This blog is Pastor Jay's weekly musings about God's Word, God's world, and God's call to our culture. We hope they encourage, challenge, and inform you. Sign up to recieve them in your email.
The Christian world has been stirred up by a particular question Pastor Allister Begg answered on a radio broadcast that was recorded on September 1, 2023. In that interview Begg recounted counsel he gave to a grandmother about a grandson's transgender wedding. Begg said because the grandson knew the grandmother's opposing position on this kind of wedding, she should still...
Keep ReadingThe last post took us to the theological reason that I don't believe Abolition will not work. That theological reason is Common Grace. God is only partially restraining sin in the unbelieving world; therefore we can only expect a partial stop of abortion. It will be more or less in different places and different times. We must always strive for the fullest and most complet...
Keep ReadingWhat do we do about communion while in quarantine? Our church takes communion once a month, on the first Sunday of the month, and it is now upon us. Eventually every church is going to come to this moment. So what are the options before us? I can see at least three different options. As we look at each one, we will think about what the Bible says about communion and how ...
Keep ReadingI was encouraged to listen to a podcast the other day. The title of the episode was You Need More Than God. Provocative, to say the least. What made this challenging was that these speakers were making a biblical case for this argument. The argument was thought-provoking and caused me to wrestle with the premise for weeks. Let me frame up the case they were making. The ...
Keep ReadingSometimes when we are really feeling righteous, there are certain statements that roll off our tongue and smash down on those whom we are confronting about sin. One of those statements is that God is more interested in our holiness than our happiness. We poke them in the eye with this statement, hoping to make them see that if they are going to know and follow God, then ...
Keep ReadingJust asking this question is almost blasphemous in our culture. Today's culture says that dreams are what empower you, animate you, and are the reason to get out of bed in the morning. Not having dreams for your life is considered the only real problem. Since the church is notorious at absorbing current culture, but with a 5-10 year delay, it therefore says the same thin...
Keep ReadingBeing irrelevant is a bad thing. Screen door companies should not market to submarine manufacturers, and you don't bring football pads to a nursing home. These things are irrelevant to the stated contexts. Irrelevance is foolishness and wastes time, money and effort. Does this mean that the search for relevance is the wisest and noblest goal for business and churches ali...
Keep ReadingOn Monday April 29th, USA Today published an opinion piece entitled American Churches Must Reject Literalism and Admit We Got It Wrong on Gay People. You can read it here. The main point of the author, Oliver Thomas, is captured well in the subtitle, "Churches will continue hemorrhaging members until we face the truth: Being a faithful Christian does not mean accepti...
Keep ReadingLast week our church looked at the difficult doctrine of election as we were going through Ephesians 1:4. Therefore, I wanted to piggyback on that teaching with a thought I believe should be greatly problematic for Arminians. Let me start with one of the key beliefs held by the Arminian. The Arminian holds that the freedom of the human will is so central and vital t...
Keep ReadingOne of the primary drivers behind the charismatic movement is the desire for an experience with God. While we should always pray for and seek God's power in our midst, we have to be careful what we mean when we speak of these things. Do we mean watching God change lives, illuminate his Word, meet needs, and providentially orchestrate details? Or do we mean visions, dre...
Keep ReadingDon't you get tired of the swinging pendulum? It seems that everywhere you turn you find some out-in-left-field teaching, and before you know it there is a reactionary swing to the other side that creates its own rat's nest of problems. This very thing has happened with the concept of love. We shouldn't be surprised. Love is an essential biblical teaching, a key att...
Keep ReadingThe health, wealth, and prosperity gospel is a well-established and growing segment of the church worldwide. Though there are countless reasons why the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel is a prostitution of the truth, it just keeps raking in the followers. Why is this? Because there are two powerful forces at work: people are incurably religious and incurably self-ce...
Keep ReadingThe health, wealth, and prosperity gospel is a well-established and growing segment of the church worldwide. Though there are countless reasons why the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel is a prostitution of the truth, it just keeps raking in the followers. Why is this? Because there are two powerful forces at work: people are incurably religious and incurably sel...
Keep ReadingThere is always a war waging over the Bible. It will be different at different times, but it will be waging. In the last few generations we have seen battles over the full inspiration of Scripture and postmodern approaches to hermeneutics (what it means to me). One of the latest battles over the Bible has to do with sufficiency. People will say that the Scripture is ...
Keep ReadingGod's love is one of the most common themes in many churches. Nothing wrong with that. It is clearly a major theme in Scripture. But just because we have lined up with Scripture's emphasis on God's love, doesn't mean we are lining up with Scripture's description of God's love. People make God's love into a divine version of whatever the culture is peddling; something...
Keep ReadingThe knee-jerk answer to that question by most Christians is "Well, of course." But in order to be Christians who do not lean on their own understanding, and do not lean on knee-jerk answers, we have to do more. The fear of the Lord calls his people to test everything by the Word of the Lord, because the Word has the final say on what we teach, and how we are corrected ...
Keep ReadingThe moral revolution continues to speed along with these two commitments: "leave-no-stone-unturned" and "take-no-prisoners." The latest example is the highly anticipated live-action movie Beauty and the Beast. The entertainment industry surrendered to this moral revolution long ago. But the newest twist is Hollywood's offering of a beloved children's story on the altar o...
Keep ReadingThere are different ways to reject the Bible. One way is to set it on fire. Another way it to set it on a shelf. A final way is to set it off in the wrong direction. The first way is direct. The second way is subtle. The final way is deceptive. Satan will take whatever way he can get, but his favorite is the last one. He is a deceiver, so he has no greater thrill than us...
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