Month: February 2010

Rick Warren plays the Pharisee card

Rick Warren, CEO of Saddleback Church, yesterday played the Pharisee card. He wrote:

‘It drives Pharisees nuts to watch God keep blessing ministries they ridicule & despise.God’s sovereignty is often humorous.’

What’s the Pharisee card? Good question.

Continue reading Rick Warren plays the Pharisee card

Legalism and licence

Which of these two statements is true?

  1. We are never permitted to sin.
  2. We cannot avoid sinning.

Both of these assertions appear in an excellent article by Todd Wilken (of the Issues, Etc radio programme). Todd writes:

They seem so different. One person lives his life striving for moral perfection. The other person doesn’t try that hard. The first is convinced that he can avoid sinning, if he tries hard enough. The second is equally convinced that he can’t avoid sinning, so why try at all? After all, He says, ‘I like to sin; God likes to forgive; that’s a pretty good deal.’ The first is all about keeping the rules; the second is all about breaking them.

The first is a legalist. The second is licentious. They seem very different, don’t they?

Which are you? A legalist? Or licentious? Either way, you won’t regret reading the full article:

Thank you to my friend Paula Coyle of Purpose Drivel (please visit!) for bringing this article to my attention, and for the opening question to this post.

What is a sermon for, and is it right for us to judge a poor one?

My friend James kindly posted some thoughts in response to my How to diagnose a sermon article. That article gave a three-step diagnostic (courtesy of the Issues, Etc. radio programme) for reviewing sermons. You can read his comments in full on that article, but his three main points were:

  1. That I seemed to be ‘casting judgment on the speaker and the sermon rather than looking for the Lord to help you pick out those things from Him which are helpful for your sanctification and growth in Grace’.
  2. That there are some texts that do not lend themselves to a forthright preaching of Christ. The commandment not to commit adultery, for example. And that, therefore, the steps for diagnosing a sermon that I propagated cannot be justly applied to the preaching of such texts.
  3. That a lecture by Dr. Peter Masters (of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London) perhaps did not seem to fit the criteria I recited in my article, and that therefore my yardstick might be invalid.

I found myself writing enough in response to these points to warrant a separate blog post.

Continue reading What is a sermon for, and is it right for us to judge a poor one?

Luther’s Small Catechism on the Ten Commandments: Introduction

In times past, many Christians used to educate their children and new converts in the basics of the Christian faith by way of catechisms.

Some still do.

The rest of us might want to give the idea some serious thought, for our times are not so very different from those in which Luther found himself:

Continue reading Luther’s Small Catechism on the Ten Commandments: Introduction