My pastor knows his people. My wife and I needed this practical exhortation to jump-start our annual Bible reading. I do think that one of the biggest lessons I'm still learning about life in this modern world is that every choice to value something is necessarily a...
Piety
Stumblingblocks
In my personal experience, violations of the following Pauline command mostly tend to fall into one category. Let us ... decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. (Rom 14:13) That category is entertainment. In my own life nothing...
Alan Jacobs: The Hermeneutics of Love
Anything combining love and epistemology fascinates me, so I've thought of the following excerpt from Alan Jacobs' challenging book A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love many times. If he or his publisher believes that including an excerpt of this length (I...
Review: Crazy Busy, by Kevin DeYoung
What do you get when you put together a gifted, kind of techie young communicator from the culturally conservative end of the neo-Reformed spectrum with a contemporary topic like our culture's crazy busyness? This book had the feel of one that wrote itself—to take...
Another Verse I Never Understood
Another verse I never understood, and I'm pretty excited about this one. I can't exactly blame the King James, because I don't think the KJV translators did anything wrong. And the ESV and NASB translators did pretty much the same thing. Here's the verse, Psalm 16:6:...
Kim on Carr on How Our Tools Shape Us
Joseph Kim at Second Nature quotes Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain…. I used to find it easy to immerse myself...
Authoritative Application?
My respected friend Joel Arnold probably does need to leave this country, as he currently plans to do. What he says is downright un-American: Believers have not obeyed God's commands until they are willing to make authoritative and spiritually guided application of...
Flavel and Piper on Antinomianism
According to Flavel, antinomians fail to distinguish, as they ought, between vindictive punishment from God, the pure issues and effects of his justice and wrath against the wicked; and his paternal castigations, the pure issues of the care and love of a displeased...
Excellent, Edifying (and Even Entertaining) Sermon on a Controversial Topic
My thinking—and my soul—really profited from this sermon by Kevin DeYoung. The thoughts were not new to me, since I'd read his excellent book The Hole in Our Holiness, but I had forgotten how engaging (and humorous) he was in person. One of the newest reasons I've...
Charles Bridges, Exposition of Psalm CXIX, 90.
But we must not be content with walking in this way; we must seek to "delight in it." Delight is the marrow of religion. "God loveth a cheerful giver," and accepts obedience only when it is given, not when it is forced. He loves the service of that man, who considers...
A John Frame Sighting!
Why do I think John Frame's triperspectivalism is so important? Because it provides what I take to be scriptural (or at least scripturally-consistent) lenses; and when I look through those lenses I see with greater clarity. It happens all the time. It just happened,...
Everyone Knows Best and Everyone Knows All
These comments have come back to my mind many times since I read them. The author lays out an incredibly difficult vision to live up to. I honestly quail in the face of it. But love for my neighbor demands it, and I seek by God's grace to do it. I tried to shorten...