If we’re honest with ourselves, we really don’t want God’s grace. Maybe a more accurate way of putting it is that we don’t want to have to need it…In a sense, we buy into the lie that says we never needed God’s grace until we blew it! Kind of like my saying that until I got Vitiligo my skin was perfect. Like I never had a zit!

Religious ritual cannot take away sin. The Jewish people made a tragic mistake. They took the symbols of sacrifice and started to treat them like they were the real thing, like adherence to religious ritual could actually take away sin. People do that today when they think that certain religious rituals (like taking communion, regular church attendance, tithing, or saying a ‘Hail Mary’) can take away their sin

[W]e are not to try to guess the result of our behavior. We are supposed to do what God commands. We are not responsible for the results of what we do. We are responsible to obey whatsoever God commands. We are called not to success, but to obedience.

Notice that in the current debate about spiritual gifts many in the charismatic movement (but probably not most Pentecostals) agree that apostles - in the sense of those who are "first" among the gifts given to the Church, like the 12 and Paul - are not present in the Church today. In that respect, at least, whether or not they care to think of themselves as such, the large majority of today's charismatics are in fact "cessationists."

Ethnic specific churches historically have served as a place of cultural cultivation and identity affirmation. It is in the black church that I first learned God made me black on purpose and that I can be proud of how God made me. Who I am as a person was forged within the confines of an ethnic specific congregation

Chuck Colson often said that Christians cannot impose their views on anyone. Instead, we propose. That applies to human sexuality. Our job is to hold out to a hurting world a better way to live, a way that points to love and human flourishing, to human wholeness.

The Bishop of our souls knows us better than we know ourselves. Although ministers and bishops are called to follow our Lord’s example, we will never have a pastor or elder who cares for our souls anywhere near the degree to which Christ, our Bishop, does. The titles that the New Testament writers use for... Continue Reading

What eluded Paterno, and what is crystal-clear from the Freeh report, is that the quasi-religious reverence with which the football program was held within the culture of the university, and in particular the secular godlike authority granted to Paterno, made this horrifying scandal possible. When the perceived good of the institution is taken as the... Continue Reading

In the Reformed church we are not comfortable with “numbers.” It is not numbers that count but faithfulness…The danger, however, is that we come by this route to develop an “un-expectant mindset.” We see our smallness and assume that “small is beautiful;” the more truly Reformed we are, the smaller we inevitably will be. But... Continue Reading

Air power is intrinsically awesome, involving—as it does—death from above, out of the blue. Its technological handmaiden flows from humanity’s greatest intellectual accomplishments. When absent God, human advancement—whether ideological, political, philosophical or technological—reflects our intrinsic nature, which is evil. Better we fly with a wing and a prayer. Not long ago, a group of 66... Continue Reading