The Twenties: A Retrospective (11/30/06 - 19 Comments)
This Saturday will mark my thirtieth birthday. I am not typically one who takes much notice of occasions such as birthdays or who makes a big deal of them, but as I considered passing a decade barrier, it seemed appropriate that I should spend some time thinking about the last ten years. I was convicted that it would be beneficial to ponder all that has happened in my life since 1996, the last time I...
Should We Light Candles? (Part 2) (11/30/06 - 22 Comments)
Yesterday I broached the always-difficult subject of the Regulative Principle. As I should have expected, there was a good bit of discussion about it. I assume it was clear that I was not personally defending the Principle but merely attempting to explain it in a way that accurately represented those who hold to it. Today I will post a brief conclusion to the original thrust of the article which dealt with advent candles. As you...
Book Review - The Nativity Story (11/29/06 - 21 Comments)
It is a rare occasion that a film is better than the book it is based on. The book is almost always superior. However, a book that precedes a film by the same name is typically far better than a book that is based on the film. Only rarely does a textual adaptation of a film equal it. And so it was with little eagerness or expectation that I began to read The Nativity Story,...
Should We Light Candles? (11/29/06 - 45 Comments)
I receive all kinds of interesting questions from readers of this site. Recently one of these, a friend, asked my opinion of lighting advent candles in worship services. "Would you say the lighting of advent candles fit under the category of imagery," he asked, "or would it be considered symbolism? What's the difference? Does observance of advent violate the Regulative Principle?" I would like to consider this question today and will focus primarily on the...
Book Review - When You Pray (11/28/06 - 14 Comments)
When I was a child my parents explained to me how important it is to make time every day for reading the Bible and praying. Wanting to please them, and knowing it was the right thing to do, I began to have a brief period of devotions each day before bed. I do not remember a whole lot about how I conducted these devotions, but I do remember struggling with whether or not it was...
An Exhibitionist and Voyeuristic Culture (11/27/06 - 24 Comments)
This weekend a friend sent an article to myself and to a list of other people. He was outraged at a story that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He is no doubt right to be outraged. Here are some excerpts from the story. Just how far will people go to get their hands on a new PlayStation 3? Just ask KDWB-FM, 101.3's morning show host Dave Ryan, who on Tuesday morning asked folks...
A Favorite Poem (11/26/06 - 9 Comments)
I wrote a couple of days ago about poetry and its power in communicating. I do love poetry in general, but certain poems stand out. And there is one that I love more than all others. I thought I'd share it with you today, though I suspect most are already familiar with it. It is John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud." Donne lived from 1572 to 1631 and was a prolific poet. He also coined...
Book Review: Flags of our Fathers (11/25/06 - 5 Comments)
War is terrible. It's an understatement, I know, and something that is almost too obvious to bother saying. Yet the horrors of war can only really be understood, it seems, by those who have been involved in them. In the annals of warfare, few battles have been more brutal than the battle of Iwo Jima. Those who survived this battle were changed forever. James Bradley's father was one of those survivors. But he was more....
John Piper: The Anti-Rowling (11/24/06 - 29 Comments)
While I was slurping down lunch today I spent a few minutes playing with LibraryThing's "Unsuggestion" feature. For those who have no idea what I am talking about, LibraryThing is a neat little site that allows you to catalog your books. Or as the site says, "LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere--even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also...
Poetry (11/24/06 - 20 Comments)
I've been thinking a lot lately about words. This must sound fascinating, I know, so congratulations if you have even made it to the second sentence of this article! With this being an unofficial holiday in the United States (and National Sleep-in Day, or something like that) I don't expect too many people to visit my blog anyways. Still, for the benefit of myself and anyone else who cares to read it, here is a...
How To Pray For Your Wife (11/23/06 - 6 Comments)
"As a husband, I know it is my responsibility to pray for my wife. Often, though, I do not know the words to use, and I end up feeling that my prayers for her could be more effective. From marriage counseling and pastoral experience, I have met many men who share the same concern. The average Christian man does not know how to pray for his wife. Unfortunately, when we do not know how to...
The Lesson of Ananias (11/22/06 - 17 Comments)
I was thinking this morning about one of my favorite passages of Scripture. While the story is well known, the part of it that appeals to me is often just passed over. It is in Acts 9 and involves just two people, the disciple Ananias and Saul. Saul, notorious for persecuting Christians, has departed Jerusalem after obtaining a letter granting him authority to arrest any Christians he can find in Damascus. He is to bring...
Tuesday Ramblings: Thabiti Edition (11/21/06 - 17 Comments)
I had great plans for the site for today, but real life very rudely interrupted those plans. Hence I'll haul out a ramblings column I had hoped to post on Friday. Ramblings are, of course, things I have wanted to say but things that haven't seemed worthy of a post all their own. I also hadn't planned on this being an unofficial celebration of Thabiti Anyabwile, and yet somehow, events have conspired to make his...
Body Piercing Saved My Life (11/20/06 - 31 Comments)
Andrew Beaujon has a strange fascination with Christian music; though he is not a Christian, he enjoys listening to this music and has spent a great deal of time seeking to trace its history and to understand the genre and the subculture it has inspired. Body Piercing Saved My Life is the result of his investigation. The book's title is inspired by a t-shirt he saw at Cornerstone Festival, which showed a picture of Jesus'...
Book Review: David Livingstone (11/19/06 - 5 Comments)
As I make my way through the biographies of famous Christians of days past, I came across David Livingstone. Interestingly, Livingstone is a man best known not for something he said but for something that was said to him. "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," spoken to him by Henry Morton Stanley, is a phrase that has gone down in history. But for this phrase I suspect few people would remember Livingstone's name. Born in Scotland in...
King For A Week - Thirsty Theologian (11/18/06 - 6 Comments)
King for a Week is an honor I bestow on blogs that I feel are making a valuable contribution to my faith and the faith of other believers. Every week (in theory) I select a blog, link to it from my site, and add that site's most recent headlines to my left sidebar. While this is really not much, I do feel that it allows me to encourage and support other bloggers while making my...
Heroes and Celebrities (11/17/06 - 13 Comments)
I have been reading James Bradley's Flags of our Fathers, a book describing the infamous battle of Iwo Jima, but more importantly, a book describing the author's search for the role his father played in that battle. His father, John Bradly, a Navy corpsman who was assigned to the Marines, was one of the men who raised a flag over Iwo Jima in what has become the world's most reproduced and most famous photograph. His...
Plagiarism In The Pulpit (11/16/06 - 59 Comments)
Two months ago, Suzanne Sataline published an article in the Wall Street Journal. The article was cleverly titled "Veneration Gap: A Popular Strategy For Church Growth Splits Congregants" and dealt with churches that had been split apart through the attempts of their leaders to convert them to the Purpose Driven paradigm. Last month I wrote an article that was, in part, inspired by that one. I wrote about the church's dirty laundry and expressed concern...
ChurchMerch - Your Best Life Now: The Game (11/15/06 - 78 Comments)
So a friend of mine saw a rather strange item on my Amazon wishlist and decided he would, as a bit of a gag I suppose, buy it for me. And so in today's mail I found a copy of "Your Best Life Now: The Game." The box declares that it is "Inspired by the #1 New York Times Bestseller" by Joel Osteen and says, "The 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential." I...
Finding Your Gift (11/14/06 - 36 Comments)
There have been a couple of times in the past few years that I have written about spiritual gifts and spiritual gift inventories. These articles continue to be read (thanks, I suppose, to the efforts of search engines) and, since I have given a great deal more thought to this subject, I wanted to update what I have said in the past. When I first began thinking and writing about spiritual gift assessments I was...
Books and Beliefs (11/13/06 - 45 Comments)
Last month, in an article entitled By Our Books Shall We Be Known, I discussed some commentary Al Mohler wrote based on an essay that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The purpose of the article was, quite simply, to show that there is a lot you can tell about a person by the books in his library. Mohler said, "To a great extent, our personal libraries betray our true identities and interests. A...
Meeting Adrian (11/13/06 - 13 Comments)
Last night Adrian Warnock flew into Toronto on a short layover while travelling to a top secret meeting in an undisclosed American city. He will be spending a couple of days with Andrew Fountain, who pastors a church somewhere in Toronto. But last night Paul and I drove out to a restaurant near the airport to meet the guy. We had a nice meal together and enjoyed getting to know both Adrian and Andrew. For...
Hymn Revival (11/12/06 - 32 Comments)
There is an old phrase which states "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Yet this is no mere cliche when it comes to hymns. Over the past few years worship music has taken the Christian music world by storm. Artist after artist, band after band fed the craze by releasing albums of praise music, some filled with original songs and some with songs that had been previously-recorded. But with such a finite number of songs...
Book Review - Squat (11/11/06 - 4 Comments)
"We live in a squat. We don’t know squat. We don’t have squat. We don’t do squat. We don’t give a squat. People say we’re not worth squat." In the shadow of Wall Street’s wealth, homeless people with names like Squid, Saw, and Bonehead live in abandoned buildings known as "squats" where life is hand to mouth, where fear and violence fester. One of these people is Squid, an obsessive compulsive young man who has...
Friday Ramblings (11/10/06 - 19 Comments)
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day here in Canada, the day we remember veterans and those who sacrificed their lives to protect our nation. My son's school is honoring this day today in the way many schools do: they are inviting veterans to the school and will hold an assembly. I hope my son looks in awe at the veterans as I did when I was his age, though there are fewer and fewer veterans still alive....
ESV Reverse Interlinear New Testament (11/09/06 - 11 Comments)
At long last, the ESV Reverse Interlinear New Testament has become available. What is a Reverse Interlinear Bible, you ask? The Preface answers well. "A conventional interlinear New Testament provides an English translation directly below each Greek word in a Greek New Testament. This tool is called an interlinear because the English words are placed between the lines of Greek." Though remarkably helpful tools, interlinears do have one weakness. "Since the English words are merely...
Book Review - Wild Men, Wild Alaska (11/09/06 - 4 Comments)
Rocky McElveen is the kind of man, the kind of "real man," who puts desk jockeys like myself to shame. While I spend nearly endless hours sitting at my desk in Canada's suburban sprawl, McElveen leads parties of bedraggled hunters through the wide open spaces of untamed Alaska. Though he was trained and educated at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and is an ordained Presbyterian minister, he was drawn back to Alaska, the land...
C.J. Mahaney: "The Pastor's Priorities" (11/08/06 - 15 Comments)
Those who had the privilege of attending the Together for the Gospel Conference, or who listened to the audio recordings (available here in MP3 or CD format), no doubt remember C.J. Mahaney's plenary session which was entitled "Watch Your Life and Doctrine." He took as his text 1 Timothy 4:16 which reads: "Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and...
The Benefit Obtained By Preaching (11/07/06 - 18 Comments)
As I read Marsden's biography of Jonthan Edwards last week, I was stopped short several times by Edwards' wisdom. Constantly surrounded by conflict, and often facing people who sought to undermine his ministry, Edwards had every opportunity to reflect on the task of a minister. During his ministry, one conflict involved whether sermons should primarily enlighten the mind or whether they should primarily stir the affections. Charles Chauncy, his opponent in this debate, believed that...
The Scandal (11/06/06 - 148 Comments)
By now you have heard of the scandal involving Ted Haggard. Reaction to the news has ranged from sympathy to disgust, from support to condemnation. The media has dedicated a lot of attention to this story, though they seem to be writing about it as just another news story rather than something that is somehow bigger or more significant than any other story. Watchbloggers are out in force, like homeschool moms at a book sale,...
King for a Week - Expository Thoughts (11/05/06 - 6 Comments)
King for a Week is an honor I bestow on blogs that I feel are making a valuable contribution to my faith and the faith of other believers. Every week (in theory) I select a blog, link to it from my site, and add that site's most recent headlines to my left sidebar. While this is really not much, I do feel that it allows me to encourage and support other bloggers while making my...
Saturday Ramblings (11/04/06 - 9 Comments)
I got a laugh out of Phil Johnson's post this morning on Pyromaniacs. He wrote "I have part 3 of Gary Johnson's review queued up and ready to go, but I'm holding it till Monday because weekend traffic at the blog is sometimes low, and I don't want the end of that series to get overlooked." I have to admit to doing the same thing, namely, writing an article and figuring that it's just too...
Book Review - Jonathan Edwards: A Life (11/03/06 - 12 Comments)
I came to realize not too long ago that, for a man of such importance, I knew shockingly little about Jonathan Edwards. I had some knowledge of the basic outline of his life and teachings, but knew little beyond that. Having heard so many positive reviews of George Marsden's recent biography of the man, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, I turned to this book to learn more about this giant of the faith. I was richly...
Book Recommendations (11/02/06 - 11 Comments)
I read and review a lot of books. You already know this. I have been pleased to find that other Christians able to benefit from my love of reading through these reviews. I've received a lot of encouragement from people who have purchased books based on my recommendation and have been blessed by them. It has always been my purpose to help put good books in the hands of believers while helping them avoid ones...
The T in TULIP - Part 2 (11/01/06 - 11 Comments)
This is the second article in a series dealing with the Five Points of Calvinism and attempting to draw some fresh application from them. I anticipate that each of the five points will merit two articles. The first article dealing with the T in TULIP can be found here. Today we will seek personal application for this doctrine. Total Depravity: The Great Equalizer I often feel that I have a boring or even uninspiring testimony....
