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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Friday, August 11, 2017
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Shooting from the Lip
“Pastor John” Piper is answering his mail again, which nearly always ends up, well ... interesting,
to say the least.
This time he’s responding to the single mother of a
three-year-old boy who wants to know whether the Bible teaches she should be
looking for a husband.
Piper is rarely reluctant to engage with questions the Bible
doesn’t directly answer, and this one is no exception.
Labels:
John Piper
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Marriage
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Premarital Sex
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Sexuality
Wednesday, August 09, 2017
The Multicultural Road to Hell
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Ecumenicalism
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Testimony
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Witnessing
Tuesday, August 08, 2017
Did or Didn’t
When you and I confessed faith in Jesus
Christ from the heart, God saved us, and the Bible says he saved us with certain
objectives in view. Those objectives were both general and specific. Unless we
were saved in the last six months, I think we should probably know
something about that.
Hey, if you don’t have a clue, it might be
time to give the subject some thought.
Labels:
1 Thessalonians
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Service
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Spiritual Gifts
Monday, August 07, 2017
Separation Anxiety
If our culture has a
mortal sin, it is discrimination, the penalty for which is shaming,
mockery, job loss or exclusion from the in-group.
We are told not to
discriminate between moral and immoral behaviors, regardless of the real-world
outcomes such actions produce. We are told not to discriminate between the
productive and unproductive use of our tax dollars, because to do so
demonstrates that we are ‘phobes’ of one sort or another. For
similar reasons, we are not allowed to distinguish between employees who are
capable of performing required tasks and employees who are not; or between students who understand the material and students who do not. Instead, we
must meet demographic targets for success based on levels of perceived historical
victimhood.
We might say our
society has separation anxiety. It’s in a mindless panic to make sure nothing
is ever usefully distinguished from anything else.
Labels:
Discimination
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Holiness
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Nehemiah
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Separation
Sunday, August 06, 2017
Not As Simple As It Looks
Oh, maybe it looks simple. The apostle Paul could pray this:
“… that our God may … fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of
our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Simple, right? Christians like Paul pray, and a powerful God takes care of business.
Well, I guess we could read it that way. But I think there’s another side to it.
Labels:
2 Thessalonians
/
Good
Saturday, August 05, 2017
Inbox: Grace and Gratitude
PB takes thoughts from last Monday’s post in
an interesting direction:
“ ‘Grace’ as understood today does indeed fall woefully short of conveying the depth of
meaning in charis. Gratia, whence cometh grace, was ‘a goddess of charm, beauty, nature, human
creativity and fertility in Greek mythology’, so it isn’t that the meaning has
changed — it’s pretty close actually. It’s as you say — we don’t have an
equivalent in English for charis.”
If we are to talk usefully
about grace to people who do not understand what we mean by it, we are probably
best to use four or five different English words, each conveying a single aspect
of the meaning of charis.
Friday, August 04, 2017
Too Hot to Handle: Rightsizing the Church
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Megachurches
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Pastors
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, August 03, 2017
Unmuddling the Muddle
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Christian teaching
about prophecy is a chaotic muddle.
Within Christendom, in the broadest and most general terms,
we find Preterists, Historicists, Futurists and Idealists. When we get into specific features of the prophetic calendar such as the Millennium, we fragment further into Pre-, Post-
and Amillennialists, and the Premillennialists subdivide yet further
into Pre-Tribulationists, Mid-Tribulationists and Post-Tribulationists. If I’ve
left your view out, forgive me.
You will be unsurprised to find that I have no particular
interest in trying to straighten all that out, and no patience for it even if I
had the skill.
Labels:
1 Thessalonians
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Apostle Paul
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Culture
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Prophecy
Wednesday, August 02, 2017
My Church Must Change
There’s a thread of an
idea that pops up at the end of a previous post that I wanted to take a few
more moments to explore, since it’s been cropping up over and over again
throughout my life.
Parents love their
kids, or at least they should. In properly-functioning family units, which
would hopefully include most Christian families, parents generally fulfill their
responsibilities more consistently and effectively, though none of us can claim
to have achieved perfection in parenting. Far from it.
But some parents
cannot resist putting a finger on the scales to help their kids through life.
This is the source of all kinds of trouble.
Labels:
Change
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Church
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Elders
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Wisdom
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Youth Work
Tuesday, August 01, 2017
A Suspicious Inversion
It’s been a few years but this guy still grinds
my gears, and since he’s quite literally the poster boy for a generation — or at least for
the last administration — there is a problem with that, and I hope we can
see it.
Now, to be fair, nobody
wants to marry a guy who resolves domestic quarrels with a fist to the face.
At least, nobody normal and emotionally healthy does. But be honest here: how many women truly want to partner up with a man who possesses
neither the will nor the physical strength to act in a crisis?
That’s a different
question, isn’t it. This guy is all that in spades.
Labels:
feminism
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Gender
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Men's Role
Monday, July 31, 2017
The Wrong Word
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christian Life
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Colossians
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Grace
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Interpretation
/
Speech
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Inbox: Radical Pruning
“Over the past year I had to do a radical pruning of my
social media feeds and the time I spent looking at them … the constant
barrage of complaints and call-outs from Christians and non-Christians worked
up about some political / social / educational / economic
/ artistic outrage was exhausting. It was making me feel angry and
disgusted with humanity, and not in a good or holy way.”
Hey, that’s honest. And taking practical steps to solve the
problem, as this reader did, is an eminently more sensible solution than fuming
about the world and being miserable.
Friday, July 28, 2017
Too Hot to Handle: EDM in the ‘Sanctuary’
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Evangelism
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Music
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Too Hot to Handle
/
Worship
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Disclaimers Anonymous
More and more as I observe the life and conduct of the Lord
Jesus, I want to say less and say it better.
We Christians have, I think, a tendency to over-explain things,
especially our own thoughts and motivations, and especially what we DON’T mean
by this or that. We disclaim for good reasons and we disclaim for bad ones.
You’ve done it, I’ve done it, everybody does it. And usually
it doesn’t help one bit.
Labels:
Disclaimers
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Truth
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Words
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
4GW and the Church
4GW is short for
Fourth-Generation Warfare, a term first used in 1989 by a team of U.S. military
analysts to describe conflict characterized, as Infogalactic puts it, by a “blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants and civilians”.
In simplest terms, a
4G war is any conflict in which one of the actors is not a state but a
sub-population of some sort, ethnic or otherwise. 4GW’s goals are usually
complex and long term, and may be achieved through guerrilla tactics,
terrorism, psy-ops, economic pressure, media manipulation and/or other non-traditional
means.
Labels:
Church
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Discipling
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Evangelism
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Tactics
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
A Giant Problem, or That Stupid Sword Again
Not Goliath, whom
David slew, but that bad habit you can’t give up, and most of the time don’t
really want to.
Somebody I know is
fighting a giant. In his thinking, maybe 5% of the time
he’s in a place where he makes an offhand remark about how he needs
to go back to church, or how he needs to start reading his Bible again, or how
he really needs God in his life. The rest of the time he’s just doing his thing
like he’s always done it, and I suspect the will and character of God are the
last things he’s thinking about. Life provides bucketloads of convenient distractions.
But can God work with
5%? I’d estimate he can. See, I’ve been there too.
Labels:
Conscience
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Conviction
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Guilt
/
Holy Spirit
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Sin
Monday, July 24, 2017
Idolaters in the House
“Seek
the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.
Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
— Jeremiah 29:7, NIV
“Never
seek their peace or prosperity …”
— Ezra 9:12, ESV
Two instructions: both from God, both to
Israel. To the casual reader they may appear to be diametrically opposed, but
they are not. The commands occur at very different times in Israel’s history
under very different circumstances, and are issued with respect to very
different groups of people.
The differences are instructive, I think.
Labels:
Church
/
Israel
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Peace
/
The Captivity
Sunday, July 23, 2017
The Castle and the Cave
It is often said that
the three enemies of the human soul are the world, the flesh and the devil. The
first and last members of this triad are instantly understood; the middle one ...
well, not always.
In the New Testament, the
word “flesh” (Gk: sarx) possesses a range of related meanings from merely natural (“the two will become one flesh”) to expressly wicked (“Now
the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery,
enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries,
dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these”).
This being the case, when we come across references
to “the flesh” we may find it helpful to ask ourselves in which sense it is
being used.
Labels:
Asceticism
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Galatians
/
Self
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