Idol of the Week
A nation casts about in search of its God.
We can impoverish ourselves and rend our garments in pursuit of environmental, racial, moral, or medical purity. But “the gifts and sacrifices being offered are not able to clear the conscience of the worshipper” (Hebrews 9). There is and has only ever been one God who can do that. Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution,... Continue Reading
You Don’t Have to Suffer Alone
We long for presence—both the presence of God, who draws near in our pain, and the presence of others who can minister his grace.
Suffering can be one of the loneliest experiences, making us feel estranged and isolated from our friends, from our community, and from God. Yet paradoxically, as we let the church minister to us in our pain, leaning into God and into our friends, letting them carry us when we are weak, we often will find... Continue Reading
What Grieving Parents Wish You Knew
Parents who have lost a child to the world face different challenges than those who have lost children to death.
The church needs to understand this grief. We must understand in order to care for parents and families who are walking this hard road as well as for the children who are wandering. We need to understand in order to love well and pray well. Losing a child is a terrible thing. It strikes... Continue Reading
How David Brooks, Peter Wehner and Others Fail to Address Evangelical Divisions
Some recent careful articles have tried to analyze and illuminate this breakdown, but they are often one-sided, which means that they may simply exacerbate the very tensions they lament.
There is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by treating those with whom we differ as if they were tribal objects in a quasi-anthropological investigation. Are those who differ from us merely stupid, or perhaps venal, or even evil? Were they simply dropped on their heads as infants? Or do they have... Continue Reading
Sexual Sin and The Golden Rule
Society is pressuring the church to accept homosexuality as a legitimate moral alternate lifestyle; the church must maintain God’s created order and ethical norms.
Jesus reaches out to sinners with love, but Jesus does not condone their sins. He offers sinners not a tolerance to live in their sins but deliverance from their sins. If we need an example to show us how to implement the Golden Rule, surely this example is found in Jesus as revealed to us... Continue Reading
Greg Johnson’s “Still Time to Care” Repeatedly Misrepresents the RPCES
Greg Johnson’s interpretation about what the RPCES adopted on homosexuality in 1980 is erroneous and misguided.
In Synod’s long paragraph on Call to Repentance, we find that we must not deny responsibility for or excuse “unnatural desires” even if they began in infancy. (Johnson does not quote that part of the report.) Synod’s report then disagrees with Johnson head on when it speaks of cure when it says, “In sanctification we... Continue Reading
Christianity and a Word from Moby Dick
We must not abuse the idea of grace. It is not only the grace to believe that God gives us, but the grace to act.
Paul said, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Cor 15:10). Open your Bible and find out what that life is like.... Continue Reading
How Partisan Politics Captured And Fractured The Evangelical-Industrial Complex
The rise and fall of the Evangelical Industrial Complex call into question whether theology and politics should be treated as enemies.
So what went wrong? How did “the remarkable coming together” of these doctrine-bonded evangelicals fall apart? The short answer is the politics of the blue communities. What counts as winsomeness in any community is determined by that community, not by those looking to be found winsome to them. In blue communities, partisan political preferences proved... Continue Reading
The Judgment of Charity in Questions of Official Misconduct
To use the judgment of charity is to use a sound teaching in an unsound way. Its failure lies in its imbalance: it overemphasizes the charity element to the neglect of the judgmental element.
…it is not the duty of any listener, much less of the church as governing institution, to perform whatever adjustments are necessary to make a problematic teaching palatable. If someone’s teaching is so unclear or apparently wrong when left to itself that it has to undergo some manner of creative interpretation to be regarded as... Continue Reading
Doctrinal Latitude and the PCA
The PCA’s latitudinarians have made clear their belief that the PCA must allow the ordination to sacred office of men who identify themselves by unnatural sexual desires.
If the PCA cannot or will not rid itself of gay Christianity, Side-B homosexuality, Revoice, or whatever else you want to call it—we will find ourselves on the boneyard of formerly faithful churches. Such will be the price of this brand of latitude. Recently, a pastor in the PCA and member of the National... Continue Reading
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