So, in August of 2013 I ran to confessionalism. Specifically my ordination was transferred to the Presbyterian Church in America and I became the Lead Pastor of a PCA congregation. The experience has been like finding an oasis in a desert. It has been like discovering a GPS after meandering blindly through an unknown country.... Continue Reading

Herein lies the irony. In the name of not “singling out” homosexual conduct we are, in fact, singling out homosexual conduct. If it is the only sin we treat with these special kid gloves, then we are guilty of treating this sin differently than the others. We are minimizing it in a way we do not minimize any other sin.... Continue Reading

I wish I’d known about the destructive effects of insecurity in a pastor. This is less because I’ve struggled with it and more due to its effect I’ve seen in others. Why is insecurity so damaging?   What follows has been adapted from a brief talk I delivered to the Oklahoma chapter of The Gospel Coalition on... Continue Reading

When you read the headlines, it becomes easy to forget that many homeschoolers fall nowhere near the fundamentalist Christian camp outlined in Joyce’s story, and that even many who do buy gifts from Vision Forum and send their children to Patrick Henry College are sane, loving, empowering parents. They’re not the ones we hear about.... Continue Reading

There is no way to read everything, and not everything deserves to be read. I say that in order to confront the notion that anyone, anywhere, can master all that could be read with profit. I read a great deal, and a large portion of my waking hours are devoted to reading. Devotional reading for... Continue Reading

Whenever the Wise Men visited Jesus (and I think it was likely sometime in the first 6 months after His birth), it is very appropriate for us to ponder the significance of their visit right after the beginning of a New Year. The dawn of a New Year prompts us to think in terms of... Continue Reading

The paradox is that growing or shrinking numbers do not tell you anything. The Gospel would still be true even if no one believed it. The hopeful thing is that, where it is tried – where it is imperfectly and hesitantly followed – as it was in Northern Ireland during the peace process, as it... Continue Reading

This is part of the beauty, and necessity, of catechisms–learning biblical truth about God and humanity not only for ourselves, but also as a point of reference while in conversations with others, many whom are curious, skeptical, or hostile about Christianity and its place in the modern world. A catechism combined with wisdom, tact, grace,... Continue Reading

We return to the determinative factor of context. Clearly, modern preachers and believers who use terms like “passion” and circumscribe the semantic range by placing it in syntactical relation with prepositional phrases like “for God” or “in worshiping God” or “for lost souls” are well within biblical and lexical grounds of propriety and should not... Continue Reading

In our culture as Christians, we must always be kingdom-minded and aware of world views.  We have a world view based on the Bible.  We use Biblical terms and Biblical definitions for terms.  We as Christians formulate our opinions and our view of the world on every subject from the Bible if it even touches... Continue Reading