Even wolves must serve the church

Having read the first post linked to this, and found startling parallels to a situation we faced years ago, I think this follow up is exactly right. Wolves exist under God’s sovereignty, they exist for a purpose and, hard as it may be, the Lord will use them for the good of his church.

How pop nietzscheanism masquerades as Christianity

‘The faithful Christian ministry is not very glamorous. It consists of baptizing, preaching, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper. It is about pointing people to a God on a cross whose strength, like that of his followers, is made perfect in weakness. Of course, none of this quite compares to engaging in an apocalyptic culture war or crushing one’s opponents or seizing worldly power by worldly means. So weak is it that it’s not even as glamorous as fantasizing about such things online. But that’s the problem with Christianity. It is routine. It is by turns foolish and offensive to those who look on from outside. Its weapons look ridiculously weak to the watching world.’ There has since been some back and forth over this article and I co-sign Trueman’s response to the pushback here.

Should Christians observe the Sabbath?

Here is one particular answer to that question.

Marriage, mutual submission and headship: what does it look like in practice?

Dave Williams offers some thoughts on headship, what it means and what it looks like in practice. He is particularly concerned here with not saying more than the Bible seems to in order to avoid making demands of either husbands or wives that the Bible doesn’t ask of them.

Not my DIY project: How a wife entrusts her husband to God

On a similar, and yet different, note: ‘When conflict arises in marriage, or we’re dissatisfied with our husband’s spiritual growth, our default setting is not to trust that God will use even this to fulfill the good work he began in his life. Instead, we might offer not-so-subtle suggestions for ways our husband could improve his spiritual practices. For starters, he could wake up earlier to be in the word, lead the family in more regular devotions, or get involved in a men’s Bible study. Secretly, we might compare him to other, more godly husbands, wallow in discontent, and let it deepen.’

Everyone has their own facts now

‘What happens when you take a populous whose idea of an informed person is someone capable of juggling massive amounts of incoherent and contextless information (by “juggling” I mean, sharing it online with an emotive, self-justifying passion) and submerge them in a limitless morass of content?’ This is such an important question and I suspect most of us will have encountered the situation described in the post. Worse, some of us are probably the uninformed-and-yet-armed-with-information person and yet we are almost certainly not going to realise it.

From the archive: It’s a question of faithfulness

‘We are called to faithfulness. The problem is that we quickly point to our faithfulness in a particular area whilst ignoring our faithfulness in another. So, we might argue we are being faithful to the Lord ploughing on with a gospel service as our mainline evangelistic outreach nobody attends, which may be faithful to the call to preach the gospel, but it isn’t being faithful to the call to go into all the world on any real level. Similarly, we might be faithful in evangelism – thinking we are pressing on in great evangelistic works – but remain unfaithful in the ultimate call, not to make converts, but disciples. We might reach the lost and hope they’ll convert, but we have no interest in walking with them any further and wonder why nobody is saved. It’s a matter of faithfulness – not just in some areas, but in all areas.’