While few of us today seek to follow the Pharisaical model, this level of misery is alive and well among those who misunderstand the complementarity of law and gospel and seek to earn favor with God through both keeping the law and misappropriating it to extrapolate a set of personal convictions—often related to modes of... Continue Reading

Surely no one who had actually been in heaven would neglect to mention what Scripture shows is its main focus. If you had spent an evening dining with a king, you wouldn’t just talk about the place settings. When John was shown heaven and wrote about it, he recorded the details — but first and... Continue Reading

Dale W. Brown, who writes from a perspective sympathetic to pietism, identifies five central motifs: 1) a turn to the practical; 2) a primitivist reading of Scripture, which is described as Biblicism; 3) an emphasis on sanctification and ethics; 4) an emphasis on religious experience; 5) acts of mercy (Dale W. Brown, Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,... Continue Reading

I see the internet spats. The calling out. The dissension. The accusations. High profile leaders or high prolific tweeters are targeting and targeted. Social media is awash with charges and pointed fingers. We are doing the opposite of what Jesus did by shaking Judas and neglecting the greater mission. I have no doubt that this... Continue Reading

It is not necessary for one to be able to say where or when he came to new life and true faith. That is a human invention not biblical truth. Our confidence is not in our experience nor in our memory of an experience but in Christ, in his person, in his finished work for... Continue Reading

Retelling the story of redemptive history in every sermon runs the risk of monotony after preaching chapter one. Preaching Christ should never be boring or tedious. Theology and devotion become the primary tools of preaching Christ throughout Amos. Every denunciation of prophets, priests, and kings should lead us to Christ’s fulfillment of these offices by contrast.... Continue Reading

Christianity is a primitive religion that the apostles made up to fit the needs of the community. The argument goes that Christianity is no longer suited to the modern world, that the apostles supposedly edited, adapted, and transformed Jesus to fit the needs of their community. However, this is very unlikely. The apostles wrote their... Continue Reading

To love our friends, families, and neighbors as Jesus loves us calls for the relinquishing of requirements we naturally put on the recipients of our love. Active, concrete love means that we keep loving even when that love is despised and unappreciated. Our love is to be cruciform, cross-shaped.   In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers... Continue Reading

Today’s squishy Christianity has trouble articulating the gospel, or explaining the necessity of the cross, or affirming a bodily resurrection, or even finding solid footing to take a stand. Surveys have shown that the person in the pew is biblically-illiterate and theologically-indifferent. As a result, the church finds itself ill prepared to be the salt... Continue Reading

“So, is the Reformation over? My answer to that question is this: The Reformation is over only to the extent that, in some measure, it has succeeded. And, in some measure, of course, it has succeeded—and succeeded even more within the Catholic world than in certain sectors of mainline Protestantism.”   Several years ago, Mark... Continue Reading