Miscellanea

Prefer even vicious people to be cured rather than condemned …. If you want to quarrel with your enemy, quarrel first with your own heart. Quarrel, I tell you. Quarrel with your own heart.

We need more singing!

Sing more and murmur less!

Sing more and slander less!

Sing more and cavil less!

Sing more and mourn less!

Evangelical theology faces tough times ahead: the church seems variously determined to prioritise management technique, religious experience, or that nebulous bane of contemporary life, ‘relevance’, over any notion of careful reflection upon and articulation of its irreducibly doctrinal message and experience.

The church is required to be the body of Christ in which the unmarried may find fulfillment as persons in the fellowship and companionship of the congregation of believers. The church should recognize that being unmarried the single members are free to be ‘anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 7:32). Therefore they must be given the opportunity within the fellowship of believers to serve the body of Christ and experience the love and acceptance of the body of the Lord.

Law-gospel is a wonderful theological category. It’s lousy exegesis. If every command that you find you put in the category of law, and every promise you put in the category of gospel, and every time you see a command you say, ‘Well the point of this command must be, you can’t do this but Jesus has done it for you and therefore be thankful for the justification you have in him, you are absolutely eradicating scores of imperatives and exhortations that Paul treasures in the New Testament and things that are deeply important for us to embrace as Christians.

I read [the 740 page N.T. Wright book on the Resurrection of Jesus] while brushing my teeth over a period of time. … One page in the morning, one in the evening.

When I ask students who are the most influential pastors in their life, it’s concerning that they rarely mention their local pastors.

There aren’t many books being written about the seven steps to living quiet, peaceful, and godly lives, and yet that’s the explicit, unequivocal teaching of the word of God.

Surely the first foundation of righteousness is the worship of God.

For any mode of relating the water to a person that is attested in the various biblical water ordeals would have biblical warrant. Of course, not all such modes would prove expedient. In Israel’s passage through the Red Sea the baptismal waters stood in a threatening (if actually protective) position over against the Israelites without, however, touching them, while in the Jordan crossing, the waters were so far removed as to be quite out of sight. At the other extreme, Jonah, like the accused in the Babylonian water ordeal, was plunged into the depths (not to mention now his novel conveyance), and the baptized family in the Noahic deluge ordeal sailed over the rising flood while torrents descended from above.