(considering) 8:28

Implications of the Sovereignty of God

recent posts

  • Online Reading (March 31, 2016)

    Reading:
    God’s Not Dead 2: As a Christian with some legal training, I’m a little apprehensive about how the law and Christian belief will be presented in this film. Though I am happy to see these issues being brought up in the public discourse. Opens this weekend.

    Mmmm…. Chicken: I wonder if the purchase of St. Hubert Chicken by Cara foods bodes well for seeing a St.Hubert return to Newfoundland.

    Band of Bloggers: If, like me, you’re travelling to T4G in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, a week and a half from now, you might want to check out the Band of Bloggers event. Remember to also listen in on the T4G livestream, it’s sure to be
    Prayer Points:
    Here in Canada, the problems of First Nations communities are legion. A tragic fire this past week undercores some of the issues. Pray for the strength of Christians who minister to First Nations in Canada, and for concerted, non-paternalistic solutions to the problems.

    St. John’s, Newfoundland is dealing with some of the mixed messages that come from some Christian symbols that were flown at government buildings, pray for wisdom for all involved, and that the Gospel

  • Getting Back into It

    I am not the greatest for discipline.

    If you’ve been waiting for me to write here, you’ve been disappointed and I’m sorry.

    I could say that with the new work at my local Church, I’ve gotten busier, or that the last semester of classwork has been more diffficult than expected. Both would be true, but honestly not the reason I haven’t blogged.

    Nor is it really that I haven’t thought of it. I have often had the experience of thinking “gee, that’d make a great post”, and in some cases even written something down.

    Nope, the fact is, I’ve been lazy.

    That said, I’m hoping I’ll get a better handle on things soon. I’ve been going through some interesting things, and having some interesting thoughts. I would like to talk some about struggles I have had, give advice about reading articles, talk about some of the things I’ve been learning as a grad student, but most importantly, learning to use the gifts God has given me to bless his Church.

    Watch this space, and pray I use some discipline.

  • The Heresy of Underestimating God’s Grace. (Redemption in Christian Community part II)

    This is part II in a series on redemption. In yesterday’s post I talked about the puzzling problem of a culture that seems to love redemption, but doesn’t seem at all compelled by the real redemption that is central to the Christian message. Why is that? I think the problem lies in two separate but related functional heresies at work in the Church (here meaning heresies in what beliefs are reflected in the way we behave, even if we swear up and down with large conferences, studies and sermon series’ to the contrary). The first is the heresy of core goodness; that we were simply good people on a wrong path before Christ came and saved us. The second is the heresy of surface neatness, as opposed to deep righteousness.
    The first heresy works to make us, at least in the way we act, imagine that some people are beyond salvation, by imagining that we were not “beyond salvation” before God came and saved us, regardless of how respectable we were at the time.
    Just by way of review, let me remind us of where we were before God found us. We were one of the “all” that were going their own we, we were not doing righteousness, because none were (read Romans Ch 1-3 for a full elucidation of the topic… and yes, Romans 1 applies to all of us). The simple fact was that our righteousness was as dirty rags (and so our evil was even worse). We were not seeking God, we were seeking our own righteousness when God saved us.
    By forgetting this, we imagine that certain people (usually people who don’t meet our standards of surface neatness… more on that tomorrow) are beyond God’s salvation. We may use religious language to cloak it (misappropriating Jesus’ words about pearls before swine), but the result is the same, we believe we were closer to God when he saved us than those other people are, so there is no reason to have patience with people who struggle with sins that are different from our own.
    It’s also going to mean that we’re going to have “second class Christians” (or even go so far as to call other people not Christian) for “sins” that are minor in the Biblical metanarrative (drinking alcohol, failing to divest of investments in politically problematic companies), all the while ignoring sins that are major (failing to love people created in the image of God…. all people, or failing to love God).
    This gets really dark when it’s linked with the other major functional heresy. More tomorrow

  • Online Reading (June 24, 2015)

    Persecution: A New York Times opinion piece points out why Christians should see the white supremacist habit of picking on Black Churches as persecution of the Church.

    Apologetics: While (at staggeringly great length) taking issue with “natural atheology”, Edward Feser argues that Apologetics isn’t just an intellectually dishonest branch of rhetoric.

    Media: GetReligion today shows why failing to understand prayer can lead journalists to get stories wrong.

    Church Resources: Probably self-serving, but Thom Rainer talks about how churches actually can (In many cases) afford extra staff.

  • Losing the Plot (Redemption in Christian Community Part I)

    Many people will say that church isn’t all that interesting. At some level, that’s because people who have not been reborn of the Holy Spirit don’t generally enjoy the real things of God, but in addition to the direct sinfulness of humanity, I think we Christians may also bear part of the blame for the lack of value in Church.
    Churches generally spend a great deal of time trying to be more relevant, whether through changing worship styles, better small group programs, or even through shifting doctrine to be more inclusive, but all of this is strange considering the compelling nature of the Gospel (or how it was compelling to previous generations).
    I don’t say this without evidence. Despite the great antipathy the culture has been feeling for the Church over the past several years, this past week, we saw society compelled by the witness of a group of Christians in Charleston, South Carolina. The reason is, in the face of a gross evil visited upon them, a group of Christians determined to offer forgiveness to the man who performed the evil deed. I have no idea if they saiid theologically correct things, but they did choose to overcome evil with good.
    The interest in this part of a tragic story opposes the idea that we have simply arrived at a historical period where the message of the Gospel no longer has any clout. The idea that we can be acceptable to God; that all the mistakes and evil we have done in our own lives can not only be forgotten, but remade into a display of God’s goodness… into something beautiful…. Maybe that is no longer valuable to people. Yet when the men and women at Dylan Roof’s bail hearing wished mercy on his soul, many again felt the
    Yet generally, as the Church, I think we have lost the plot, so this week, I’m going to do some short posts about where I think we’ve gone wrong, and how we can get right. In the meantime, though, it’s easiest to say that we have often followed our unbelieving culture, and lost our love of seeing God’s redemption because in order for something to be redeemed from a sinful state, it must be well and truly bad. 
    We have sought to isolate ourselves in the church from both the sins of others and the sins of ourselves, and even sought security and safety in things other than God, rather than facing evil squarely with the Gospel. We have as a result lost the ability to see God’s beauty in saving the lost and repurposing what we intended for evil for His ultimate good. Why has this happened? Tune in tomorrow.