before God and
everyone you love, you meant them with all your heart.
Labels:
Divorce
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Letters from the Best Man
/
Marriage
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Two Glories
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
David
/
Glory
/
Mephibosheth
/
Worship
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Recommend-a-blog (23)
I’m a ‘Radical Anabaptist’, or at least so says Mere Orthodoxy’s political theology quiz.
Not sure quite what to think about that. I guess I’m glad to
be a radical something. These days I think I’d be more insulted to be called a moderate. And while I dislike the implicit
nod to infant baptism in the “Anabaptist” label, I am indeed a firm believer in
baptizing believers only, as readers of my baptism series (left sidebar) will confirm, and glad to take a stand on that.
It seems a funny point of theology to fixate on, but I’ll
take it ... I guess.
Labels:
Politics
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Rapture
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Recommend-a-blog
/
Theology
Friday, May 12, 2017
Too Hot to Handle: Unhinged Racism
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Douglas Wilson
/
Jonathan Merrick
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Racism
/
Speech
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, May 11, 2017
Christian Confession: An Elaborate Fabrication?
Is it really necessary
for Christians to confess our sins in order to be forgiven them?
Peter Ditzel says no, that
being forgiven for the sins we commit from time to time as believers does not
depend on regular confession. That, he says, would be working for our forgiveness.
He is also not a fan of John MacArthur’s take on 1 John 1, which draws a distinction between
judicial and parental forgiveness that Ditzel thinks is an “elaborate
fabrication”. He sees the ongoing search for MacArthur’s “parental forgiveness”
as a Protestant form of penance.
The judicial/parental
distinction probably did not originate with MacArthur. I’ve been hearing it my
whole life. It is a very common explanation of what the apostle John has to say
about forgiveness.
But is it correct?
Labels:
1 John
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Communion
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Confessing
/
Fellowship
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Forgiveness
/
Righteousness
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Tom 1, John the Baptist 0
Jim Plunkett when he was not winning Superbowls |
Oh, he put up a good
fight. Taking on the Jewish religious establishment was brave. Living on a diet
of locusts and wild honey was certainly evidence of great devotion to his job, not to mention that he
spent way, way less than I do on his wardrobe. Excellent stewardship there. And
that whole martyrdom thing, well ... it’s a pretty special honor to die
for what you believe. I’m not sure I’m up to that at all.
But I won anyway. How do you like them apples!
Labels:
John the Baptist
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Kingdom
/
Matthew
Tuesday, May 09, 2017
Going Out With A Bang
Sixty-five is no
longer mandatory retirement age in Canada, so a few of the men I learned from are
still on the job, though they have definitely slowed down. Most are gone despite the change in law. Some even
took packages and opted out early. Others who thought they’d work past sixty-five
found they were running out of gas and changed their minds. Still others had unexpected
health crises or family drama.
Hey, there are no
guarantees for any of us, right?
Labels:
1 Chronicles
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David
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Retirement
/
Stewardship
Monday, May 08, 2017
By What Authority?
Don’t panic. Let me get going here and you’ll
soon see what I mean. And in case it doesn’t become howlingly obvious, I
promise I’ll clear it up at the end.
Ready? Here we go. So … Tish Harrison
Warren is an author and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She
currently serves as co-associate rector at Church of the Ascension in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’m going to quote her a bit here, so I mention this
not at all in an attempt to disqualify what she says, but so that you can better
enjoy the many, many helpings of mouth-wateringly delicious irony she
dishes up.
You see Ms. Warren fears the Christian blogosphere is off its leash. She thinks its various Christian and heretical voices are operating without
spiritual authority and ought to be reined in.
Wow. Just … wow. Pot, meet kettle.
Sunday, May 07, 2017
Back to the Beginning
Currently, if your IQ is 132 or higher, you are in the 98th percentile for intelligence. Worldwide. Mensa has 121,000 members, but in theory its membership could be sixty or seventy million. That’s a lot of smart people.
But scripture teaches there is something significantly more important than IQ.
Saturday, May 06, 2017
Mouth Almighty
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
James
/
Negativity
/
Positivity
/
Proverbs
/
Speech
Friday, May 05, 2017
Too Hot to Handle: Surveying Evangelicalism
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
/
Evangelicalism
/
Megachurches
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, May 04, 2017
Institutionality and Convergence
“Convergence” is a term originally coined by John Stuart
Mill to describe the process by which a public policy consensus is reached. The
term has been reinvigorated by former World Net Daily columnist Vox Day, who
uses it to describe what happens when institutions are infiltrated and coopted
by people pursuing agendas foreign to their original purposes.
Of course, an institution may survive and even prosper for a
period of time while pursuing multiple goals. But no man can serve two masters,
and no institution can simultaneously make two non-complementary goals its holy
grail. Thus an institution can be described as fully “converged” the moment its
pursuit of its new mandate begins to make it ineffective at doing what it was
originally created to do.
Prime modern examples of the downside of convergence are tech giant Mozilla,
Marvel Comics, the NFL and ESPN. All have prioritized social justice virtue
signaling over catering to their core demographics, and each has seen its
market share shrivel because of it.
Labels:
Church
/
Satan
/
Spiritual Warfare
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
The Stuff That Matters
The human heart (interior view) |
The terror is the
reason most of us avoid it. To be known is to expose the worst about ourselves,
so we market a more palatable package of “alternative facts” to the public,
withholding information or spinning it as required.
Man, it’s an awful lot of work.
Labels:
1 Corinthians
/
Knowledge
/
Love
/
Psalms
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