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The Investment of Suffering
Some people spend their days in pain with bodies that keep the yearning front and center, that keep loss always in the mind’s eye. Widows. Orphans. The sick. The damaged (by birth or by man). Know this: God has special promises for you, and He loves bringing triumphant resolutions to those who have tasted the deepest sorrows.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 109-110
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Impossibillions Is a Lot
Our futile struggle in time is courtesy of God’s excessive giving. Sunset after sunset make it hard to remember and hold just one. Smell after smell. Laugh after laugh. A mind still thinking, a heart still beating. Imagine sticking your fingers on your pulse and thanking God every time He gave you another blood-driving, brain-powering thump. We should. And we shouldn’t, because if we did, we would never do anything else with our living; we wouldn’t have the time to look at or savor any of the other of our impossibillions of gifts.
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A Spoiled Supper
One way that communion has been spoiled is by an incorrect understanding of worthiness. In the middle of his instructions about the Lord’s Supper, Paul warned against participating “in an unworthy manner” and said, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Corinthians 11:28). We ought to judge ourselves truly, then “we would not be judged” (11:31).
The Lord is serious about who He eats with.
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Of Mortal Ills Notwithstanding
You cannot throw a diva fit backstage in this production and force the understudy to take your place. You are in every scene. You are on the field for every play. And you go into the next one and the next one and the next one carrying the baggage and the wounds and the weariness of the last one and the last one and the last one.
—N. D.
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The Gunk on Our Glasses
What is the purpose, could we even say benefit, of planning a time in our worship service every Lord’s Day to confess our sins? Is our focus on sin a way of worshipping sin? It’s certainly not meant to be. Is worship with a focus on our sin a guilt-producing event? “You probably haven’t felt as bad as you should have this past week, sinner. Don’t you realize what a worm you are?
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It's an Important Difference
How do you tell a scribe from a prophet…? The prophets love the people they chastise….
—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel, 162
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There Is Still Work to Do
Assumption One: Paradise was easy living. Incorrect. It was joyful and glorious, which is a very different thing. Adam and Eve were given an entire planet to tend. Every last creature to identify, name, and oversee. Or, in the case of the dragon, identify, name, and kill. All before the fall. All while the world was perfect. Adam and Eve were not in hammocks, relaxing in the light of a perma-sunset with even tans while sipping on honeysuckle bouquets proffered by miniature ponies.
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Hard to Find, Harder to Miss
Good Story: a linked thread of occurrence, real or fictitious, in, around, and after trouble of some degree or sequence, in which the triune nature is consistently revealed with artistry either through the real actions and choices of particular characters, the author’s direct participation, or through the author’s indirect judgments latent in the choices of style and arrangement in the recounting.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 72
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Image Bearing by Battle
Nails are forged for pounding. Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded— under torch and hammer and chisel— into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 69
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Parents Are Always Parenting
Other real live souls are now depending on you. You are the creator of their childhoods. You are the influencer of their dreams and tastes and fears. You are the emcee of all reality, the one to introduce those small people to the true personality of their Maker (as imaged by your life more than your words). The choices you now make have lives riding on them. Always.
—N.
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Bricks on the Wall
Some Bible opposites are easy to couple. The opposite of night is day, of dark is light, of truth is lies. Some opposites are a bit more creative. For example, the opposite of evil is not always good. When it comes to the way of salvation, the opposite of evil is justification. The opposite of foolishness is not necessarily wisdom considered by itself. The opposite of foolishness is faith and the fear of the Lord, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
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Such a Bone Head
Harsh. Badly behaved. Worthless. Impossible to talk to. These adjectives are used about a character in a well-known narrative, but not about a low class halfwit. They do not describe an independent man but one who received care and kindness from others he didn’t know. They aren’t directed at a man whose wife was cranky and ugly and hard to tell which was worse; his wife was discerning and beautiful.
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They All Involve Hills
Here’s a good case for pastors to fight on the front of free speech rather than of tax exemption. One reason is because we will lose the rhetorical battle about money.
[P]rogressives have successfully camouflaged their lust for other people’s money as the high point of their altruism, and our objection to being pillaged as our greed.
A second reason is because the liberals say that they love free speech.
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Not the Final Meeting
Thank God that the justice of God can never be isolated from the mercy of God. We can divide them when we study them. We can track both words through a concordance search and read passages that mention one and not the other. But in the world, in God’s nature, the two cannot be separated.
When God judged Adam and Eve, promising them pain and death, then banishing them from the Garden, He honored His righteous, authoritative justice.
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Motivation for Obedience
We believe that God is God meaning that He does whatever He pleases (see Psalm 135:6). We believe that He controls everything, from ants in driveway cracks to the color of lights on the White House. We also believe that God writes all things into existence for His glory, and in light of His unmatched wisdom and power, we would be right to conclude that what we see around us is ultimately the best way for Him to be seen as great.
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Not That Far Apart
Over the last couple days I’ve argued that the start of our cultural problems is when man rejects God as God. The Supreme Court and the cover of “Vanity Fair” are fruit from an unsubmissive root. Then I gave three things that Christians could do. And we really must do something.
If the church fails to apply the central truth of Christianity to social problems correctly, someone else will do so incorrectly.
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Mr. and Mrs. Grumpybottoms
Yesterday I wrote that the sins in our culture are not worse than the original sin in the Garden of Eden. That said, our sins are bad and getting worse, or they at least have better marketing. What can we do? Are we supposed to do anything? Who is the “we”? The church? Individual Christians? American citizens? Pastors? Parents?
Within the first twenty-four hours after the Supreme ruining on marriage, the most common response I saw among evangelical Christians went something such as, “We don’t care about politics, we still have the gospel.
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Our Cultural Garden
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled last Friday that no State has the right to make it illegal for a man to “marry” a man and for a woman to “marry” a woman. This is on the heels of national news and controversy over a man changing himself into a woman (adding some female parts to his male parts). Some women are mad that this defines womanhood according to bodily features, and pink nail polish.
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When Obergefell Falls
Part stone slung at Goliath, part song sung at Grendel’s mom, read the whole charge from Toby Sumpter that starts with this:
We are being taunted. The giant’s name is Obergefell; he is a six-fingered descendent of the Anakim. He has come out onto the battlefield arrayed in his impressive armor. He wears the media elites like a helmet of brass, and on his chest, he wears the deep pockets of multibillion dollar corporate CEOs.
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He Has Us Covered
Even if you’ve heard it before, sometimes it’s good to cover the same ground again. When Jesus died on the cross He covered our sins.
Cover is an interesting concept. To cover the bill is not to put your salad plate on top of it, but to pay the full amount. To cover a mistake, at least in a good way and not a cover-up, is to do what it takes to fix the problem.
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Children of the Rainbow
Doug Wilson writing (again, for those who haven’t read him already) about why Christians kids need a Christian education before engaging the culture.
You can’t choose sides before you can see the sides.
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Running Out of Generations
Christians don't listen to Immanuel Kant much, or get our worldview of marching orders from him. But his take on Genesis 3 may represent a typical, if unspoken, view of the many about man.
[Genesis 3 reveals the] transition from an uncultured, merely animal condition to the state of humanity, from bondage to instinct to rational control—-in a word, from the tutelage of nature to the state of freedom. (quoted in "
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His Shots Will Backfire
We understand now that the ultimate fulfillment of God’s curse on the serpent, namely, that the seed of the woman would crush his head (Genesis 3:15), is Jesus. It is similar to Paul’s explanation of how Jesus is the one seed fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham, “promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one. And to ‘your offspring,’ who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16).
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Paternity Tests
Confession of sin is an issue of fatherhood. I don’t mean that father’s are the most important confessors, though dads can’t help but make a mess of things at home if they don’t. Instead, I mean that confession of sin is an issue that reveals spiritual fatherhood. How we react to sin makes it evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil.
The apostle John wrote,
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Premeditated Forgiveness
When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper (and we do celebrate it), we are not celebrating that God has overlooked our sin but that He most certainly has not. Grace isn’t God’s willful oblivion. Grace is His premeditated forgiveness with a full view. God knows all of our sin. And God receives Jesus’ sacrifice as a full ransom for our sin.
Christ saw the list of charges against us. He knew we disobeyed, and how badly.