"The first Reformation was about doctrine; the second one needs to be about behavior," best-selling author Rick Warren told a congress of the Baptist World Alliance last year. "We need a reformation not of creeds but deeds." Throughout the speech, as reported on the group's website, Pastor Warren announced that a new movement is underway […]
As created male and female, all of us are sexual beings with various seasons of sexual expression. Whether single, married, divorced, widowed, sick, healthy, young, or old, all of us are to engage in chastity as a spiritual discipline over the course of our lives. According to the number of singles in my counseling office, […]
In his book Shepherds After My Own Heart, Timothy Laniak provides in-depth exegetical examination of the pastoral leadership theme throughout Scripture. Laniak, associate professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, marshals a wide number of texts to help transform the perspective of pastors and ministry leaders in a number of […]
Is marriage on the decline in Western culture? It would seem so given the number of books on singleness that have appeared on bookstore shelves in recent years. Could we be harkening back to Jeremiah's day when the absence of marriage was a sign of the times, more specifically, the decline of the times? "For […]
Section 2. Christian liberty seems to me to consist of three parts. First, the consciences of believers, while seeking the assurance of their justification before God, must rise above the law, and think no more of obtaining justification by it. For while the law, as has already been demonstrated(supra, chap. 17, sec. 1), leaves not […]
Christian faith has appeared to many an easy thing; nay, not a few even reckon it among the social virtues, as it were; and this they do because they have not made proof of it experimentally, and have never tasted of what efficacy it is. For it is not possible for any man to write […]
Paul's primary concern about the civil authority in Romans 13 is that believers subject themselves to it. He opens with the basic imperative to "be in subjection" and provides a series of arguments for it, based upon both the command of God and prudential concerns. Most remarkable is what Paul doesn't say. Not a word […]
Between May 2005 and May 2006, nearly 2,000 Chinese house church pastors and Christians were arrested. Though most of them were released after international pressure was applied, many Chinese Christians today are still serving in labor camps. My wife and I have also suffered persecution. When we were arrested in 1996 because of "illegal evangelism" […]
What good is theology in the mind if that is where it ends? If in thinking through the revelation of God (the Bible) it stays in our heads and doesn't pass through to the heart unto the hands and feet, how will anyone know it has affected us? The mouth is not a sufficient instrument; […]
Nothing expresses the heart of Christianity like the Kyrie. It was the cry of blind Bartimaeus, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Mark 10:47). It was the prayer of the justified publican and the last prayer of John Murray, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). The Bible makes clear that […]
Within the Anglican context in which I serve, we are constantly offered up an insight from Romans 14, as the antidote to "fundamentalism." "Fundamentalism" is the word that liberal opponents of our evangelical school of thought within the church use to label our position. The stock argument deployed against theological conservatives in First-World Anglicanism is […]
When I go into a restaurant, the waitress who brings me my meal, the cook in the back who prepared it, the delivery men, the wholesalers, the workers in the food-processing factories, the butchers, the farmers, the ranchers, and everyone else in the economic food chain are all being used by God to “give [me] […]
