Mohler on Male Maturity

SBTS President Al Mohler writes on Boundless.org about several marks of male maturity.  This is deep, interesting, heart-probing, challenging stuff.

(HT: Thabiti)

Reformation Day Self-Examination

Courtesy of Pastor Chris Castaldo, using the Reformation’s key doctrines as starting points.

(HT: Kevin DeYoung via Thabiti)

Joined to Christ and through Him to His Church

Thabiti quotes James V. Brownson’s The Promise of Baptism about the meaning of Christianity:

Up to this point, we have been discussing what it means to be a Christian. But in a very real sense, there is no such thing as an individual Christian. When God joins Christians to Jesus, God also joins them to something bigger than themselves; they become incorporated into the church, the “body of Christ.” In the New Testament, it is inconceivable for Christians to think of themselves as united to Christ without also thinking about the ways they are united to other Christians…

Thabiti then concludes, “I wonder if those who oppose church membership aren’t guilty of not having thought enough about what it basically means to be a Christian.”

Amen.

What Kids Know About Martin Luther

In honor of Reformation Day and the poverty of knowledge about it, I’ve created a pie chart (over at GraphJam) to explain the problem.

SEBTS’s Six Crucial Aspects of the SBC in the 2st Century

Over at Between the Times, the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary blog, Dr. Bruce Ashford and Danny Akin blog about the Mission of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 21st Century.  They give six crucial aspects, saying “Our mission must be one that is:”

1. revealed in the Christian Scriptures
2. based upon God’s mission
3. (a) focused on the nations and (b) focused on this nation
4. driven by biblical theology
5. centered in the gospel
6. based on local church initiative and supplemented by entities and associations

They will be expositing these in the coming weeks.

Which Is Worse, Being Burned or Belittling God?

Over at Desiring God, Pastor John Piper blogs on the relationship between physical suffering and spiritual suffering, physical pain and spiritual treason against God:

What is stunning and essential to see is that physical horrors correspond to spiritual horrors. God knows that we do not feel horrible about the spiritual horror of our sin. We take it lightly. But we get very angry and very agitated and very indignant about the horrors of our physical suffering. So God correlates the two in order to make plain to us how horrible sin is. Belittling God feels like a light thing to us. Being burned feels huge.

The Swell Season

A while back, I blogged about enjoying the movie, Once, and its soundtrack, performed by the members of The Swell Season.  Recently, TSS has released their second album, Strict Joy, and you can listen to parts of it at their home page or all of it on Pandora.com.

You can also hear their first album at the Once homepage.

What’s Best Next Blog

Lately, I’ve been greatly enjoying Matt Perman’s work, productivity, business, creativity, and life blog, called, “What’s Best Next.”

Recently, he has written most helpfully on how to organize your desk and office, recommended productivity tools, and how to get your inbox to zero.  I have profited (and changed my practices) from all three.

Enjoy, and to God be the glory for redeeming our ever-shortening time!

Free Tim Keller Sermons Now Online

To celebrate their 20th anniversary, Redeemer Presbyterian Church (NYC, NY) is launching their Free Sermon Resource, featuring 150 of Pastor Tim Keller’s sermons, all downloadable at no monetary cost.

The sermons are categorized as follows:

• Discovery
• Growth
• Mission

(HT: Resurgence)

Collision, Humor, and Absolute Truth

Collision is a movie chronicling the tour of debates between Christian pastor Doug Wilson and atheistic journalist Christopher Hitchens.  Here’s one hilarious (if you believe in absolute truth, that is) clip that didn’t make it into the movie.

(HT: Doug Wilson)

New Online Ad About Abortion in Health Care

New Online Ad About Abortion in Health Care

Shared via AddThis

The Short Obama Legacy: Propaganda, Lies, and Deceit

At what point do we as a nation become outraged?

• Major networks refuse freedom of speech against the President and his policies
• One of the President’s first executive orders sends more money to kill foreign unborn babies
• New Jersey schools go around parents to teach children to sing the President’s praises
• President organizes Hitler-esque civilian security force and funds it with half a trillion dollars
• President indoctrinates and encourages students to ask what they can do to help the president
• President commissions National Endowment for the Arts to create propaganda for his policies
• President organizes theatrical presentation of his health care policy, complete with cronies in white coats

Need I go on?  Do the searches of major news networks for yourselves – Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review will still at least speak out.

More Socialism at Work

The Wall Street Journal evaluates the Cash-for-Clunkers program that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood deemed, “The one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.” 

The WSJ responds, ” Really?”

Following God’s Logic in the Bible

I haven’t had too many of these conversations, but I get the feeling that many Christian leaders’ objections to following the logic of the Bible are based on the belief that theology can’t be reduced to a set of conjunctions and purpose statements.  They would probably say that theology is more than grammar and thought-flow.  And that, strictly speaking, is absolutely true. 

Theology is more than grammar and thought-flow, but it is never less.  Biblical theology can explore the heights, breadth, and depth of the Triune God, salvation, the human soul and its depravity, suffering, grace, family, heaven, hell, and so much more; but it can never do so in a way that disagrees with the grammar of the passages that are speaking. 

In other words, the words of Scripture absolutely matter, but the way in which they are arranged must direct our understanding of the words themselves.  Grammar and thought-flow direct meaning.  Any other theological “method” is inherently anthropocentric.  It does not fear God in its very approach to His holy Word.

This week, I’m teaching a passage that for centuries has been hotly debated.  Please pray that I stay faithful to the thought-flow and grammar, and not twist the sentences to fit anyone’s “theology.”

What Happens When Sexual Freedom Rules

First Things’ Carson Holloway on the strange Roman Polanski controversy and its implications for Hollywood’s idea of “freedom”:

We must ask, then, why Polanski’s entertainment industry colleagues have behaved all along as if his crime were not a weighty matter. I would suggest the following explanation: the embrace of sexual liberation necessarily diminishes our horror for rape, and contemporary Hollywood has been nothing if not ardent in its embrace of sexual liberation.

Traditional sexual morality depended on the assumption that human sexuality possessed an objective moral nature and seriousness that all human beings were obliged to respect and that society itself was entitled to protect through law and custom. Sexual liberation rejected such notions, claiming instead that in matters of sex the acts of consenting adults were none of society’s business. That is, the sexual liberation movement denied sex all intrinsic moral content and reduced sexual morality to the requirement that the consent of the participating parties be respected. The problem, however, is that once traditional sexual morality has been swept away, it is not clear that a solid respect for consent can be maintained.

Weighty, serious, sobering.

HT: JT