Tag: gospel

This Was Never a Neutral Culture

Tim Keller is a well-known Christian pastor, bestselling author, and mentor to rising Christian leaders. He planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in the heart of Manhattan in 1989, and it has grown to more than 5,000 worshipers per week in an area that is considered rather inhospitable to the Gospel message. He stepped down from his position as senior pastor in 2017 to focus more on training church leaders. In 2020, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but he continues to… Read more »

On Putting Carts Before Horses

A phrase I’ve heard throughout my life, “putting the cart before the horse,” comes to mind for me when I survey the Christian response to politics in our day. Or at least the response that many Christians are making with respect to the current political scene. The phrase means “reversing the proper order of things,” and I see that more and more. Christians should always put the Gospel and the Kingdom of God before anything else, and we can sometimes… Read more »

Healing Divisions By Being Real Christians

In the midst of protests and chants of black lives matter, what can I say that has any significance at all? After all, I’m a white guy (actually, kind of light beige) who grew up in a small town in northern Indiana that had no racial diversity. The closest we came to it was the Amish farming community east of town. Their lifestyle was different but they were of the same Germanic background as many of us town-dwellers. But when… Read more »

Man’s Praise or God’s?

You know how you can be reading through the Scriptures and a passage jumps out at you? That happened for me this morning as I was meditating on chapter 13 of the Gospel of John. Here’s what stood out: Many even among the leaders believed in Him. But because of the Pharisees they would not openly acknowledge their faith for fear they would be put out of the synagogue. For they loved human praise more than the praise from God…. Read more »

Lewis Conference Nuggets

The C. S. Lewis conference I attended last week, sponsored by the C. S. Lewis Institute (CSLI) and held at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, was a thoughtful, challenging event. The theme was how to communicate the Gospel with guidance from the writings of Lewis that show how he did it. I hadn’t been back to the Wade Center since 2014, when I first investigated whether anyone had written extensively on Lewis’s contacts with Americans and why America was… Read more »

Seeing What Is Unseen

All Scripture is inspired by God. When you read it with an open heart, God’s Spirit can speak directly to you. What’s even more remarkable is that passages that you have read often can sometimes stand out in a rereading in a way they didn’t before. That happened to me recently when meditating on chapter 4 of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Let me see if I can convey why this section was so meaningful this time. Since through… Read more »

Communicating Truth: A Lewis Exhortation

“You must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular,” exhorted C. S. Lewis in an essay entitled “Christian Apologetics.” He admitted this could be “very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential.” Theologians, he believed, had a tendency to write in an obscure way. In the same vein, many pastors may try to impress their congregations with high-flown, little-understood phrases that leave the listeners spiritually cold. Lewis therefore… Read more »