Author: Brian

Follower of Jesus, Husband, Dad, Grandpa, and Pastor

Ministry Monday

On By BrianIn Ministry Moments

Here are some helpful posts on waiting in ministry:

When You’re Waiting in the Wilderness – Gavin Ortlund (GC)
Of course, it’d be nice if ministry meant 1 Kings 18 fire-from-heaven power from start to finish! But most of our ministries can likely relate better to the metaphors of 1 Kings 17: hanging on until the ravens come again, trusting the jug and jar won’t run out tomorrow, scraping by until the drought finally ends, wondering why God hasn’t removed corrupt Ahab, and, all the while, waiting, waiting, waiting.

5 Reasons Why God Calls Us To Wait – Paul David Tripp (GC)
In ministry you will be both called to wait and also find waiting personally and corporately difficult. So it is important to recognize that there are lots of good reasons why waiting is not merely inescapable but necessary and helpful.

God’s Will for Your Wait – Paul David Tripp (GC)
In ministry there are often moments when you are propelled by a biblical vision but called by God to wait. Waiting can be discouraging and hard. So what does it look like to wait in a way that makes you a participant in what God is doing rather than someone who struggles against the wait?

Passion Points

On By BrianIn Holidays, PASSION Points

Here are some good Passion Week related posts for your weekend reading:

How To Handle Your Sin – Kevin DeYoung
Run to the cross. There you will find salvation for your sin sick self.

God Wants You To Know How Much He Loves You – Jon Bloom (DG)
That’s what Passion Week is for; that you might remember and more deeply know how much God has loved you — so much that he gave his only Son for you
Includes a link to a Desiring God booklet with daily readings for the coming week.

The Passion Week – Infographic – Josh Byers
This week’s infographic, The Passion Week, is a chronological timeline of the major events that happened during Jesus’ last week before he died and rose again.

Some Easter Posts – Three Passions
This is a collection of Easter posts I put together last year, including another Easter week timeline and a short video you should watch every year.

The Thief and Us – Three Passions
Another post from last year worth pondering again.

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day and coming week reflecting on our Savior’s death, burial and resurrection!

Current

On By BrianIn Current Collection

A weekly collection of current news and issues in the church, country, and world.

Ideological Moralism and Gospel Grace – Derek Rishmawy (GC)
“My life has meaning because of the Cause. You oppose the Cause. You must submit or be destroyed.” — Modern/postmodern ideological moralism

Division Begins with the Departure from the Truth – Jared Wilson
And it isn’t those who believe the Bible when it says sin is sin that are being divisive; it is those who are introducing the idea that some sins aren’t. If you push a decision on something that innovates on the Bible’s testimony, you’re creating the division. Division begins with that first departure. The first step away from the agreement is the original divide. It is simply necessary, then, for Christians to walk away from a divisive person.

The Fault Lines Before the Evangelical Earthquake – Trevin Wax
Can an institution with an historic evangelical identity be divided on an issue as central as marriage and family and still be evangelical? Related to this discussion are questions about the authority and interpretation of Scripture, cultural engagement, and institutional power. All sides of the debate recognize that the definition of evangelical is at stake, which is why some are now publicly casting off the term altogether.

Passion Points

On By BrianIn PASSION Points

Here are some good posts for your weekend reading:

Ten Things To Do During Suffering – Ed Welch (CCEF)

Why God Gives Us More Than We Can Handle – Jon Bloom (DG)

40 Joys Through Jesus – David Murray

How Do You Prepare For Sunday? – Jordan Kauflin (DG)

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day worshiping our great God with your local church!

In The Womb Of The Self

On By BrianIn PASSION Quotes

NoPlaceForTruthThe sort of Christian faith that is conceived in the womb of the self
is quite different from the historic Christian faith.
It is a smaller thing,
shrunken in its ability to understand the world and to stand up in it.
The self is a canvas too narrow, too cramped,
to contain the largeness of Christian truth.
Where the self circumscribes the significance of Christian faith,
good and evil are reduced to a sense of well-being or its absence,
God’s place in the world is reduced to the domain of private consciousness,
his external acts of redemption are trimmed to fit the experience of personal salvation,
his providence in the world diminishes to whatever is necessary to ensure one’s having a good day,
his Word becomes intuition,
and conviction fades into evanescent opinion.
Theology becomes therapy,
and all the telltale symptoms of the therapeutic model of faith begin to surface.
The biblical interest in righteousness is replaced by a search for happiness,
holiness by wholeness,
truth by feeling,
ethics by feeling good about one’s self.
The world shrinks to the range of personal circumstances;
the community of faith shrinks to a circle of personal friends.
The past recedes. The Church recedes. The world recedes.
All that remains is the self.

– David Wells in No Place For Truth

Current

On By BrianIn Current Collection

A weekly collection of current news and issues in the church, country, and world.

This week we consider the Christian’s interaction with Hollywood:

Evangelicals and Hollywood Muck – Trevin Wax
Yet now in the 21st century, we are expected to find redeemable qualities in what would only be described by people throughout church history as “filth.”  What’s the point in decrying the exploitation of women in strip clubs and mourning the enslavement of men to pornography when we unashamedly watch films that exploit and enslave?  I do not claim to have this all figured out. But one thing I know: our pursuit of holiness must be the mark against which our pursuit of cultural engagement is measured.  If, like me, you’re conflicted about this issue, maybe it’s because we should be.

And then there is the new movie Noah.  Here are three takes – a simple movie review to get the basics, Ken Ham’s thoughts, and the final post which is fascinating, disturbing, and helps make sense of all the oddities in the movie (which I have not seen, and based on everything I have read and heard have no intention of seeing).

Noah: Film Review – Todd McCarthy (The Hollywood Reporter)
Noah will rile some for the complete omission of the name “God” from the dialogue, others for its numerous dramatic fabrications and still more for its heavy-handed ecological doomsday messages, which unmistakably mark it as a product of its time.

Ken Ham: The Unbiblical Noah Is a Fable of a Film – Time
Also, while the extreme wickedness of man was depicted, the real sin displayed in the film was the people’s destruction of the earth. Lost within the film’s extreme environmentalist message is that the actual sins of the preflood people were rebellion against God and man’s inhumanity to man. 

Sympathy For the Devil – Brian Mattson
Conservative-minded evangelicals write off the film because of the “liberties” taken with the text of Genesis, while a more liberal-minded group stands in favor of cutting the director some slack. After all, we shouldn’t expect a professed atheist to have the same ideas of “respecting” sacred texts the way a Bible-believer would.  Both groups have missed the mark entirely. Aronofsky hasn’t “taken liberties” with anything.  The Bible is not his text.