Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2014

best of 2014

Here is my very own modest contribution to the best new Christian books of 2014. Caveat: I do not read many just-published books, so it's not a long list.  And one of these books was published in 2013 (Thornbury); one is a new translation of Calvin's Institutes from 1541; and one, The Sense of Style , is not a Christian book.  So there are three new Christian books from 2014 I can recommend.   I have enjoyed all these books, though, and have included snippets of the publishers' blurbs with the titles.  God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World ,   by David F. Wells.  In God in the Whirlwind , Wells explores the depths of the paradox that God is both holy and loving, showing how his holy-love provides the foundation for our understanding of the cross, sanctification, the nature of worship, and our life of service in the world. What’s more, a renewed vision of God's character is the cure for evangelicalism’s shallow theology, with

the headline above all headlines

"For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts..." (Psalm 95:7-8 ESV) "If the living God should address mankind in any fleet moment at any point in space with but a simple sentence, with even one single Thus saith the Lord! what intelligent person would not stop, look and listen?  Yet in his revelation God has published news incomparably important to every generation, past and present, of momentous value to each of us who lives in this present opportunity for decision.  God's disclosure for us involves not simply a definitive word about the past and a remarkable declaration about the climactic future but has superscribed a decisive now .  Its dateline included today (this very day); God's disclosure is not exhausted by the revelation given once upon a time and then and there .  God has your and my personal benefit in view as present-moment objects of his address.  T

authority but not oppression

"When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, 'Do you understand what I have done to you?  You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet.'" (John 13:12-14) "There is no compromise to the hierarchic superiority of Jesus.  He is Lord and Teacher, and they are right to call him so.  But, as such, he washes the feet of his disciples. Compare also Jesus' words about himself as the Good Shepherd, who gives his life for the sheep (John 10:1-18). "I conclude that the honor of the fifth commandment [ "Honor your father and mother..." ] is a complex honor.  Certainly the inferior must show honor to the superior, in all spheres of legitimate authority.  There is a hierarchy, an authority structure.  But in the overall relationship, the superior must care most, not for himself, b

blessed among women

In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord." (Luke 1:39-45 ESV) "We must therefore be quite clear about why Elizabeth calls Mary blessed.  It is because of the grace of God's Son whom she bore; and grace is something we all have in common with her.  So what this passage reveals is that, while God was pleased to exalt the Virgin, having chosen her for the preciou
Nice use of glass and steel at the Carilion NRV Hospital.