(considering) 8:28

Implications of the Sovereignty of God

recent posts

  • T4G 2016, Day -1

     

    Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.
    – Proverbs 25:25

    It’s Monday morning in Louisville Kentucky. I’ve just finished my morning devotions after the long trip from Newfoundland, Canada, and after having done my morning devotions, I’m preparing to go to the pre-conference for T4G 2016. Thanks to all my friends and family, and especially Church family back in St. John’s who are praying for us, that our travels would be safe, and that God would refresh us here, and give us extra strength and ideas to bring back home to help rebuild the Church in our corner of Canada.
    After spending the last several weeks writing a preliminary paper on the secularization of St. John’s Newfoundland, cataloguing both the Christian past we had and the present broken condition of the Christian Church in St. John’s, coming to a conference like this one is likely to be a bit of a shock to the system. What would it be like if we had thousands of pastors willing to learn and teach and live a robust, Biblical Gospel, for the sake of the Glory of God in Jesus Christ? Pastors willing to help build a Church that will stand where so many Christian witnesses have faltered and gone after Gospels that are not the true Gospel, or who have turned the saving message of Jesus Christ into some kind of rule book? What would it be like to have 100 such pastors, or even 10?’
    I pray this week is not just a good conference, or a time to get books, or even a time to be refreshed as we worship God and hear His word preached. I pray this is a time where I can get a vision for how sweet it is to spend time with God’s people worshipping the one true God, with a worship that engages my mind even as it makes my heart sing. I pray I get a vision for the kind of Church God desires for my homeland, and for the eternal joy of the people I love.

  • 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.