Why We Must Keep the Gospel in View Every Day
Without a rich, ongoing experience of the gospel, the Christian life can slowly drift toward legalism, hypocrisy, performance, exhaustion, or apathy.
Without a rich, ongoing experience of the gospel, the Christian life can slowly drift toward legalism, hypocrisy, performance, exhaustion, or apathy.
I wrote recently about my concerns with voluntary vaccination passports in churches. In my view, such a system would unnecessarily create obstacles for the congregation. However, the Province of New Brunswick now allows their provincial passport system to apply to churches on a voluntary basis. If a church can prove that it has 90% of its congregation vaccinated, then they can meet without physical distancing (and more). If a church does not want to submit such proof, then they must only meet with 50% of their building’s capacity. In other words, if a church voluntarily uses the provincial passport system,...
If we only gain allies and friends by being mutually against something, then that partnership lasts only until the controversy ends. And given the kind of partnership we had, our former ally could turn on us. So instead, we should unite around being for the Gospel of the triune God—an eternal cause. Then that partnership will have no end—it is eternal as God is eternal. And if we need an enemy to rally against, let’s fight the one the Bible identifies: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic...
Jesus has established unity between previously divided factions. Our job is to maintain it.
Another classic, skeptical challenge to the biblical stories of the birth of Jesus goes something like this. “You cannot trust Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus because he gets the key Old Testament text wrong (Matthew 1:23). He quotes Isaiah 7:14, saying it is a prophecy that one day a virgin will give birth. There are two problems with this. First, in the original language, Isaiah is referring to a “young maiden” not a virgin. Second, the text is really about the birth of King Hezekiah, not Jesus. So Matthew misreads the verse and quotes the verse out of context...