When The Dream Becomes Reality

I don't post much here anymore, mostly because of time and priorities. But today is a day that deserves a post. It won't be long, but it is important.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the, "I Have A Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King in Washington, DC at the Lincoln Memorial. Fifty years later, as we watch the news, we wonder if King's dream will ever become reality. But it has. Not completely, but it has.

On a widespread basis; on a macro-cultural basis, it is pretty easy to win an argument that Dr. King's dream has not been realized. In the speech, Dr. King said, "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." While this isn't Georgia, that very thing happens at my office every day. It happens at other small businesses, corporate offices, golf courses, coffee shops, and churches, all over this country, every day.

I'm not saying all is well and there is no more work to be done. The work of cultural change will never end. There will always be racism. (Why? Because the only realistic model for change is the Judeo-Christian ethic, found in the Bible, that we are made in the image of God, the imago dei, and thus all deserve equality under the law and within a culture...and there are a lot of powerful people in the culture that hate the Bible.) Racism is sin, and we can no more banish it than we can banish lust or greed or avarice of any kind. Until the onset of eternity, when all sin will be cast into Hades, we'll have these things with us. But that doesn't mean we can't be thankful for God's common grace and His specific blessings on those who repent of that sin and walk in fellowship with fellow believers of a different race or culture.

This nation isn't perfect, but it is certainly a lot better place than it would have been without Dr. King and his dream.  Let us celebrate that, if not in a big cultural way, in a local way, by sitting together at the table of brotherhood.

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*Here is a transcript of Dr. King's full speech.  If you've never read it, take the time to do so now.  http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/27/transcript-martin-luther-king-jr-have-dream-speech/

When the Law of Unintended Consequences Works in Your Favor

You may remember the scuffle earlier this year when Vanderbilt University passed a discriminatory policy (discriminating against evangelical Christian groups) in the name of tolerance.  Well, not surprisingly to those of us know know something about the history of Christianity and what happens when the church is persecuted, this ruling is furthering the Kingdom of Christ.

Here's a quote from a recent blog post by Byron Yawn-

...I have a message for the faculty of Vanderbilt: THANK YOU. Thank you so much for implementing this policy, because you have taught my church members who are students at your campus things I couldn’t have taught them in years, and you have done that in just a summer.

This demonstration of white collar persecution has succeeded in lighting a fire under their faith. Essentially, you have brought the gospel to life for them. You have turned these students into fervent prayers for Vanderbilt, interceding for the students there and for the gospel. You have provoked them into becoming fervent evangelists. They know now first hand that they are surrounded by people who are alienated from God. The fact that Christian groups are no longer allowed to meet on campus provides incontrovertible evidence that their campus leaders are hostile towards Christ and His church.

You have given them a small and appropriately Americanized view of what opposition to Christ’s church looks like. It has caused the students who love the Lord to realize that college is not a game, but an opportunity to reach the lost.

Gotta love those secular humanists at Vandy for helping to stamp out moralistic therapeutic deism and replace it with gospel-saturated Christianity.

"It's My Money, And I Need It Now!"

There's a rather annoying (but effective) commercial for one of those we'll-take-all-your-money-over-time-and-give-some-of-it-back-to-you-now places; you probably know the one I mean.  They say, at least 20 times, "It's my money, and I need it now!".  In fact, other than the narrator giving the address and phone number of the company, that's about the only dialogue in the commercial.  It's effective because it plays directly to post-modern Americans' need for immediate gratification.

'Mr. Wentworth'

Cameron Cole wrote an interesting blog post over on The Gospel Coalition website.  Here's the whole thing...it is worth a read.  But I want to focus on just one of his points. In explaining some of the problems with contemporary youth ministry, he says this in point three-

3. Parents want moral children.

A gospel-centered youth pastor in South Carolina once told me that parents were his biggest opponents to him fully preaching the gospel. After several years of teaching the radical grace of the gospel, parents complained about a lack of concentration on drinking, sexual abstinence, obedience to parents, and "being nice." They viewed the message of grace as antinomian and as a license for kids to pursue hedonism. Parents rightly want moral children, as do youth pastors. Sometimes, families view the church exclusively as a vehicle for moral education, rather than spiritually forming them in Christ, and put pressure on youth and senior pastors to moralize their children. Many parents view the law alone as the catalyst for holy living, rather than law and grace, and want the youth ministry to embrace this same theology.

The fact that parents want moral children isn't surprising, nor (do I think) is it a bad thing to want.  The problem, as Cole hints at in this segment, is they want results now.  I struggle with this in my own parenting.  I keep wanting to treat the symptoms instead of the disease.  One of the things my wife and I remind ourselves and our Sunday School class on a regular basis is, we need to be more concerned about the long-term status of our children's faith than the short-term status of their behavior, without neglecting their behavior.

Here's how we put it: "Would you rather have a perfectly-behaved teenager who doesn't understand the gospel, or would you rather have a teenager who messes up on a regular basis, but has a great understanding of the gospel?"  The question may seem rhetorical, but it isn't.  We need to ask ourselves, and answer to ourselves, that question on a daily basis.  In our daily discipline and instruction of our kids and how they should behave, are we consciously focused on the long-term, big-picture aspects of making sure they have heard the gospel in all that we do toward them?

This isn't an easy task.  If any of you have any magic pills for this, I'll take a bottle at whatever price you ask.  (This could be a better retirement plan than weight-loss pills.  After all, not everybody is fat*, but everybody who has teens struggles to parent them!)

 (teens not behaving badly)

The problem is, we parents want what we need (good behavior from our kids) and we want it now.  Our own pride rears up when they misbehave.  We worry what other might think of us in the community, and this worry can easily outweigh our (well-placed) concern for the true state of their hearts in spiritual terms.  What that happens, we become like the parents in the blog post above; sort of a spiritualized version of helicopter parents, with just as much risk and the potential for even more damage than a secularized version of the same. We, like the parents in the post, begin to view patience and grace as bad things, when we have directly benefited from these things when we've behaved as badly as our own teens (and this from both our earthly parents and our heavenly father!). We begin to pressure our youth ministers to moralize our children, and the gospel gets lost in the mix.  No wonder we see the long-term results we see.

The only solution I see is to make sure our imperatives to our kids are given in the light of the gospel's indicatives.  We need to make sure we daily plan to purposely steer our kids toward the gospel whenever we also steer them towards the law.  We won't get it right as much as we'd like, but the good news (pun intended) is, the power unto salvation is found in the gospel, not our ability as parents.

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*OK, CDC says about 40% of Americans are fat.  That's too many.  The diet pill thing is still a good retirement plan, if you can find one that actually works.**

**This isn't medically possible, so quit wasting your time.  Go for a walk instead.

It Would Be Funny, If It Weren't So Pathetic

I made the usual mistake that I often make on weekday mornings; I turned on the Weather Channel hoping to see a weather forecast.  As usual, I got everything but.

Stephanie Abrams, the co-anchor de jour, who is most famous for talking about inane and meaningless trivia through the weekly planner segment, was moderating a panel of four or five 'experts', two of whom were religious figures, discussing the recent tornado outbreak.  She managed to look like a fool during this segment as well.

One of the 'experts' was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.  His response to Stephanie's less-than-inspiring question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" was that we should shake our fist in God's face and challenge him on why he is being so mean to people he's supposed to care about.  Another 'expert' was Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, the President of Union Theological Seminary.  She promptly replied that there is no answer to this question, and anyone who tries to answer it is only making things worse.

Makes one wonder if either of these folks has any familiarity at all with their respective corpus of religious writings.

I like this response from John Piper a lot better.  He does answer the question, and he doesn't make anything worse, unless (of course) you hold a worldview that places man above God in both value and authority.  But if you hold that worldview, I'm afraid the Rev. Dr. Jones is right, at least in your world.

If anyone needs empirical evidence that our culture needs the gospel, including some of our most well-know religious leaders, well, there you go.  As for having barely competent weather-babes moderating a panel of liberal theologians, it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.  Real people are hurting in real ways, and all they have to offer are sound-bite-quality pablum.

The Pefect Storm: Helicopter Parents in an Age of Narcissism and a Culture of Consumerism

A very good friend asked me for my thoughts on this article from the Huffing-and-puffing-ton Post.  Here's what I could throw together on a first reading.  I'm sure I'll be able to add more later...and reserve the right to come back to this with more info.

The article is full of important truthful observations.  There really is such a thing as helicopter parents, and they really are doing a great deal of damage to their children.

There are all sorts of anecdotes that most any of us could add to the list in the article.  Unfortunately, some of the anecdotes will be personal, because we've perpetrated some of the excesses. Current parents (mostly born after 1964, the cutoff year between the Boomer and Buster generations) waited longer to marry and have smaller families than at any time in US history.  Since we don't have as many kids, we can focus more attention on the ones we have.  (I don't fit the mould...I have four kids, but the average for parents in my age group is just below two kids.)

The article puts much of the blame on instant gratification.  This is true to a degree, but it is not the whole truth. Greed, narcissism, and deep-seated desire for complete autonomy are also important factors.  You can trace these things back to the Garden of Eden.  It was the idea of autonomy (literally, 'law unto oneself') that got Eve and Adam in trouble.  Of course, one could argue that greed is a simple function of instant gratification, but I think there is a difference.  And narcissism is very different, involving self-worship over simple hedonism.

Did this all begin in the Fall of 1982, as the article claims?  Hardly.  There have been bad parents, both helicopter parents and neglectful parents, for a lot longer than that. The story is told that Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point, and took an apartment near the campus so she could watch him with a telescope.  That was 1899. (1)  And D.H. Lawrence famously offered back in 1918: "How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning." (2)

There are broader implications to the problem than just those on which the article touches.  The author faults the, 'you're special' message we send to our kids, and rightly so.  But it misses the gospel implications of this message.  Our culture tells us that our problems are external to us and the solution is on the inside.  But the gospel teaches us the opposite:  our problems are internal and the solution is alien to us.  We have a tremendous problem of unregenerate church membership in our country, because we've told our kids so often that they haven't sinned, but simply made a mistake; they aren't bad people, just caught in bad circumstances.  But scripture clearly says the problem (sin) is in us, and the solution (Christ and His righteousness) are clearly outside us.  Even where the article gets much right, it misses this completely.  And we wonder why we have the aberrant phenomena of the so-called Emergent Church?



The article addresses the idea of external vs internal motivation- saying one of the problems that helicopter parents create is a lack of any internal motivation.  This is certainly a factor, but not really new.  I've been pointing this out in higher education for twenty years or more.  Kids used to rely on themselves and were self-learners.  They'd walk in to a college class, expecting the professor to be somewhat aloof, and understand it was up to them to read the textbook, attend the lectures, and spend the necessary time to digest and critically examine the information they'd gained and form new thoughts and ideas from it.  Now, they come to class, plop down in a chair, and challenge the professor to teach them, or else.  They don't lift a finger to help in many cases.  Reading the textbook?  How dare you ask them to do that!  (NB: This attitude is being changed somewhat by the rapid increase in online learning...students are finding that without the baby-sitter influence of a face-to-face contact with the professor, success in the course is nearly impossible without reading the textbook...and professors are in a better location to give the grade earned instead of the grade requested with pressure- the location being anywhere the student isn't.)  Now, this problem may be less visible in secondary schools, because there has always been more institutional control over children at this age.  But I don't doubt the problem exists behind the scenes even at these ages.

One of the other ideas where the author tends to partly miss is the idea that students must do something special in order to be special.  I partly agree.  From the context the author takes, it is indeed necessary to have a skill set, or know something, or be able to do something beyond the innate to be considered special.  Where the author leaves off and falls short, I think, is an analysis of the whole problem.  The bigger problem isn't that they aren't doing anything special, but as the article points out in a prior point, we aren't teaching them the importance (special-ness) of doing small things, and compounding that error by making the source of their special-ness things they do rather than their position as a creature that bears the image of God. 

How many marriages would be in less trouble, or would not have failed, if we taught our kids the importance of small things, like kindness, gentleness, patience, and self-control?   And how much do we contribute to the problem by telling them they are special based on ways that have no foundation in reality? In other words, the reason all people are special is because of their special status as God's creation and because of His blessing on them from the beginning.  We miss this in a secular culture (of course) and thus try to assign special-ness to other factors, such as what we can do. And even when we get the reason for being special right, we focus often on the creature rather than God; taking the humanistic rather than the theistic solution to the problem.  We need to teach our kids that they are special, but with that we also need to throw in the little part about them being sinners and deserving of eternal punishment.  That little inconvenient factoid tends to throw a wet blanket over narcissistic tendencies, at least when it is believed by the recipient of the information.  Kids are special, but they all have the same problem:  they are sinners at the root.


              (I wonder where he learned that behavior?)

Happiness as a central goal, as the author suggests, is a huge problem.  Maybe the biggest of all.  I've faced this numerous times.  The defining event for me was a meeting I once had with a woman in my church to whom I had been assigned as a family deacon.  She had chosen to abandon her husband and one-year-old daughter for more worldly pursuits.  When confronted with the sin she was choosing to embrace, her response was, "God wants me to be happy." My deacon colleague who was with me quickly and correctly pointed out to her that God wanted her to obey, and that her happiness (really joy) would come from obedience, not fleshly pursuits.  She didn't repent.  Happiness was more important than obedience. 

One of the results of this kind of thinking is the Hedonist paradox.  We usually have to wait to see the results of this paradox later in life.  The author cites young adults in counseling over their 'issues'...often boiling down to the simple fact that they haven't had the world handed to them on a platter.  The Hedonist paradox works like this- If you live for pleasure you will either find it or you won't.  If you don't find it, you will become frustrated.  If you do find it, you will become bored.  And living like this will certainly cause many to end up in the office of a professional counselor.

Should we let our kids fail? Absolutely.  Teaching them to deal with failure is MUCH more important than protecting them from the bad feelings which come with failure.  We need to fail, and more importantly, we NEED to feel bad about it when we do.  This is one reason why sin is such a non-issue in our culture today...because we've made feeling bad about being bad a bigger sin than the sin itself.  We have a misguided and factually faulty idea of the risks.  Some kids now never learn to ride a bike, because their parents are too worried about them falling off. Time says it this way- "Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label 'Remove Child Before Folding.' " (3)  Falling off a bike hurts, but we learn a lesson from it that can't be taught any other way.

Even more misguided is our evaluation of the risks of NOT letting them fail. That ends up being an epic fail on our part as parents.  This is not easy.  It's just one more example of learning from our mistakes, but this time, it's our kids who suffer from our bad decisions, not us.

Sources:
(1) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940697,00.html

(2) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940697,00.html#ixzz1nbWFpn88

(3)  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940697,00.html#ixzz1nbU5T34r

Marriage and the Gospel- A Poetic Look

This young man posted a video that went viral a while back; now he's posted this one, which gets toward the heart of marriage as a picture of the gospel.  He's getting better every time.

All Authority Really Means 'All'

An interesting set of quotes from Michael Horton's, The Gospel Commission-

“Not even the new birth is the result of human decision or effort. We are not given steps for ‘How to Be Born Again’. Jesus’s statement in John 3, that one must be born from above in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, is not an imperative (i.e., command) but an indicative (i.e., statement of fact). That is, it simply declares the state of affairs…The gospel is for us, not about us.  It isn’t about anything that we do, feel, or choose. It is the Good News about Jesus Christ and what he has accomplished for us. Of course, the new birth evidences itself in conversion: a lifelong response of repentance and faith.” (p. 30)

“We often speak of ‘making Jesus our personal Lord and Savior’, but this obscures two important points. First, we do not make Jesus anything, especially Lord and Savior. It is because he already is Lord and Savior that we are freed from the fear of death and hell.  All authority belongs to him already.” (p. 32)

 “The early Christians were not fed to wild beasts or dipped in wax and set ablaze as lamps in Nero’s garden because they thought Jesus was a helpful life coach or role model  but because they witnessed to him as the only Lord and Savior of the world. Jesus Christ doesn’t just live in the private hearts of individuals as the source of an inner peace. He is the Creator, Ruler, Redeemer, and Judge of all the earth.” (p. 33)

 What part of, 'all authority' do we not get?

If Ephesians 5:12 Had Never Been Written

Watching the flurry of posts recently on Driscoll's new book on marriage, I rather enjoyed this quote by Carl Trueman on the Ref21 blog-

I have often in the past stood with those who laughed at what we regarded as the ignorant, unsophisticated taboos of the older generation. But now I worry about the ease with which the rising generation talks explicitly of 'the fruitless deeds of darkness' in the name of cultural engagement, fear of being thought passé or simply a desire to slough off the legalisms of their fathers in the faith. You can, after all, get to heaven without ever having seen an R-Rated art house movie or having enjoyed a spectacular love life.

Here's a question: would it make any difference to you, any difference at all to the way you talk, to what you watch, to the wayyou 'engage culture', if Eph. 5:12 had never been written?

Would it?

A Better Way to Handle The Question

I've lampooned Joel Osteen here several times, most recently over his mishandling of the question of Mormonism.  But I haven't given an alternative, mostly because I hadn't seen one in the media that was worth mentioning.  I still haven't seen one in the US media (imagine that!), but thanks to the Ref21 blog, I found a pastor doing a pretty good job of it in the British media.

Here's the link.

I especially liked his comment that we (humans) won't be going to heaven or hell in groups.  Our eternity depends on what we do with Jesus' question in Matt 16:15, "Who do YOU say that I am?" (emphasis mine)

Two Views of October 31- One Thoughtful, One Fun

Today is both Reformation Day and Halloween.  In honor of the former, and in retrospect of the latter, here are two YouTube videos.

John Piper on Halloween.

Piper is introspective and balanced...well worth hearing in you have radicals on either side of the issue screaming at you.


Manic Monday Luther.

This one is just fun, but it is very much historically accurate.

HT: Dan Phillips, DG Blog

Bounded Sets

This past Sunday, my SS class started chapter 2 of Galatians.  In the first section, we saw how important it is for us to confront changes to the gospel, while not being confrontational people over non-essential issues.

Chebyshev center

The Housewife Theologian posted a blog article today that explains very clearly this concept, along with a logical reason why it is both true and important.  She cites a lecture by Don Carson on how we should view fellow believers with whom we don't fully agree on all issues regarding our church practices.  Carson uses a 'sets' illustration from mathematics to create an image of orthodoxy. It was immensely helpful to me; I wish I'd seen it before the lesson last weekend.

Here's her post.

I highly recommend this blog.  You should be reading it regularly.  If you only have time for one blog, dump mine and read hers instead.  I bet she won't put scary math equations up, there.

He Opened His Mouth

Sometimes adversaries are clever; one has to do his homework before he can find evidence of wrongdoing.  On the other hand, there's Joel Osteen.  It appears that no one need do any digging at all; in fact, all that needs to happen for there to be empirical evidence that Osteen has no clue what the gospel is, is for him to open his mouth.



I'm not looking for a fight here, but there's a serious problem when the pastor of the largest church in America is teaching something other than the gospel.  My Sunday School class is going through the book of Galatians right now, and we are just starting chapter 2.  We've seen something important in chapter 1, particularly with regard to getting the gospel right.

If you look at the combination of Paul's writings and information found in the gospels, it is easy to conclude that we are much better off preaching the right gospel with the wrong motives than we are preaching the wrong gospel with the right motives.  On the one hand, when the gospel is preached by those seeking gain, the apostles praised God, saying, "The gospel is preached!"  On the other, the purveyors of the wrong gospel are clearly in danger of condemnation to hell.

Here's more, if you need it:  Al Mohler's Blog

Barack Obama is not nearly the threat to the church in this country as is Joel Osteen.

Religion or Relationship?

I've often heard Christianity dichotomized into these two choices, with the right answer being, 'relationship' of course.  But that sentiment has always bothered me, particularly in light of James 1:26-7, and even 1 Tim 5:4 (and a few others, if you dig for them).

How about a tertium quid?*  Stephen Lutz posted this blog post over on the Gospel Coalition this morning, and it makes a lot of sense.  He says,

"Both religion and relationship capture helpful aspects of what 

Christianity is, but neither word is strong enough to fully encapsulate 

what Christianity is about. Only gospel can do that. The gospel alone is 

the power of salvation for all who believe (Romans 1:16); no amount of 

our religious observance or relational feeling has the power to save."

His blog is about college ministry, but this make sense for ministry at any level.  Chalk one more up for gospel centeredness.

* literally,  the 'third this'...Latin for third option

Where's the Gospel in Hater Vids?

Stephen Furtick, a 'pastor' of a large culturally-relevant gathering called Elevation Church, posted this video a while back.  It's as full of, if not more full of, hate than anything said by those he accuses in the video.

Finally, Frank Turk posted this video response.  It is tremendous.  Watch it, even if you choose not to watch the first one by Furtick (which really isn't bad advice).

Christian Love vs Self-Love

Recently, the bumbling buffoon Pat Robertson, who calls himself a pastor, but is rather more a pester than a pastor, made an idiotic remark that a man was justified in divorcing his wife after she became ill with alzheimer's disease, and he was lonely.

I agree with another blogger: this is a repudiation of the gospel of Christ.

In contrast, watch this video about a man who left his job to spend all of his time with his stricken wife.



If there's any divorce to happen, it needs to be the divorce between the church as a whole and Pat Robertson (and all the other prosperity-gospel nuts like him).

I made the following comment in my Sunday School lesson last Sunday:  "Barack Obama is not nearly the threat to the church in America as is Joel Osteen."  I thought there might be some disagreement (you see, Obama isn't very popular here in Texas).  There was none.  The first comment I heard was, "Amen.  Preach it."

Now I think I'd be almost as correct to go back and re-state the comment with Robertson's name in place of Osteen's.

Secularization as a Christian Heresy

“Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church.  In fact, it’s difficult to think of secularism as anything other than a Christian heresy.” 

When I read Michael Horton, the going is usually slow, and every couple pages, I have to put the book in my lap, lean my head back, and think.  The above quote is from the introduction to his recent book, The Gospel Commission: Recovering God's Strategy for Making Disciples.

It shall be an interesting read.

Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal

Here is a link to the book trailer (or click through below) for a new book coming out in few months by Canyon, TX native (and current Nashville resident) Michael Kelley.

The Kelley's two-year-old son Joshua was diagnosed with leukemia; this is the story of what it was like to live in and battle through those days, and how the grace of God was revealed to them in diverse ways through the process.

Michael has preached in my church on numerous occasions, and is the real deal...I can highly recommend this book even though I haven't seen a copy yet because I know Michael and know his strength of character and love for the Lord.

Run, don't walk, to get this book when it is available.

Sola Mortalis (Justification by Death Alone)

As R. C. Sproul has pointed out in numerous places, the prevalent belief in America today about the mode of justification is not sola fida, nor is it justification by works, or some combination of the two.  It is in fact sola mortalis, or justification by death.  That is, the only thing most people believe is required to be ushered into the glory of heaven after we die is to, well...die.

How did this come to be so?  Where did our culture adopt such a non-biblical idea of justification in the face of contrary claims of scripture and of pretty much every church, conservative or liberal, up until very recently?

I think it is the innate humanism that resides in the heart of all of us.  We continually walk away from the stated claims of the gospel and back into our natural state of, I-can-do-this-for-myself.  It is the antithesis of the gospel to rely on ourselves for our own justification, yet it is our natural tendency.  As one author put it recently, we don't need heretics in the church to pull us away from the gospel...all we need is a good night's sleep.  Our natural character (fallen souls) pull us away from the gospel unless we are continually reminded of what it says and what it means.

So what conclusions can we draw from this, given it is true?

One, we need fellowship with other believers.  Christianity is not a go-it-alone religion, as going-it-alone usually results in a therapeutic religion rather than a relationship with Christ.

Two, study of history, particularly historical theology and church history, is critical if we are to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.  It seems like anytime a new controversy turns up in Christianity, its not long before someone points out that this controversy has happened before, and was dealt with by some council about fifteen-hundred years ago.  As G. K. Chesterton once said, 'The wit of man is insufficient to invent a new heresy.'  I think he's right.

Three, we need to hear solid biblical exposition, especially from our pulpits on Sunday mornings.  Deistic therapeutic moralism won't cut it.  (Yes, I renamed that...see this post for why.)  We need to hear the word of God and see the Word of God in our worship.  In many places, that's not happening.

Four, we must always reforming.  We must constantly test ourselves against what orthodox Christianity has always believed and be less enamored with innovation and more enamored with faithfulness.  God doesn't change.  Why is it that we always desire change, even when change isn't warranted?

Five, we need to stop talking about justification as sola mortalis.  This is the hardest for many of us, especially if we have family and friends who are not believers. If you spent much time on my blog, you know of the respect I have for the US Marine Corps.  They are all honorable men.  Yet there is a common belief, spoken openly amongst Marines, that when a Marine dies, he goes to guard Heaven's gates.  Even Marines need Christ if they hope to guard Heaven's gates.  I pray they all heard the gospel, but I fear it is not so.  We can't continue to talk like semper fidelis is the same thing as sola fide.  (Though I'm sure that is a tradition that will not change.)

And six, in order to accomplish number five, we need to start talking about these things before someone dies.  We need to proclaim the good news of Christ- sola gratia through sola fide, and why it is vitally important (pun intended).  And in conjunction, we need to keep praying for those we know who are not believers, so that when they come to faith in Christ, we can rejoice with them that they no longer hold the view of sola mortalis.

Harry Potter...Who Woulda Thunk It?

Was all the brouhaha over Harry Potter over the last ten or twelve years a tempest in a teapot?  Or was it something worse, an example of law-based parenting over gospel-based parenting, and the legalistic foundation therein?

Jerram Barrs has this fascinating review (on YouTube) of the last book and movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

J. K. Rowling a Christian. Who woulda thunk it?

Why Is My Church So White?

Here's a very moving post from the Gospel Coalition blog...it is worth the read.