This is the 21st installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification, incarnation, idolatry, the church, holiness, and salvation. Meditate much upon the day of judgment. Feathers swim upon the water, but gold sinks…
What Is Family Integrated Church? At the most basic level, the family integrated church is one intentionally designed to eliminate unnecessary age-segregated structures from the church’s ministry. Children typically attend all of the corporate worship gatherings with their parents rather than attending a separate children’s ministry or, in some cases, even a nursery. Intergenerational discipleship…
Pornography has traditionally been an industry that caters almost entirely to men. There have always been exceptions, of course, but it was predominantly men who bought the magazines and videos in a pre-digital age and it has been men who have made pornography a multi-billion dollar industry in the Internet age. If the industry has…
A few months ago I shared a few lessons I’ve learned along the way–a few things I’ve learned about preaching since I rather unexpectedly found myself regularly standing in the pulpit. I learned that preaching can be discouraging, that preachers are fragile, that success in preaching is difficult to measure, and that preaching is a…
This is the 20th installment in a series on common theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification, incarnation, idolatry, the church, and holiness. In the 9th sermon of John Piper’s epic series on the book of Romans he…
More than once I have been accused of being a bibliolater, a person who idolizes the Bible, who has excessive reverence for the letter of the Bible. I’m sure many other Christians have been accused of this as well. In my experience, this charge tends to be leveled against those who affirm the infallibility or…
This is the nineteenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification, incarnation, idolatry, and the church. In a lecture titled “The Meaning of Holiness” (video), R. C. Sproul identifies two major scriptural meanings…
This blog has introduced a challenge to my life that I hadn’t expected. It demands that at least part of my life–or thought life, at any rate–is lived out in public. This blog, like most others, is a place where I am able to think out loud in public and this affords every reader the…
This is the seventeenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification, incarnation, and idolatry. Wayne Grudem says it simply and well: “The church is the community of all true believers for all time.“…
While I’ve always been an avid reader of books, in the past twelve months or so I’ve also become an avid listener. After seeing hundreds of Audible ads advertising “Download a Free Audiobook Today!” I finally went ahead and signed up and downloaded my free audiobook (and yes, you actually can join, get that free…
This is the seventeenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification and incarnation. “For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the giver himself?” (John Calvin, Institutes…
Let me allow you in to a little secret of the blogosphere: The week between Christmas and New Years is the slowest week of the year for site visits. We are all busy and distracted and otherwise out of our routines, so traffic to blogs plummets to a mere forty or fifty percent of the…
This is the sixteenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, and sanctification. We sing joy to the world at Christmas, says Spurgeon, “because it is evermore a joyous fact that God should be…
If you’re a regular reader of the site, you’ve probably noticed that it has had a lot of problems in recent weeks. It holds steady for a few days, then crashes hard. After some emergency surgery—the virtual equivalent of keeping a car together with Bondo and duct tape—it comes back to life for a while.…
This is the fifteenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, and adoption. The concept of sanctification is found throughout Scripture and in reference to a variety of subjects. For example, God sanctifies the seventh…
Marco Ament’s The Magazine is a new iPad-only magazine that publishes four or five medium-length articles every two weeks. The articles cover a wide variety of subjects targeted largely at geeks and curious people. I think I probably qualify under both headings. It’s a unique publication and one I’ve generally enjoyed, though, as with every…
In some areas of my life God has called me to lead and in other areas he has called me to follow. Whether I am leading or following, the calling is one of service. As Jesus said, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must…
Are you Tim Challies?” These are not words I was expecting to hear while waiting to retrieve my luggage at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. I had just flown from Lucknow to New Delhi as I began a marathon journey back to Canada. And now I was standing by the luggage belt, waiting to…
We spent Wednesday night aboard a train that took us from New Delhi to Lucknow. We woke up in a very different part of the country. We were greeted at the station by a friend—a local pastor—who promptly took us to his apartment for breakfast. The city here is smaller, a little less noisy and…
Everyone I asked assured me that the Indian Railroads would be a cultural experience I would not want to miss if I was looking for good slice of life in India. Last night pastor Prasoon drove Murray and me through the endless Diwali celebrations so we could take an overnight train to Uttar Pradesh. It…