“Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence? We live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts. Everywhere we turn we hear complaints: I can’t spend my money the way I want; I can’t spend my time the way I want; I can’t be myself; I’m under the control of others all the time. And everywhere we […]
I’ve been waiting a long time to read something like the following selections from Tullian Tchividjian’s book Jesus + Nothing = Everything. Of course, regular immersion in Scripture will lead to the same conclusions, but you never know what you’ll run across in some downtime reading. Expressing his disdain for “accountability groups” Tchividjian writes, “All parties involved believe that the guiltier we feel, the more holy we are” (p180). I’ve found […]
What a difference one letter makes! Repentance is one “t” away from wholesale gospel distortion. Without its “t” repentance is re-penance, which is often what we consider repentance to be. However, repentance is not repeated penance, but one’s change of mind toward sin and its empty promise of life eternal. What we often demand from others in the name of repentance is really acts of penance that prove they’ve overcome […]
The Gospel Coalition published yet another great post from the insightful and provocative Kevin DeYoung. Entitled “Dude, Where’s Your Bride?”, the article addresses what DeYoung considers a paucity of marriagable Christian men. This trend, as DeYoung cites, is part of the larger trend among all men. There is simply a generation of men without “substance” and “plans.” In typical DeYoung fashion, he provides helpful correctives for women-seeking-men and churches […]
In the latest Touchstone Magazine Daniel Boerman wrote a sweet article entitled “When the Wood is Dry.” The following excerpt was most edifying: There is . . . a gospel for sufferers. Jesus not only suffered in our place; he also suffered as an example for us to follow. He warns us that obedience in a sinful and fallen world will not be easy. The world does not appreciate or […]
“Failures in particular circumstances don’t mean the failure of the kingdom. Our Lord is faithfully warning us from the beginning that we are going to meet with a variety of failure and that that is always going to pain us. One thing we must never do and that is to turn every failure onto ourselves and say, if only we as a church had been a more loving, and a […]
We have enough Bibles for every household in America a couple of times over. We have churches galore; religious organizations; educational institutions; religious presses that never stop pouring forth books, Sunday school materials, and religious curricula; and unparalleled financial resources. What don’t we have? All too often we don’t have what the Old Testament people didn’t have. A due and weighty sense of the greatness and holiness of God, a […]
Does not the gospel call into fellowship those whom a society divides? There, side by side, should we not see the rich and the poor, men and women, powerful and marginalized, boomer and nonboomer all united in the same Christ by whom they have all been bought? (David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant, p57). There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is […]
Don’t miss this great article by Jim Eliff on the absolute necessity of the local church in the Christian life. “Church” is not what we do or where we go, it’s who we are.
You’ll read Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God in one sitting and here’s an excerpt from p38 to get you started: Why is [the elder brother in Jesus’s parable in Lk 15.11-32] so angry with the father? He feels he has the right to tell the father how the robes, rings, and livestock of the family should be deployed. In the same way, religious people commonly live very moral lives, but […]