We Are Loved for His Glory

via youtube.com

An excellent message. Key words: "The love of God that makes much of us for his glory is a greater love than a love that would only make much of us." - Piper.

Posted via web from The Central Point

John Calvin on Isaiah 55:7

An apt comment on preaching the whole council of God, from Calvin's Commentaries:

We ought carefully to examine the context, for he shews that men cannot be led to repentance in any other way than by holding out assurance of pardon. Whoever, then, inculcates the doctrine of repentance, without mentioning the mercy of God and reconciliation through free grace, labours to no purpose ... And indeed, as we have formerly said, a sinner will always shrink from the presence of God so long as he is dragged to his judgement-seat to give an account of his life, and will never be subdued to fear and obedience till his heart is brought into a state of peace.

Posted via email from The Central Point

Quote of the Day

By Tim Keller in The Reason for God:

It is possible to avoid Jesus as Savior as much by keeping all the Biblical rules as by breaking them. Both religion (in which you build your identity on your moral achievements) and irreligion (in which you build your identity on some other secular pursuit or relationship) are, ultimately, spiritually identical courses to take. Both are "sin."

Posted via email from The Central Point

The Big Issues - How Can the Church Prepare?

via thegospelcoalition.org

Tim Keller has penned an excellent analysis of what the church ought to be doing to address the huge challenges it currently faces. One of his recommendations stands out in my mind - a renewal of apologetics in the church. Keller believes that the contemporary church's laxity in this area reflects a larger hole in western thinking. Keller cites two primary reasons for renewed Christian apologetics:

First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years — how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call ‘post-modernism’) is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment’s optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins’ books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

Emphasis added.  I think this analysis is spot-on. If you are interested in apologetics, I can recommend a wonderful starter book called the Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics by Doug Powell.

Please note that if you elect to purchase the book through the above link, I will receive a small percentage of the sale price.

Posted via web from The Central Point

Gamechanger

via blog.beliefnet.com

Ben Witherington reports on an amazing find in eastern turkey - a temple complex approximately 11,500 years old called Gobeckli Tepe - and discusses the implications.

Posted via web from christopherdrew's posterous

From the "Unintentionally Entertaining" File

Here is an amusing article wherein Christopher Hitchens, atheist, demonstrates a deeper knowledge of orthodox Christianity that his interviewer, who happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister. See especially the fourth question by Marilyn Sewell and Hitchens's response:

[Sewell]: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

[Hitchens] I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

I respect Hitchens, who is generally a great thinker despite his tragic disbelief. It speaks volumes that he is so informed on the apostolic faith while the "minister," also tragically, is not.

A New Year, A New Blog

Happy New Year!

As we enter the year 2010, I have decided that it's time to resume the blogging enterprise. My old blog, ::What Next?:: was much fun.  It's now retired.  I've copied all of the entries to this blog, and the old one will go by the wayside permanently at some point in the future.

In deciding to jump back onto the horse, I had to determine what God might want me to accomplish by rebirthing this blogging work.  It's taken a long time to discern what this could be.

I've been galvanized lately by some great preaching and wonderful reading.  In all of that, one thing stood out as the mission for this new blog - that it be a vehicle for the expression of joy in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That joy could assume a variety of expressions.  Polemic can even be joyful as long as it glorifies God.  We'll see what happens.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you in this New Year.