1) How Catholic Was John Kennedy?
Protestant leaders – from backwoods evangelists and radio preachers to prominent pastors such as Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale – warned the country would go to hell with a Catholic in the Oval Office.
“I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold at Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” Kennedy complained.
Against some advisers’ counsel, the candidate decided to directly confront the anti-Catholic bias with a televised speech to a group of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960. It was like Daniel walking into the lion’s den, a journalist said at the time.
2) Are Your Books Your Shell Collection?
Good theology books are very important, but even the best, when left on the shelf, emphatically cannot replace what it means to know God. If your library doesn’t lead you to a deeper affection for Jesus, then it’s as useless as a collection of shells.
3) Does Your Facebook Rant Honor Everyone?
For the Christian, it’s not about winning a culture war. We win through how we engage our neighbors. Our honor should be on full display… even on Facebook.
4) C.S. Lewis: Scholar to the Common Man
Because of Lewis, I can have interesting theological discussions with people who never went to college. I’ve met troubled college students who found solace in Mere Christianity, four-year-olds who delighted in The Magician’s Nephew, 50-year-olds who love to ruminate over The Abolition of Man. The beauty of Lewis’s legacy is that it transcends class, country, and age. Even 50 years after his passing, he continues to teach us all.
5) A Table of Forgetful Remembrance
What gratitude would flow from this exercise? What thanksgiving? For those who have dined on the sacred, the Thanksgiving table becomes a feast of forgetful remembrance. For forgetful remembrance is grace—the taste of a homecoming remembered, the foretaste of a homecoming yet to come. On Thanksgiving years from now when our grandchildren gather to serve this most familiar of meals, may the table still be laid with the flavors of homecoming—may we still be serving the very grace that was served for us, in which all true thankfulness finds its source.
6) Ten Times its Wise to Hold Your Tongue
Ten reminders for when it is appropriate to hold your tongue.
7) Nothing More to Need: A Profile of Christian Courage
A short time ago my mother visited Elaine and asked how she deals with all that she has suffered. Elaine looked at her quizzically and said, “But I don’t feel like I have suffered.” She acknowledges that she has endured great challenges and great physical pain, but she cannot and will not see herself as essentially a sufferer. She knows Jesus Christ and him crucified and now waits patiently and joyfully for the day when her body, soul and mind—all she is—will be perfected in his presence. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
As we meditate upon these dignities and blessings, the image of the robot becomes less and less appropriate, not because God’s control over us appears less complete, but because one doesn’t treat robots with such love and honor.
2) Ted Turner Wants to Go To Heaven
He revised the Ten Commandments, which he considered outdated, coming up instead with his Eleven Voluntary Initiatives, which he printed on cards small enough to carry in a wallet. He tossed out the commandments that struck him as outdated — a host of the “thou shalt nots,” particularly the one banning adultery. “People have had a lot of fun breaking that one. I know I did.”
3) Why You Can’t Push Your Kids Into the Kingdom
Children are a divine stewardship. They are not for us to own, but for us to love, carefully guide, and then release to God’s provident care. We cannot pressure, bully or force them into faith.
We parent, not with anticipation of some promised outcome, but out of faithfulness to Jesus, leaving the outcome to him.
Divorce is a third-rail topic, one about which there are a variety of opinions within evangelical circles. Gospel-centered people who love Jesus and his Word can draw markedly different conclusions on the issue based on the same biblical texts. While everyone would agree marriage is a good gift from God that should be upheld—defended from the inside by a husband and wife and protected from the outside by the local church and the broader Christian community—we’re often unsure how to proceed when the brokenness of this world infects a marriage and it succumbs to the disease. Disparaging the existence of the morgue won’t raise the dead, and it certainly won’t bring comfort to those who mourn.
5) Is New York on the Brink of a Great Awakening?
Since New York City is a center of influence in terms of media and entertainment, Metaxas also asserts that a spiritual change inside of New York would have a ripple effect outside of New York: “If we could see changes in places like New York and Los Angeles, we could see changes across the whole country.”
As someone shaping the next generation of believers, Thornbury is eager to see young Christians continuing the work in New York City: “I see the Church in New York City becoming a prophetic witness that seeks the welfare of the community. I also envision more young believers relocating here, doing a work in the city, and having a heart for metropolis.”
He continued, “Historians will be able to tell us a generation from now whether or not—technically speaking—this era in New York City fits what missiologists and sociologists would call a ‘revival.’ But, it’s clear that God is on the move here.”
The selfie isn’t bad. It just is. It’s a fact of life in this digital world. But amidst the selfie’s ubiquity, don’t miss what it tells us about ourselves and about the way we present ourselves to the world. The selfie is not a photo of your face as much as it is a snapshot of your heart.
This week’s articles follow, but first – a sermon excerpt for all those who haven’t listened to the new Beautiful Eulogy album yet…
1) Fox News’ Highly Reluctant Jesus Follower
But then the pastor preached. I was fascinated. I had never heard a pastor talk about the things he did. Tim Keller’s sermon was intellectually rigorous, weaving in art and history and philosophy. I decided to come back to hear him again. Soon, hearing Keller speak on Sunday became the highlight of my week. I thought of it as just an interesting lecture—not really church. I just tolerated the rest of it in order to hear him. Any person who is familiar with Keller’s preaching knows that he usually brings Jesus in at the end of the sermon to tie his points together. For the first few months, I left feeling frustrated: Why did he have to ruin a perfectly good talk with this Jesus nonsense?
2) To Stave Off Decline, Churches Attract New Members with Beer
With mainline religious congregations dwindling across America, a scattering of churches is trying to attract new members by creating a different sort of Christian community. They are gathering around craft beer.
I think some of this could be a fine para-church ministry, but I’m really concerned about the “ho-hum” approach these people seem to have to the gathering of God’s people and approaching God with reverence.
3) 91 New Thesis Concerning Modern Heresy
Earlier this year, I was going over Martin Luther’s 95 theses, and it occurred to me that many of them apply to the teachings we call the prosperity gospel. The comparison isn’t exact, of course. Prosperity teachers may be popular, but they aren’t part of the majority church as were the teachers Luther opposed. And if you remember from reading Luther’s list, he gives the Pope all due respect, suggesting that he is being misrepresented, not that he is teaching heresy himself. We can’t say that for the preachers of the prosperity gospel.
Here’s my list, taken from and based on Luther’s original–and four theses short. You see today’s Wittenberg doors on the right. They’re bronze, so we’ll have to post new theses with sticky tack. You’ll also see that several of the theses here are Luther’s own statements, taken from this translation.
4) Bolz-Weber’s Liberal, Foul-Mouthed Articulation of Christianity Speaks to Fed-Up Believers
These are the people who put her memoir near the top of the New York Times bestseller list the week it came out in September. They are the ones who follow her every tweet and Facebook post by the thousands, and who have made the Lutheran minister a budding star for the liberal Christian set.
And who, as Bolz-Weber has described it in her frequently profane dialect, “are [mess]ing up my weird.”
A quick tour through her 44 years doesn’t seem likely to wind up here. It includes teen rebellion against her family’s fundamentalist Christianity, a nose dive into drug and alcohol addiction, a lifestyle of sleeping around and a stint doing stand-up in a grungy Denver comedy club. She is part of society’s outsiders, she writes in her memoir, its “underside dwellers . . . cynics, alcoholics and queers.”
Again, I’m OK with some of her attitudes and tactics – I’m all for more authentic people and preachers – but I maintain that a cleaned up person, and a preacher of the Word, should have the sensibility to know that poor language isn’t to be tolerated in the pulpit. Also, I’m generally cautious about anything that classifies itself as “progressive.”
5) A Reading Plan for Augustine’s City of God
The City of God must be read against the backdrop of the sacking of Rome, where critics argued that Rome fell after it embraced Christianity and lost the protection of the gods. Augustine argued that the pagan critics were defining goodness on the basis of the satisfaction of their own desires, rather than the true definition which sees that the ultimate good is found in God alone. Augustine shows that everything in history happens for good purposes, if goodness is rightly understood. He pointed to the pagan desire to return to the city of Rome, and argued that their desire was right but their destination was wrong. True happiness could only come in the heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God.
One of the reasons that Augustine’s work remains unread today is because of its length and digressions. In lieu of an abridged version, Michael Haykin of Southern Seminary offers a selective reading guide to the book, which I’ve included below for those who want to take up one of the great classics of the Christian tradition.
6) How I Shut Down Two Porn Shops
As stoked as I get when one of the places I pray about closes down, let me be clear that my prayers are not vindictive or self-righteous. We need to be grounded in the Father’s heart of love and compassion as well as His heart for justice. I don’t pray for porn shops and strip clubs to close down because I want a power trip. I pray because these kinds of places are strongholds of addiction, spiritual oppression, and the dehumanization of both men and women.
When I pray in this way, I pray for a blessing on the next people who will occupy the buildings I target. I pray that God would break the spiritual strongholds and curses within those spaces. And I pray that He would bring healing, freedom and repentance to the previous owners of the place.
7) John MacArthur Answers His Critics
John MacArthur’s Strange Fire conference has come and gone and the book will be shipping next week. Whatever you felt about the conference, there is little doubt that a lot of work and a lot of discussion remain as we, the church, consider the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the aftermath of the event, and with the book on its way, I think we all have questions we’d like to ask Dr. MacArthur. A week ago I asked for your questions and sent them through to him. Here are his answers to the first batch of questions. I anticipate adding a second part to this interview within the week.
1) I Hate Porn
I hate porn for the fear it induces in the hearts of parents everywhere that their child could stumble upon a sight and get addicted.
But I love Jesus.
It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out.” That stunningly clear sentence reflects one of the most amazing, tragic, and lamentable characteristics of contemporary Christianity: an impatience with the Word of God.
Theology in story is a genre that comes and goes in Christian writing and one that, in the past, has been used for good and for ill. I am grateful to see Wax both attempting it and succeeding well at it. Clear Winter Nights is a book, a story, that will encourage the Christian and provide answers to the skeptic. I highly recommend it.
4) Gods Grace and My Filthy Rags
Money given to a stranger in need, a meal cooked for a friend with a new baby, a note of encouragement written to a good friend: rags. Even my time spent studying the Bible, praying, and tithing: still rags. Not one of those things—not one—can earn me the right to be the adopted daughter of the King. All of my actions earn me nothing, except for this: I can choose to believe by faith that Christ died on the cross and in power rose again, defeating sin and—in the ultimate and perfect demonstration of grace—offering me new life in Him. It’s a gift I can never, ever repay, but one I should earnestly desire to share with everyone I meet.
…Father…help me trade my petty frustrations, however valid I think they may be, for peace and gentleness toward those who frustrate me. Jesus, forgive me for my pettiness, and help me to live out even the small things in your name. Amen.