Watchfulness: Recovering a Lost Spiritual Discipline
Watchfulness is as necessary to a healthy spiritual life as meditation and prayer.
The Christian life is a journey, a race, and a battle. As pilgrims, we travel the long winding road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. As athletes, we are called to forget what lies behind and, with eyes fixed on Jesus, to cast aside every hindrance to completing the race of faith.... Continue Reading
3 Ways to Know You Worship the True God
As you come to recognize that the story of Scripture is the story of reality, you can begin to see that God works to bring you into eternal life.
The God of the Bible is a strange God not the kind of God we can manage, manipulate, accommodate, or domesticate to our familiar experience. When God actually confronts us, our speculations are exposed as idols, our experiences judged as little more than a projection of ourselves, and our felt needs give way to more... Continue Reading
In My Place Condemned He Stood
The main burden of McCall’s piece is to show that some popular preaching on the cross is at odds with orthodox Trinitarian theology.
According to McCall, “God against God” theories of the atonement imply (or explicitly teach) that God’s Trinitarian life was ruptured on Good Friday. And yet, McCall argues, God could not turn his face away from the Son, because the Father is one with the Son. “To say that the Trinity is broken—even ‘temporarily’—is to imply... Continue Reading
Let’s Rethink Our Language of ‘Calling’
n my view, the calling language—at least how I usually hear it applied—creates an unhealthy expectation.
My concern is not that we move away from the vocabulary of the Bible because “calling” is used consistently in Scripture. I merely desire to be more careful in how we apply it. Christians are the beloved and “called” of God (Jude 1:1; Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:24–31). All Christians share certain callings in Scripture, like the calling... Continue Reading
Why are There No Chairs Inside the Tabernacle?
For the priests serving in the tabernacle, there was no sitting on the job.
The priests in the tabernacle had no need of a chair because their work never ended, but Jesus Christ, the Great High Priest, offered himself as a single sacrifice for sins, for all time (Hebrews 10:12). After his sacrifice was offered and accepted, he did what no other priest serving in the tabernacle had done... Continue Reading
The Active Obedience of Christ – No Hope Without It!
Christ's active obedience to the will of God is inseparable from his passive obedience.
The passive sufferings of Christ discharged the enormous debt we owe, due to our sins and the sin of Adam. In effect, Jesus’ passive obedience alone would bring our account from hopelessly overdrawn back to a zero balance – our debt would be retired. But having our debt retired and our sins forgiven does not... Continue Reading
The Loving Father Who Judges?
Peter sees no conflict with God’s compassion and his justice.
God, who “disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness,” deserves far greater reverence than even the best earthly fathers (Heb. 12:10). Peter knows unless his people have a sense of holy reverence for their Father—the Holy One with grand purposes for them far beyond comfort or social acceptance—the pressure to... Continue Reading
The Origin and Presence of False Teaching
Since we are called to be alert to the threat of false teaching in our midst, for what should we be looking?
If we expect that a sudden and dramatic falsehood will enter the church, we will not be looking in the right place. It is true that great falsehoods have been found in the church, but not typically in a sudden fashion. The enemy of our souls prefers a subtler approach, sowing doubts and twisting the... Continue Reading
Roseanne, Gender Bending, And The War Against Nature (1)
There is a creational pattern and as part of that creational pattern males and females are different and complementary in obvious and in less obvious ways.
It is important to distinguish between social convention and nature but not everything is a convention to be deconstructed. Nature remains. The differences between boys and girls cannot be reduced to social constructs. Boys and girls are obviously different biologically, even if it is not currently fashionable to say so. As a boy of 56... Continue Reading
Formulating Doctrine
Formulating Christian doctrine, especially as it relates to the doctrine of the Trinity, is not as simple as counting texts which use the same words.
When systematic theology does its work properly, each topic’s statements are formulated by a canonical consultation, a consultation of Scripture as a finished product of divine revelation, and in conversation with historical theology. Systematic theology reduces all the truths of Holy Scripture concerning given topics to propositional form. Similarly, confessional formulations seek to reduce large... Continue Reading