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, January 19, 2018
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Leadership: It’s a Dog’s Life
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Elders
/
Leadership
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Shepherds
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
No Apologies
A question like that, we all have a pretty good idea
where it comes from and where it’s going.
The insinuation is that Cain had sex with his sister, and the
implication is that we should be really, really offended by this, always assuming it ever took place.
But it’s not really incest that’s the issue.
Labels:
Cain's Wife
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Contradictions in Scripture
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Hope in Christ
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Recycling
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Unseen Footprints
Ignore the title. I promise there will be
no sentimental poetry today. You can all breathe easier.
Circumstances are very much open to
interpretation.
When an angel appears to declare to you the
meaning of events you have just gone through or are about to witness, you can
be 100% sure you’ve got cause and effect in the correct order and rightly
attributed.
Otherwise, well, we’re kind of in the dark.
Or at least twilight. Taken on their own, the meaning of even very unusual events
can be ambiguous.
Monday, January 15, 2018
The 1,600 Year Conspiracy
Or so goes the story. By “him” I mean Jesus Christ. By “we” I mean human beings with an agenda.
On the surface it’s not
a bad thesis. After all, you can’t rigorously prove biblical inspiration. Oh, you
can make the claim, and you can demonstrate from the text that the apostles,
prophets and Jesus himself claimed it too. You can make the case that inspiration
is a reasonable and logical inference, and you can argue it from the sorts of
behaviors these supposedly sacred words produce in the lives of those who
obey them.
But can you
demonstrate with 100% scientific certainty that the text of our Bibles is
really God speaking? No.
And if it isn’t? Well, then ... we made him up.
Labels:
Christ
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History
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Inspiration
Sunday, January 14, 2018
On the Mount (13)
Statistics vary and are interpreted
variously, but we can probably agree without too much debate that the number of
divorces both in the world and throughout our churches is way, way too high; in
2014, 0.32% of the total U.S. population got divorced.
Surprisingly, that is trending downward. It
was 0.4% annually at the dawn of the new millennium.
Labels:
Adultery
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Divorce
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Marriage
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Matthew
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On the Mount
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Out at the Margins
Drew Brown has a post
up at assemblyHUB on the subject of outreach to people who call themselves LGBTQ or some variation thereof. (In the interest of greater inclusion, the acronym keeps changing faster than
anyone can keep up, including those who use it to describe themselves. Even the
HUB can’t seem to type it the same way twice.)
Sexually transgressive
lifestyles are the subject of numerous online debates between believers at the
moment, but most are about whether churches should accept individuals who engage in deviant practices as active members. Pragmatic considerations about how Christians can
carry the gospel to people living life out at the margins rarely come up.
When they do, they
seem to veer to one extreme or another.
Labels:
Homosexuality
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Transgenderism
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Witnessing
Friday, January 12, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: Church of the Revolving Door
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Discipline
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, January 11, 2018
The Next [De]Generation
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Children
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Commitment
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Clerks and Dossiers
“Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins; the enemy has
destroyed everything in the sanctuary!”
That Psalm 74 is a doozy, and it doesn’t
easily resonate when we try to apply it to church life in 2017 in our (comparatively)
easy-going Western world. The Asaphian contemplation of Zion in ruins appeals
to me poetically and dramatically, but in our day the “sanctuary” (assuming any
of us would recognize a sanctuary if we saw one) is not burning, and the
enemies of God have not recently taken their axes to the dwelling place of his holy Name.
Well, not visibly anyway.
Labels:
Psalms
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Spiritual Warfare
/
Witnessing
Tuesday, January 09, 2018
Better Than Good
I don’t mean that I’m likely to find myself
imposing an archaic, rigid moral framework on others — there’s not much
danger of that sort of legalism. But I tend to default to a very binary view of
the will of God. Black and white. On and off. Good and evil. Avoid the bad stuff
and you’ve had a good day. And I’m probably not alone in that.
I didn’t get up this morning hoping,
praying and planning to express Christ to others in the very best possible way.
I should’ve, but I didn’t.
Labels:
Excellence
/
Philippians
Monday, January 08, 2018
True Diversity
We’re all about diversity these days. Multiculturalism and
immigration policies in North America are bringing us into contact with
different cultures, backgrounds and assumptions that were not on the radar of
our parents and grandparents unless they were world travelers.
Paul notes that in the body of Christ, diversity in the type, use and context of spiritual gift is both
acceptable, anticipated and actively empowered by God:
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and
there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers
them all in everyone.”
So in our roles and service in the church, Christians are indeed diverse. But in
other ways, don’t all believers have to be more or less the same?
Labels:
Character
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Personality
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Recycling
Sunday, January 07, 2018
On the Mount (12)
It was entirely ingenuous, I think. There
was nothing calculating about the teenage girl who asked it. I don’t think she
was looking for a pass on any particular sin of her own; she was just curious
how God works.
I was discussing a portion of the Sermon on
the Mount in Sunday School — the part where the Lord says, “Everyone who
looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in
his heart.” I wasn’t trying to be especially relevant or anything, but you know
teenagers.
So she says, “But if you’re already guilty
before God just from looking, why wouldn’t you just go ahead and act on
it then?”
Good question.
Labels:
Adultery
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Lust
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Matthew
/
On the Mount
Saturday, January 06, 2018
A Late New Year’s Thought
I’ve always been kind of a non-conformist. Can’t post a New Year’s thought on New Year’s. Almost didn’t post one at all. You may have noticed IC usually writes almost all the seasonal posts here. If something’s expected, I have real difficulty delivering.
I just don’t much like marching in lockstep or following the crowd. If I find myself
surrounded on my way from Point A to Point B, my first question is “Where
are we going and why are we going there?” My second question is “Who’s
leading us?” by which I really mean, “Does this person have even the foggiest
notion what he’s doing?”
That wariness is a product of having followed
a bunch of people who, well … didn’t.
Labels:
Leadership
/
Psalms
Friday, January 05, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: How I Didn’t Meet Your Mother
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Marriage
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, January 04, 2018
Infinite Improbability and the Multiverse Hypothesis
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Multiverse
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Probability
Wednesday, January 03, 2018
Looking Past the Millennium
The so-called “Lord’s
Prayer”, prayed by millions over centuries, includes the request that “Your
kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
That line is taken as
mere aspiration by many and blithely ignored by many more. Lately it doesn’t
get recited much in public at all. But the kingdom is coming, and it’s coming
here. One wonders exactly how that will go over.
The millennial kingdom
of Jesus Christ is a “must”, as G.B. Fyfe puts it.
Labels:
Millennium
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Peace
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Postmillennialism
/
Prophecy
/
Psalms
Tuesday, January 02, 2018
God’s Great Data Repository
How does the next
generation come to know who we are and what we have learned? Our wisdom, our
knowledge — our very selves, if that were possible — need to be
passed on. In doing so, it is thought, we give our own lives meaning. On their
way to the grave, even hardened materialists appeal to the notion that they
will somehow “live on” in the memories of those with whom they interact. That
hope is illusory: human memory degrades with astounding rapidity.
The invention of
electronic data storage appeared to provide a solution.
Monday, January 01, 2018
Children in the Marketplace
As Rachel Held Evans
is always telling us, Christians in the West have it real good. And for once,
she’s not completely wrong.
When we compare our
current situation to that of believers in Muslim-majority countries today, or
to that of the apostles or Old Testament prophets, or to saints throughout the
last two millennia who have been persecuted and even martyred for confessing
the name of Christ, there’s not a whole lot for us to complain about.
Still, even if it most
often takes the form of generalized online carping rather than direct personal
attacks, Christians in North America do encounter hostility now and again. Such
occasions provide good opportunities to assess exactly what it is to which the
unsaved are reacting so negatively.
Labels:
Christian Testimony
/
Persecution
Sunday, December 31, 2017
On the Mount (11)
After questioning the Lord Jesus, the high
priest stood up before the Jewish council and asked, “What is your decision?”
Mark’s gospel tells us, “they all condemned him to be guilty [enochos] of death.”
That same Greek word, usually translated “guilty”
or “liable”, appears four times in the Sermon on the Mount. It is legal
terminology. The Sanhedrin had no problem delivering its verdict, but it lacked
sufficient clout to carry out its sentence without Rome’s ratification.
In the kingdom of heaven, however, there
are no such inconvenient limitations.
Labels:
Disputes
/
Law
/
Lawsuits
/
Matthew
/
On the Mount
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