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
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Thursday, April 12, 2018
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
How Occasional is Occasional?
I have a Christian acquaintance of many years who is morbidly obese at the very high end of the
spectrum. No quasi-medical justification (hormones, glands, depression, etc.)
can fully account for her inability to lose weight. While there are certainly
other factors involved, one is surely the consumption of large quantities of superfluous calories.
It is well established
in scripture that gluttony is a
sin, like
any other out-of-control behavior. While obesity and gluttony are not synonymous (one can be thin and voraciously gluttonous), it is hard to argue that the inability to say no
is normal, healthy Christian behavior.
My simple question: is she saved?
Labels:
1 John
/
Forgiveness
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Practice
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Righteousness
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Sin
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Housekeeping
As we close in on five years and 1,600 posts, I
realized I needed to do a bit of housekeeping.
You’ll notice a new set of links right below the ComingUntrue banner (two lines of bold
grey text). These take you to separate index pages with a list of links to
every installment in our ongoing features and series in consecutive order. (Completed
series on specific subject areas are still in the left sidebar right below the
blog archive in alphabetical order.)
When I get a chance, I’ll try to make these indices a little
more useful by adding things like who’s being quoted in each installment of
Quote of the Day, or which blog is being recommended in each Recommend-a-blog,
but this seemed like enough for one day.
Labels:
General
How Not to Crash and Burn (1)
As a result, we live among people with a chronic inability to connect the dots; to discover where
and how the choices they made at various points in their lives have inexorably rung
in the consequences they experience and bemoan today.
In a ward full of patients, we are desperately short of diagnosticians.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Parenting
/
Proverbs
/
Wisdom
Monday, April 09, 2018
Not a New Problem
When the apostle John wrote his first of three letters preserved for us in the New Testament, it’s quite
possible he was attempting to address a very specific local issue, and that the
letter’s intended recipients would have understood what he wrote primarily in
their own local context.
If so, he wrote it in a remarkably broad and general way, touching on issues that have troubled
mankind since the very beginning of its history.
It seems to me that in his thinking John goes right back to the first chapters of Genesis.
Labels:
1 John
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Abiding in Christ
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Adam
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Eve
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Genesis
Sunday, April 08, 2018
On the Mount (25)
As I have done repeatedly during our study of the Sermon on the Mount, I find myself attempting to sit in the place of the Lord’s original Jewish audience.
Do it with me, and picture the crowd around you, many of whom will never own a home and none of whom have ever heard of welfare, pensions, socialized medicine, public school or any other sort of government-mandated social safety net. Those here who are too old, too young, or too infirm to work are entirely dependent on their families. The women present rely on the industriousness, goodwill, fidelity, fortune and health of their husbands far more so than today. Even the working men and the few rich among us are surely far more conscious of the perils of war, famine and drought that periodically plague their nation’s economy, and the potential consequences of these on their families and dependents.
In short, everybody in the Lord’s audience has WAY more reason to be anxious than most readers of this post.
Labels:
Anxiety
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Matthew
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On the Mount
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Worry
Saturday, April 07, 2018
Semi-Random Musings (6)
Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, who have attempted to put together
possible timelines of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances to his disciples over the period prior
to his ascension.
As anyone who has attempted this will tell you, synthesizing four Gospel accounts and the summary
Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 15 is no easy task. There is simply not
enough information provided to dogmatize about some of the details. Some calculate
10 appearances, others 12. Most don’t speculate.
One thing nobody can reasonably fail to notice about the appearances is this: however long each may
have been, and however many of them there may have been, there is still an
awful lot of time unaccounted for in between appearances ... the better part of
forty days, in fact.
Friday, April 06, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: Snatched Up
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Matthew
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Rapture
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Revelation
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, April 05, 2018
Wednesday, April 04, 2018
The New Head
That decision runs
counter to customary business practice, which dictates that management
functions are best performed by those trained and accredited to manage. However,
the conventional wisdom fails to take into account that the learning curve for
a manager in a new environment is long and steep. More importantly, the staff can
have no confidence in or loyalty to someone who has been merely parachuted in;
who knows nothing about the company’s product, processes and people — let
alone someone who has no investment in what they are working to accomplish (beyond,
of course, nailing down and taking home his annual bonus package).
So you appoint from within. At least, that’s how God did it.
Labels:
Christ
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Daniel
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Son of Man
Tuesday, April 03, 2018
Christians That Need to Be Saved
A man in a local church I used to attend had a habit of
coming up to people and asking them exactly when and how they had been saved.
He would probe for very specific details of the blessed event, presumably to confirm that
the person he was interrogating was the real deal, genuinely a believer. I can’t remember what
he did when he was dissatisfied with the answer but I’m not sure it was
anything particularly helpful.
When he did it to me, it kind of threw me. Frankly, I didn’t know how to respond to him.
Monday, April 02, 2018
Recommend-a-blog (26)
The Stand to Reason blog, a Christian online resource I’ve recommended here once or
twice previously, has moved to a new domain. You can find a link to it here, midway across the banner atop
the main page.
Always useful to be bookmarking the right thing!
Of the more recent posts I’d missed before discovering
they’d moved, this one on inerrancy was most intriguing: Aaron Brake asks Does the Lack of
Original Autographs Make Biblical Inerrancy Irrelevant?
Labels:
Daniel Wallace
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Inerrancy
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Recommend-a-blog
/
Stand to Reason
Sunday, April 01, 2018
On the Mount (24)
Well, okay, fine … there are probably more than that. But I’m thinking of two very different kinds. The obsessive
sort of hatred is obvious: it turns the stomach sour, occupies the mind
constantly and spoils the enjoyment of life. Saul’s hatred must have been
something like that. He expended ridiculous amounts of emotional energy and
resources in attempting to rid the world of David, very much to his own
detriment.
The other kind of hatred is despite.
Labels:
Matthew
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Money
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On the Mount
Saturday, March 31, 2018
The Things Prepared
To have had truth made known to you is not the same as understanding truth.
Parents will grasp this instantly. You’re
correcting your five-year old, and he asks why, so you explain. He can
process the words. He can retain the words. They have been “made known” to
him, and they have become part of his experience. They reside in his memory,
where he can access them and make use of them when he grows into them.
But your words are not of much practical use to him in the moment, because he doesn’t yet fully comprehend them.
Labels:
1 Corinthians
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John
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Revelation
Friday, March 30, 2018
Too Hot to Handle: The Golden Age
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Dispensationalism
/
Millennium
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Attack of the Killer Reason
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Neo-Calvinism
/
Questions
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
All the Time You Need
“Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.”
How long does it take to get saved?
Some people spend their whole lives working at it. They go
to church, they provide for their families, they confess their sins, they
contribute to religious causes, they try to treat people well, they “do unto
others”. Some follow laws and religious regulations year after year.
But it’s not a trick question, nor a particularly
complicated one.
Labels:
Christ
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Crucifixion
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Faith
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Recycling
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Repentance
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
The Leaders and the Led
The answer in many quarters these days is “servanthood”. The term “servant leadership” is said to have been
coined by Robert Greenleaf in a 1970 essay, allegedly after reading a story by Hermann Hesse. Greenleaf’s concept has since been
promoted by numerous evangelicals, including
John Piper and
the Acts 29 network of churches, of which ubiquitous YouTube presence Matt Chandler is president.
At one level, who can argue? “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” “If
I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought
to wash one another’s feet.”
Pretty unambiguous, really.
Labels:
Leadership
/
Matthew
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Servant
Monday, March 26, 2018
The Rest of the Psalm
So said the exiles of Judah in Babylon, and they wept as they recalled it. Their real home was far away. They belonged in Zion, and their present
status was, to all appearances, quite degraded. Had things gone as they should,
God’s people would have been singing psalms in the temple courts of the great
city of Jerusalem, not sitting in servitude by the waters of Babylon.
But there they were all the same.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
On the Mount (23)
I like to think of wisdom as applied
reality: taking one’s knowledge of the actual nature of things and working that
knowledge through in a very practical way in the circumstances of life.
That sort of discernment is pictured for us
metaphorically in scripture. It is not that the Lord Jesus came so that men and
women might pay lip service to a particular series of moral data points, but that we might
make use of those facts to act in our own best interests, in the best interests
of others, and ultimately and most importantly, in accordance with the will of God.
The metaphor the Lord uses to describe
applied reality is light: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me
will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Being able to
see where we are going is exceedingly practical, and has tremendous value.
Labels:
Discernment
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On the Mount
/
Wisdom
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