. . Tim Challies: Several times in the past decade D.A. Carson has been asked to give a public lecture at one university or another. Three times he has taken the opportunity to speak on the subject of tolerance, or intolerance, as the case may be. Those lectures proved the foundation of what would become his cleverly-titled new book, The Intolerance of Tolerance. Here’s the thing: In a society obsessed with tolerance, we are actually not tolerant at all. It’s all a big lie, a big fiction, and we’re all playing along. In order to claim tolerance we’ve had to rewrite the definition of the term and in so doing we’ve put ourselves on dangerous ground. Tolerance has become part of the Western “plausability structure”–a stance that is assumed and is not to be questioned. We are to be tolerant at all times. Well, almost all times, that is. Carson begins by showing that tolerance presupposes disagreement. That’s the beauty of being tolerant–one person expresses
Culture
Gospel Power for a Secular Age
By Christopher Morgan and Greg Cochran: The gospel has been, is, and will always be powerful in every culture—including our secular age. Through the gospel, God still turns antagonists into his children. And through the gospel, he still forms communities who display and communicate the realities of his grace. Indeed, this gospel-powered transformation will lead in time to a life of attractive holiness and compelling love. Gospel Power The gospel was at work in Paul’s diverse first-century context, and the gospel is at work in our multiple 21st-century contexts. But Paul makes clear that the gospel is more than historical data about Jesus. Even if all accept every fact—that Jesus lived, died, was raised, and appeared to a wide range of valid eyewitnesses—that alone would not mean all believe the gospel in the full scriptural sense of that term. Thus, Paul’s listing of the historical facts of Christ’s death in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 includes the small but significant phrase, “for our sins.” The inclusion of “for our sins”
The Lord’s Prayer Advert Has Been Banned For Being Offensive – Which It Is
Andrew Wilson: There’s been a kerfuffle in the UK over this cinema advert, in which the Lord’s Prayer is prayed by various different people across the nation, being banned in cinemas. It was due to go out before the new Star Wars movie, but it has been pulled because it could offend or upset people of other faiths or none: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Not Allah’s, or anyone else’s: yours. There is only one who is holy, and he is our heavenly Father. May your name be recognised as great by all the nations, including those (like ours) who dismiss, blaspheme, patronise or ignore it. May your kingdom come. One day, all the kingdoms of the earth will become the kingdom of God and his Messiah. In the meantime, as we wait for you to gather up all your enemies and turn them into your footstool, we cry to you: let your reign be shown
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Forgotten!
“Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’ Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Templeton Address, London, 10 May 1983. (HT: Ray Ortlund)
How to Survive a Cultural Crisis
By Mark Dever: Public opinion appears to be changing about same-sex marriage, as are the nation’s laws. Of course this change is just one in a larger constellation. America’s views on family, love, sexuality generally, tolerance, God, and so much more seems to be pushing in directions that put Bible-believing Christians on the defensive. It’s easy to feel like we’ve become the new “moral outlaws,” to use Al Mohler’s phrase. Standing up for historic Christian principles will increasingly get you in trouble socially and maybe economically, perhaps one day also criminally. It’s ironic that Christians are told not to impose their views on others, even as the threat of job loss or other penalties loom over Christians for not toeing the new party line. In all this, Christians are tempted to become panicked or to speak as alarmists. But to the extent we do, to that same extent we show we’ve embraced an unbiblical and nominal Christianity. Here, then, are seven principles
10 Sure Signs We’ve Lost Our Minds
Trevin Wax: Documenting the bizarre beliefs and inconsistencies that surface in contemporary discourse… 1. We worry about the shallowness and superficiality of online relationships, so we go to FaceBook and Twitter to register our concerns. 2. We are so focused on the newest and latest things that we leave behind the oldest and most foundational things. 3. We’ve turned the virtue of prudence into the vice of prudishness and the vice of impropriety into the virtue of authenticity. 4. We ban soda from schools but make condoms widely available… because corn syrup is a more serious matter for youngsters than sex. 5. We decry the exploitation of women, but cry “censorship” when someone wants decency standards against objectifying women on television. 6. We chide a pregnant mother for smoking because of the harm it does to her child, but we applaud her choice to walk into a clinic and have her baby torn limb by limb and extracted from her
Paul Was Preaching Bad News, Not the Gospel, at Mars Hill
Justin Taylor: Daniel Strange of Oak Hill College, speaking at the Evangelical Alliance’s “Confidence in the Gospel” initiative, argues that Paul’s Mars Hill speech in Acts 17 is not actually gospel, but the necessary context for understanding the gospel. In this 10 minute talk, he gives a nice overview of Paul’s attitude, approach, and appeal: Here is a summary from Dr Strange: Paul’s speech to the Areopagus (Acts 17) is bad news. It doesn’t talk about God’s love or grace, it talks about judgement. Then, when he does talk about the resurrection, it’s to point to the coming judgement! It doesn’t mention the cross and neither does it mention the name Jesus—only ‘he’ at the very end. Actually, Paul’s speech is not expounding the gospel, rather it is commending the gospel; drawing attention to its ultimacy and urgency. The point is this: you will not understand the good news of Jesus and his resurrection unless there is a context to
read more Paul Was Preaching Bad News, Not the Gospel, at Mars Hill
Contextualization Begins Here
John Stott: (HT: Dane Ortlund)
Missing reality, preoccupied with fantasy
“A strange thing I have observed over many years in this business of news gathering and news presentation is that by some infallible process media people always manage to miss the most important thing. It’s almost as though there were some built-in propensity to do this. In moments of humility, I realize that if I had been correspondent in the Holy Land at the time of our Lord’s ministry, I should almost certainly have spent my time knocking about with the entourage of Pontius Pilate, finding out what the Sanhedrin was up to, and lurking around Herod’s court with the hope of signing up Salome to write her memoirs exclusively. I regret that this is true. Ironically enough, as the dramatization of the public scene gains impetus, so we move farther and farther from the reality of things and become more and more preoccupied with fantasy.” Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids, 1980), pages 38-39. (HT: Ray Ortlund)
That Idol That You Love, It Doesn’t Love You Back
From Justin Buzzard: Everyone has to live for something and if that something isn’t the one true God, it will be a false God–an idol. An idol is anything more important to you than God. Therefore, you can turn even very good things into idols. You can turn a good thing like family, success, acceptance, money, your plans, etc. into a god thing–into something you worship and place at the center of your life. This is what sin is. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything (even a good thing) more than God. Do you know the idols you’re prone to worship? At our church we talk about 4 root idols that we tend to attach our lives to. CONTROL. You know you have a control idol if your greatest nightmare is uncertainty. APPROVAL. You know you have an approval idol if your greatest nightmare is rejection. COMFORT. You know you have a comfort idol if your greatest nightmare is stress/demands. POWER.
Piper on entertainment, cultural analysis, and defaulting to the world
Check your heart! I’m checking mine. From Desiring God.
C.S. Lewis: “Three Kinds of Men”
C.S. Lewis’s short essay, “Three Kinds of Men,” from his collection of essays, Present Concerns (pp. 9-10): There are three kinds of people in the world. The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade,” “in school” and “out of school.” But the third
Rapping Philippians – Christ is all
(HT: Ray Ortlund)
Tim Keller: Counterfeit Gods
“We preach Christ crucified” – Do we?
Martyn-Lloyd Jones: “I am increasingly convinced that so much in the state of the Christian church today is to be explained chiefly by the fact that for nearly a hundred years the church has been preaching morality and ethics, and not the Christian faith. It is this preaching of the ‘good life’, or being ‘a good little gentleman’, and of viewing religion as ‘morality touched by emotion’, as Matthew Arnold put it, that has been the curse. Such men have shed the doctrines; they dislike any idea of atonement, they dismiss the whole notion of the miraculous and the supernatural, and ridicule talk about re-birth. Christianity to them is that which teaches a man to live a good life.” (Life in the Spirit, 19) (HT: Matthew Morizio)
Does Church Membership Matter?
Kevin DeYoung thinks that membership matters in the church, so he provided six reasons for the importance of church membership: In joining a church you make visible your commitment to Christ and his people. Making a commitment makes a powerful statement in a low-commitment culture. We can be overly independent. Church membership keeps us accountable. Joining the church will help your pastor and elders be more faithful shepherds. Joining the church gives you an opportunity to make promises. Read the whole post, and check out DeYoung’s book Why We Love the Church (written with Ted Kluck). (HT: James Grant)
On Jesuslessness
I love this from Jared Wilson: There is a pastor whose Twitter feed I occasionally read, but I shouldn’t, because it absolutely drives me nuts. A large portion of my reaction is tied to my own issues, I’m sure, but I see in his broadcasts an almost pathological intention not to mention Jesus. And as I thirst for Jesus, I notice this withholding lots and lots of places in the Bible Belt. I have been and always will be doggedly suspicious of pastors who rarely (or never) mention Jesus. John Piper says, “What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ.” We ministers of the gospel — and Christians at large — can fumble this commission in three main ways: 1. We speak in vague spiritual generalities. Love. Hope. Peace. Joy. Harmony. Blessings. All disembodied from the specific atoning work of the incarnate Jesus and exalted Lord. It all sounds nice. It’s
DeYoung and Kluck on the Church
Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck write as guest columnists today in the Newsweek/Washington Post forum on religion. Here’s an excerpt: Perhaps Christians are leaving the church because it isn’t tolerant and open-minded. But perhaps the church-leavers have their own intolerance too–intolerant of tradition, intolerant of authority, intolerant of imperfection except their own. Are you open-minded enough to give the church a chance–a chance for the church to be the church, not a coffee shop, not a mall, not a variety show, not Chuck E. Cheese, not a U2 concert, not a nature walk, but a wonderfully ordinary, blood-bought, Spirit-driven church with pastors, sermons, budgets, hymns, bad carpet and worse coffee? Their book Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion is now available. (HT: Justin Taylor)
Tim Challies on Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was in so many ways a product of this sick celebrity culture (that he helped create) that will never rest satisfied until it has both created and then destroyed the newest celebrity. We want our celebrities to start strong and finish weak, to begin with a bang and then fizzle, pop and sputter, all for our enjoyment and entertainment (Susan Boyle stands as the most recent example of this). Jackson gave us so much to talk about, so much to enjoy. More than any other celebrity he embodied the “vanities” of Ecclesiastes. He was at one time known for what he did so well and then was known for being a freak; he was at one time fantastically wealthy and then utterly broke; he was once loved and then despised. He had it all and yet, it seemed, he had nothing. All of it was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (HT: Justin Taylor)
The Great god Entertainment
“For centuries the church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognising it for what it was — a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attention from moral accountability. For this she got herself abused roundly by the sons of this world. “But of late she has become tired of the abuse and has given over the struggle. She appears to have decided that if she cannot conquer the great god Entertainment she may as well join forces with him and make what use she can of his powers. So today we have the astonishing spectacle of millions of dollars being poured into the unholy job of providing earthly entertainment for the so-called sons of heaven. And hardly a man dares raise his voice against it.” A.W. Tozer (HT: Todd Pruitt)
Already Not Yet 