Instead of the people of God being ‘salt and light’ and incarnating the presence of God derivatively in the world, the church is incarnating the world under the guise of professed Christianity. The clamour in many congregations and denominations is ‘to be more like the world in order that we might attract the world’. This... Continue Reading

Did I explain the text? Related questions are, Did the congregation walk away from the sermon and have a better understanding of the biblical passage? Did the congregation learn something about the text? The last thing you want your congregation to do is to walk out of church and be filled with awe and wonder,... Continue Reading

At the end of the day, many of the people that I have invested in have either rejected Christ or walked away from their previous commitment to him (sigh). Our current lives are no different. We are “front line” missionaries living among a lost people group. And what do I spend my days doing? Mainly... Continue Reading

Conscience has always played an indispensable role in Christianity.  Jonathan Edwards calls conscience “the instrument in the hand of God, to accuse, condemn, terrify, and to urge to duty.”  The importance of individual conscience stands out conspicuously in the Bible.  However, within the moral universe of leftism, the concept of victimhood silences or perverts individual conscience.    With astonishing... Continue Reading

When Chau’s death became international news, many Christians were keen to disavow his actions; Chau’s father believes the American missionary community is culpable in his son’s death. John was an “innocent child”, his father told me, who died from an “extreme” vision of Christianity taken to its logical conclusion.   One day, as a small... Continue Reading

Addictions always involve some idolatry of the heart that, when pursued repeatedly, conditions the soul and the body in such a way that the freedom of personhood becomes warped, bent toward a particular object and, far worse, bent away from God. When this happens, the most entrenched kind of sin takes over a person’s motivations.... Continue Reading

There are of course looser and stricter applications of this rule, and many of the stricter ones seem to reach bizarrely unbiblical conclusions, such as excluding all musical instruments (um, ever read the Psalms, fellas?).  In principle, though, regulativists agree in denying the so-called “normative principle,” viz., that the Church may worship in any way... Continue Reading

Sermon applications get into trouble when the preacher identifies a particular application and lays it on the conscience of all their hearers in equal measure. With no attention to the range of individuals and contexts. This clumsiness is often made worse when moving from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Passages which are primarily addressed... Continue Reading

I think it’s fair to say that there are two line-items ordinarily emphasized by the Bible. The first are relief funds for the poor (see Acts 2:45, 4:34, Romans 15:26, 2 Corinthians 9:9, and Ephesians 4:28). As God’s own riches are measured in his mercies (see Ephesians 2:4) it’s the peculiar glory of the church... Continue Reading

In Deuteronomy 33, Moses addresses the tribes of Israel with words of blessing. The blessing for each tribe is custom-made. God does not offer one-size-fits-all blessings to his people; but, rather, tailors them to their circumstances and need. But what is so striking about these blessings is the ‘bookends’ between which they are sandwiched. They... Continue Reading