Wisdom sayings and admonitions are not law commands per se, although keeping God’s law is surely wise. Mostly, we prefer laws since they tell us what to do. Wisdom, on the other hand, takes more effort, so we tend to shy away from learning how the world works and the reasons, benefits, and purposes of... Continue Reading

To be faithful to the whole story of salvation, Christians are eager to say, as well, that apart from the work of the Father and the Holy Spirit, we have no good news. If we separate what Christ accomplishes in salvation from what the Father and the Holy Spirit have done (and are doing), then... Continue Reading

Five hundred years have now passed since the Protestant Reformation first took root, and so it’s fair to say we’ve had ample time to assess and judge the tree by its fruit. And certainly the small seed of Luther’s protest has become like “a large tree, so that the birds of the air come and... Continue Reading

But I don’t simply want to say, “Don’t say it!” I want to explore the assumptions that have made this phrase our culture’s calling card. By looking at two problems with the phrase, we can examine ourselves and see how much we have adopted these cultural assumptions, even if we don’t use the phrase, “Speak... Continue Reading

The reason ministry requires “toil” (the focus of this word is not on mere labor but on the exhaustion and weariness that it induces) and “struggling” is not hard to understand. On the one hand, there are our own fleshly desires and bodily weaknesses to contend with. The physical demands of ministry are obvious. For... Continue Reading

The Cannons of Dort were the product of ecclesiastical deliberation on the attempt by some within the Reformed church in the Netherlands fundamentally to revise our doctrine of salvation. The Canons do not speak to many other topics in Reformed theology, piety, and practice. Further, what the churches were defending was the Word of God... Continue Reading

Chalmers suggests that we have only to look at Christian conversion as God’s revealing to us the immeasurable value and beauty of Jesus Christ. Jesus unseats any would-be pretenders to the throne of our hearts. And because Jesus is the most valuable possession a person can possess, He cannot be unseated. But that doesn’t mean... Continue Reading

I do not intend to propose a strict bifurcation between the literary nature of Jonah and the provenance of Jonah. I only wish to encourage the reader to see Jonah first as literature, and only then, after a strong understanding of its literary cues, should the reader turn to matters of provenance. Furthermore, I contend... Continue Reading

Twenty-two years ago, it was not considered hate speech for Ken to tell me that he accepted me as a lesbian, but did not approve. I rejected Ken’s worldview, and he rejected mine. We were on even ground. We saw clearly our worldview differences, but those divisions, back then, did not come with the accusatory... Continue Reading

Brothers and sisters in Christ are meant to model their love, commitment, and purity on the familial relationship. Besides the hundreds of verses that exhort us to live as brothers and sisters, we have some very specific teaching on relationships: Treat “older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity,” says Paul to... Continue Reading