Category Archives: Religion

Authors, Religion

Sharing Your Remarkable Story

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You have a story of faith and God’s work in your life. “And if people don’t take us seriously,” says Aaron Armstrong, “that’s still good news worth sharing.” He briefly describes the struggle his wife has experienced and links to a couple versions of her remarkable story.

“For years, whenever she or both of us have told the story of how we came to faith, we’ve seen people stop speaking to us, back away slowly as if we were whacked, or (in one instance) convert to an entirely different religion.”

Religion

Did God Change in the Incarnation?

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Jared Wilson writes about the problem we ignore at Christmastime: if God is immutable, if he is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then how did he not change when he was incarnated as a man? He says, “What Paul is getting at in Philippians 2:5-8 is not that Jesus did not ‘hold’ or ‘maintain’ the fullness of his divinity but that he did not exploit it or leverage it against his experiencing the fullness of humanity. He didn’t pull the parachute, in other words.”

Religion

Is Pastoral Advice Making Pastors Depressed?

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The gospel isn’t “do better” or “try harder”, and yet the advice we tell ourselves about preaching usually falls into this category. Why do we believe that “do better” and “try harder” will motivate better preaching? If it’s powerless for the banker, it’s powerless for the preacher as well.

Pastor Mike Leake offers this point as one of the reasons for depression among pastors.

Religion

What Is Christ’s Message to the Church?

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This is a stirring message from Sinclair Ferguson, giving at the beginning of the year at Ligonier Ministries’ national conference. He speaks on someone in the Reformed tradition, but his message from Revelation 2:3 isn’t limited to those churches. It’s a timeless message of seeking God’s favor over our comfort, of returning to our first love.

Non-fiction, Religion

Making an Idol of American Exceptionalism

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Nathan Finn summaries his Facebook friends’ political banter like this: “America is a Christian nation, we have lost our spiritual moorings, and political liberals are mostly to blame—but if we elect the right politically conservative (or perhaps libertarian) candidate, he or she (probably the former) will restore America’s greatness and perhaps usher in another Great Awakening.”

This, he says, is a false gospel. Believers are not called to make America great, but to expand the kingdom of Christ. We aren’t called to political action so much as we’re called to evangelicalism.

Finn writes to review what looks like a great book from John Wilsey,  American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea. If we take the idea of American Exceptionalism to the extend described above, we have politicized the gospel, rendering to Caesar what should be rendered to God alone.

This is the idea I was getting at back when I asked this question, “How would your perspective change if you became convinced the United States was not founded as a Christian nation?“

Religion

Why Some of Us Don’t Observe Advent

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Even among the congregants of churches that do observe the advent season, which began last Sunday, many believers allow the time to slip by unobserved. Timothy Paul Jones, a Southern Baptist, asks why.

Perhaps it’s because, for believers no less than nonbelievers, our calendars are dominated not by the venerable rhythms of redemption but by the swifter currents of consumerism and efficiency. The microwave saves us from waiting for soup to simmer on the stove, credit cards redeem us from waiting on a paycheck to make purchases, and this backward extension of the Christmas season liberates us from having to deal with the awkward lull of Advent.

. . .

Why this Advent-free leap from All Hallow’s Eve to Christmas Eve?

Perhaps because Christmas is about celebration, and celebrations can be leveraged to move products off shelves. Advent is about waiting, and waiting contributes little to the gross domestic product.

On a related note, Tony Reinke tweeted this today.

Non-fiction, Religion

What Book Does Tim Keller Read Every Month?

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“The other Scriptures speak to us,” observed Athanasius (AD 296–373), “but the Psalms speak for us.” For 3,000 years the Psalter has been the prayer book and songbook of God’s people. It was also the prayer book and songbook of God’s Son. Our Savior quoted from the Psalms more than any other biblical book—even while breathing his last (Matt. 27:46; Luke 23:46).

Matt Smethurst asks Pastor Tim Keller about reading the Psalms and his new devotional based on them.

Religion

The road to Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving at the home of Earle Landis, Neffsville, PA, 1942. Photo by Marjorie Collins. This was just eight years before my birth. I am that old.

My heart has greatly desired this Thanksgiving. Not because of my fitting gratefulness; heaven knows I’m as ungrateful as the next man, and a lot more ungrateful than that other guy next to him. No, this holiday season has been a benchmark for me ever since I started graduate school. By Christmas I’ll be done with classes (assuming I don’t flunk one unexpectedly), and even now the pace is slowing down. Neither of my instructors seems all that interested in cramming work into the last couple weeks. I’m essentially done with my labors for one class, and the other doesn’t have a lot left except the final test. That will be annoying, but there’s nothing I can do through anxious care to make its span a cubit less.

So here I am, on the verge of being done with the bulk of it (the question of a Capstone Project remains up in the air), breathing afar off the balmy zephyrs of liberty. For more than two years I’ve been squeezing my life into whatever spaces the academic template overlooked. Soon I’ll have evenings free again. I’ll be able to relax (a bit) on weekends. And – praise to the Almighty – I’ll be able to work on my novels again. I even sat down the other night and wrote a scene that had impressed itself on my mind. It’s an important scene, one that reveals the heart of a major character, and should guide my portrayal.

So I’m thankful. Frankly, thinking back, there were long bleak stretches when I didn’t see how I could get this far. Either I’d fail or the stress would kill me, I figured. As with so many things in life, the Lord’s iron purpose was to make me walk through it, get stronger, and learn what I was capable of. Wasn’t it Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof who asked the Lord to please not bless him so much?

Have a blessed Thanksgiving. I expect I’ll be hanging around here a bit more from now on.

Religion

Satisfy Us in the Morning, O Lord

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“So teach us to number our days
  that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Return, O Lord! How long?
  Have pity on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
  that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:12–14, ESV)

Morning at Millabedda, Hopton, Badulla.

On verse fourteen, the great Charles Spurgeon writes:

The prayer is like others which came from the meek lawgiver when he boldly pleaded with God for the nation; it is Moses like. He here speaks with the Lord as a man speaketh with his friend.

O satisfy us early with thy mercy. Since they must die, and die so soon, the psalmist pleads for speedy mercy upon himself and his brethren. Good men know how to turn the darkest trials into arguments at the throne of grace. He who has but the heart to pray need never be without pleas in prayer. The only satisfying food for the Lord’s people is the favour of God; this Moses earnestly seeks for, and as the manna fell in the morning he beseeches the Lord to send at once his satisfying favour, that all through the little day of life they might be filled therewith. Are we so soon to die? Then, Lord, do not starve us while we live. Satisfy us at once, we pray thee. Our day is short and the night hastens on, O give us in the early morning of our days to be satisfied with thy favour, that all through our little day we may be happy. That we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Being filled with divine love, their brief life on earth would become a joyful festival, and would continue so as long as it lasted. When the Lord refreshes us with his presence, our joy is such that no man can take it from us. Apprehensions of speedy death are not able to distress those who enjoy the present favour of God; though they know that the night cometh they see nothing to fear in it, but continue to live while they live, triumphing in the present favour of God and leaving the future in his loving hands. Since the whole generation which came out of Egypt had been doomed to die in the wilderness, they would naturally feel despondent, and therefore their great leader seeks for them that blessing which, beyond all others, consoles the heart, namely, the presence and favour of the Lord.

Non-fiction, Religion

Blasphemy, Prayer, and Vikings

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  1. Why you never question Allah: Islam’s trouble with blasphemy. This points out the shallowness of Islamic teaching. Their god supposedly knows everything, but if you don’t keep your nice face on, he’ll hammer you. Of course, it appears he will hammer you for just about anything, which is a theological perspective not unique to Islam.
  2. In the United Kingdom, an video intended to play among the trailers in front of the new Star Wars movie encourages viewers to seek the Lord in prayer using The Lord’s Prayer specifically. It has been pulled from the schedule because it could offend someone, which Andrew Wilson says is precisely what it should be doing. There is, after all, only one true God.
  3. St Helen’s Church in Eston, Middlesbrough, has suffered vandalism for years. It’s now being rebuilt, brick by brick, forty miles north in County Durham.
  4. Twenty-five things we’ve forgotten about vikings.
    (Last two links via Medieval News)