You should be ashamed if this is true of you

“I just spent an evening about a month ago with very close friends of mine who are Mormons. We had a very interesting conversation as we always do when it comes back around to the Gospel, and my friend’s wife said, ‘You know, I just don’t know all the debates between these different churches and denominations … I know evangelicals in town; our kids play together … I’ve even been to their churches a few times … There’s nothing different … My kids wear the bracelet [WWJD] … Look up there on the wall: There’s a picture of Jesus. We teach our children every day who Jesus is and the teachings that Jesus gave us to follow. As long as our children are being taught to follow Jesus, what’s all this division over doctrine?’”

— Mike Horton

The many and the few

Tim Challies is a baseball fan (if you call what they play in Toronto “baseball”) but he manages to hit this one out of the park.

Two motions

At the risk of 2 Doug Wilson quotes in a row, I offer this:

The unregenerate heart has only two motions it can make -- that of trying to climb to God on its own, or trying to run away from God.

The unregenerate heart can understand the holiness of God and flee from Him, or misunderstand it, and try to attain to it on its own. Only the converted heart can see the holiness as gladness, and the gladness as righteousness, and the righteousness as glory, and love all of it. As John Piper has argued concerning 1 Tim. 1:11, we have to have our eyes opened so that we see the gospel of the glory of the gladness of God. Would this really resolve all these issues? Taste and see.

— Doug Wilson

Far worse

As I periodically tell people in counseling, there is no problem you might have that you can't, by diligent effort, make far worse.

—Doug Wilson

Not necessarily warm and comforting

Phil Johnson once again splits the goalpost.

Frankly, …

I keep thinking I'd like to try my hand at debating Frank Turk, but there are 2 problems:

• He's smarter than me.
• I can't find anything we disagree on.

Here's an example.

The End

Regarding the death and end of Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Albert Mohler said

You will no doubt hear many Christians who are going to be tempted to say they would not want to be Bob Guccione on the day of judgement. Well, that is certainly true, but in truth every single sinner who does not come to know salvation in Jesus Christ is going to face the full justice and judgement of God. On that day, Bob Guccione will not stand out from the mass of sinners, because every single sinner will be seen with his or her sin fully exposed.

What we see in the death of Bob Guccione is another signal of the fact that human sinfulness is just as ugly as we must know it to be.

Looking around

In this essay, the inimitable Frank Turk laments that when he moved to Little Rock he was unable to find a Southern Baptist church that looked, well, like a church in 2 years of looking. This is at once what I want to say and convicting to me with respect to my own behavior.

Offensive line in the sand

Once again, 120 years ago, Charles Spurgeon said something yesterday.

Liberation theology of the right

Todd Wilken:

You have written that there is a liberation theology of the left and there’s also a liberation theology of the right. Of course a criticism of many of those who were supporting Glen Beck and his Restoring Honor rally was that President Barack Obama is a “liberation theologian.” What do you mean by a liberation theology on the right?

Russell Moore:

Well I think liberation theology is any kind of theology that seeks to bypass the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and the empty tomb in order to get to some temporal value.

And so I think on the left you’ve got a liberation theology that says what we’re looking for is freeing the oppressed and we’re looking for all these — which may be good and right in and of themselves, but when you get to them apart from the Gospel you’re getting something other than the Gospel.

The same thing happens on the right, where you can take values that can be good in and of themselves and can be commendable, but you seek to get to them some other way than through the Gospel.

That’s essentially exactly what is happening in the third temptation of the Lord Jesus. Satan says to him, “You can have all of the kingdoms of the world if you just bow down and worship me.” Jesus refuses to do this even though Jesus ruling over the kingdoms of the world is obviously a good thing.