Archives: sam-freney

→ Inconvenienced by inconvenience

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Tim Challies with some good and challenging reflections on using our houses and homes for others:

[Rosaria Butterfield] writes about the open door policy in their home and it reminded me of my younger days in my parents’ home: “Anything worth doing will take time and cost you something. We notice, as our attention focused more on families and children, that many people in our community protect themselves from inconvenience as though inconvenience is deadly. We decided that we are not inconvenienced by inconvenience. We are sure that the Good Samaritan had other plans that fateful day.”

 

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→ Why pushing right is harder than pushing left

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Andrew Wilson:

Theologically speaking, pushing right is much harder than pushing left. I do both, depending on the context, and pushing right is definitely more difficult. When I’m trying to nudge people to their left on an issue—trying to persuade five point Calvinists to become four pointers or less, commending pacifism, defending theistic evolution, or championing charismatic gifts for today—I feel radical, creative, daring, exciting, and somewhat impish. But when I’m trying to nudge people to their right about something—inerrancy, hell, gender roles, sexual ethics, biblical authority, Reformed soteriology—I feel conservative, stern, unpopular, staid, and even somewhat apologetic.

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Editorial: Singing, church, judgement, and fear

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Singing, church, judgement, and fear: that’s what this coming issue of The Briefing is all about.

Recently I spent a week at the Hillsong Conference in Sydney. There were many wonderful things about the week, along with a number of troubling issues. I’m still trying to process everything that went on there, and I’ll say more about it in due course. (more…)

→ Avoiding evangelical civil war

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Mark Thompson:

Here then are some suggestions for principles which might help us think through how we might ‘contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints’ in a way which builds genuine fellowship rather than destroys it.

It’s all excellent. For example,

Recognise that those who disagree with you on this particular theological point are people for whom Christ died. They are inestimably precious in his sight. They must not be regarded or treated as mere theological canon fodder. Even when you are convinced they are seriously in error they must be treated with respect and gentleness.

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→ Guidelines for Reading Old Testament Narrative

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Some useful points about reading Biblical narrative from Julian Freeman:

If you’ve ever begun to read through the Old Testament and been filled with more questions than answers, you’re not alone. Many of the stories of the OT are hard to understand and hard to apply.

Here are ten hopefully helpful principles for interpreting Old Testament narrative. It’s important that we get this right, since this genre of Scripture makes up about 66% of our whole Bible.

For a more extended article on the final point he offers, Gary Millar’s article from November last year is excellent.

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→ The Path of Least Resistance

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Richard Perkins on Ephesians 6.1-2 and instilling obedience in kids:

But child centred parenting is the modus operandi of most of the families I know. It’s what most of us do most of the time, isn’t it? We want a quiet life. And if little Jonny is going to be pacified then we need to surrender to his demands. And so we run up the parenting white flag, he puts down his weapons of mass destruction and we’re all better off, aren’t we? Not in the long run. Can you think of a better way to raise a self obsessed, selfish brat than to reinforce his impression that other people are there to satisfy his needs and that he can get his own way simply by being obnoxious and making a scene?!

NB – “child-centered parenting” has a different usage in some of the circles I’m in. Perks means “running family life around the the needs, desires and tantrums of our kids”. He’s also got a follow-up article on 4 reasons for kids to obey their parents (not that they’ll listen).

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→ To suffer faithfully

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Nicole Starling:

We sometimes tend to focus on those aspects of the Christian life (spontaneity, starry-eyed-ness, passionate intensity…) in which the younger seem to have an advantage over the older, but there are a bunch of other aspects in which the very experiences that knock some of the shine off our youthful naivety are exactly the things that equip us to be better at enduring.

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→ Moral imperatives

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Frank Turk:

… it’s one of those stories where all manner of addled thinking comes to the surface from everyone on the spectrum of lifestyle blogging—from the secular liberals and conservatives to the panoply of Christian bloggers in the weird polygon of ideas bounded by points produced by mixing the adjectives “conservative,” “liberal,” “radical,” “progressive,” “traditional,” “biblical,” and “missional,” with the proper noun “Christian.”

[…]

Dear Son,

Since you have made your confession about your situation, let me confess mine: I have never really been a good man at all. I could make a list here of all the times I have failed you, and your mother, and your siblings, and my employer, and the elders at church, and so on — but I’ll bet you can make that list also. You may remember some things I have forgotten, and I’ll simply stipulate to the entire exercise. I want you to know that I know I am not a good man, and I come to this problem we now face as a man who, at the end of the day, can’t advise you from the moral high ground.
I can only advise you, my son, as a man who has spent his life utterly at the mercy of Jesus Christ.

Turk only really gets going in the second half of the post, so stick with it, because it’s got a twist in the end.

 

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→ Notice the famine?

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Trevin Wax on how location impacts your Bible interpretation:

In other words, Americans see the famine as an insignificant detail that intensifies the prodigal’s big problem – wastefulness. Russians, on the other hand, see the prodigal’s wasteful spending as an insignificant detail that intensifies the real tragedy – the famine.

Details matter—both those in the texts and those in our lives and backgrounds.
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→ In Defense of Apologetics

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Tim Keller:

Apologetics is an answer to the “why” question after you’ve already answered the “what” question. The what question, of course, is, “What is the gospel?” But when you call people to believe in the gospel and they ask, “Why should I believe that?”—then you need apologetics.

Towards the end of this short piece, Keller makes the same (excellent) point concerning the myth of human rational neutrality that Martin Ayers outlined in his previous article here, Keep the faith. Both are worth a read.

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→ God’s mercies are new every morning

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I have a rule in my Bible study: during group prayer, before anyone can pray for local concerns (Fred’s mother, Jill’s uni exams, etc.) they need to either give thanks for something or pray for something beyond our group.

Mark Altrogge has food for thought on that list of things to give thanks for:

God’s mercies are all around us. But do we notice them?

A good exercise is to write down God’s mercies.
Some folks write down something they’re thankful for every day. Before you start asking God for things, consider thanking him. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.

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→ New and old humility

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Mark Thompson on humility vs. ‘humility’:

Humility like Christ’s means a genuine willingness to serve no matter the cost because of the value placed on others. No opportunity for service is too demeaning. Such humility, if ever you should come across it, is immensely attractive to Christians (do you have someone in mind right now?) and even to the outsider. It commends the gospel in a way that self-regard, no matter how carefully disguised and nuanced, simply cannot. Yet sometimes what at first glance might seem to be humility turns out to be something different altogether.

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→ Building a better small group

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Joanne Jung takes some advice on small groups from the Puritans:

Here are a few questions the Puritans found useful in conference, redesigned for our contemporary understanding:

  • What does God want you to know about him? About yourself?
  • For what is the soul thankful?
  • What are the words or actions that demonstrate your soul’s love for Christ?
  • What is your soul afraid of God knowing?
  • What stands now between God and your soul?

Consider asking these types of questions and, more importantly, answering them with attentiveness to your own heart and the hearts of others. In good company and conference the goodness of God and the struggles of life meet in loving acceptance, godly direction, and transforming community.

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