A Review of “A Praying Church: Becoming a People of Hope in a Discouraging World”
This book exhorts the church to return to a basic Christian practice, specifically focusing on the church’s corporate prayer.
I will be returning to this book’s early chapters for material on biblical foundations for prayer and thinking hard about how to overcome obstacles for helping God’s people pray. Foremost, Miller’s case rings true that a prayerful church starts with prayerful leadership. He is on the mark to remind us that nothing about the church... Continue Reading
Political Religion
Book Review: Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land Without Reformation, by Joel Looper
Critics of “Christian nationalism” speak as though there were something wrong with Christianity’s shaping public life. Bonhoeffer suggests, by contrast, that the real problem is when Christian faith is shaped by politics. What if the word of God were let loose in America, not merely in service of our national norms, but in order to... Continue Reading
He Is (Still) There, and He Is Not Silent
Francis Schaeffer’s Classic Defense of Christian Truth Turns 50
Schaeffer understood that the modern spiritual crisis is an intellectual crisis, and that the intellectual crisis is a spiritual crisis. At the center of this crisis is a denial of God, and that denial of God produces an intellectual crisis that quickly translates into a cultural and moral catastrophe. The one central point that Schaeffer... Continue Reading
Equality Ad Absurdum
The pursuit of woke social justice is anathema to America’s flourishing.
In Plato’s Republic, social justice is about finding harmony among all the diverse elements of society to achieve The Good. By contrast, woke social justice brands certain segments of society “oppressors” and seeks to purge them, even as it mouths platitudes about seeking diversity. Woke social justice is also antithetical to justice in the classical sense... Continue Reading
Sex & The Final Christian Generation
The sexual chaos and idolatry conquered by the early church has come roaring back -- and today's Christians don't know what time it is.
There is a reason why when Christians give up Christian sexual morality, they sooner or later give up Christianity. The Biblical rules of Christian sexual conduct are inextricably rooted in a particular vision of what the human person is, under God, and how believers are supposed to treat the material world, their bodies (and the... Continue Reading
The Priesthood of the Father, Giving Up the Son
Review: Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement, Donald Macleod
The Son is the priest who offers Himself without spot to God, and the Father is the priest in giving His eternally beloved Son as a sacrifice for the sin of His people. Jesus has been “given for us” by the Father (Isaiah 9:6) so that we might be reconciled to God. In his... Continue Reading
Book Review: “Psalms,” by James M. Hamilton, Jr.
These two volumes should now be the minimum for the preacher’s library on the Psalter.
Hamilton has produced a landmark commentary on the Psalms. It is by no means the last word, but by placing each psalm in its canonical context Hamilton is introducing the wider Christian community into the conversation concerning the Psalter’s shape. Indeed, Hamilton models what preaching the Psalms in their canonical context might look like. ... Continue Reading
The Truths of Which We Now Sing (1 Tim 3:16)
Six lyrical phrases from what was most probably an early Christian hymn, sung in three stanzas of two lines each. Let’s consider the truth revealed in each line.
We sing because we have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of sinners. We sing because we have received and are resting upon Christ alone for salvation as He is offered in the Gospel. Don’t sneer at us who sing. Join us in our confession and sing with us... Continue Reading
Listen to Your Elders, Not the Experts
You don’t need a peer-reviewed study to know it’s a bad idea to give a five-year-old an iPhone.
It is not age-old wisdom, but credentialed expertise that engenders our trust nowadays. We take our cue not from grandpa and grandma and their advice of “a little bourbon on the gums,” but from experts in psychology and sociology penning peer-reviewed studies that tell us obvious, common-sense verities. Several years ago my wife and... Continue Reading
The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism
Book Review: "The Case for Christian Nationalism," by Stephen Wolfe
Biblical instincts are better than nationalist ones, and the ethos of the Christian Nationalism project fails the biblical smell test. Will the person who goes all in on this book—the person who says “yes” to every rant, the person who feels drawn to the vision of ethnic separation, the person who is just biding his... Continue Reading
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- …
- 291
- Next Page »