“They will never accept grace until they tremble before a just and holy Law.”
— Charles Spurgeon
Christian Deconstructionism
The deconstructionist philosophy says you can’t know what’s true because everybody who talks to you about truth is biased. Well, that’s equally true of deconstructionists. They are also biased. Hence we can’t trust them either. Thank you for your time.
However, I know someone whom you can trust. Who? That’s for me to know and you to find out. Except that he says, “The heart is deceitfully wicked, who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). Hmm, he must be a deconstructionist, you think?
Ready to be pardoned?
“One cannot intelligently and heartily ask or accept a pardon until he sees and feels the fact and justice of his condemnation. . . ”
–Charles Finney
Rolling somewhere
After listening to President Bush’s State of the Union address last night, my Methodist-Buddhist uncle said, “Jesus Christ would have rolled over in his grave if he could have heard that.”
Think about that. Think all about that.
Parousial Sanctification
Like practical universalism and proportional atonement, parousial sanctification is another doctrine I invented one night when I had nothing else to do. Well, actually I didn’t invent it. A lot of Christians seem to already be living in expectation of it. However, I have not yet found any Scriptural evidence for this doctrine. Parousial sanctification is the inward transformation of the soul that evidently occurs at the second coming of Jesus Christ (Gk. parousia), presumably during the Rapture.
Continue reading “Parousial Sanctification”
Making it to home
Practical universalism isn’t very practical. It doesn’t help people become godly, anymore than hiring blind umpires makes baseball more exciting. The umpire can’t grade on a curve. He has to decide if the runner arrived before the ball, or the ball before the runner. But if the runner never arrives, he doesn’t have to decide anything. The answer is obvious. It doesn’t matter how fast a baseball player ran from second to third, it doesn’t matter how sincerely. If he doesn’t make it to home plate, he doesn’t score. It doesn’t count. If you never become the kind of person who wants to spend eternity praising God, it doesn’t matter how close you got to it. You won’t be forced to spend eternity praising God.
Unutterably ashamed and confounded before the Lord
“[There must be] that kind of genuine and deep conviction which breaks the sinner and the backslider right down, and makes him unutterably ashamed and confounded before the Lord, until he is not only stripped of every excuse, but driven to go all lengths in justifying God and condemning himself.”
— Charles Finney
The cost of discipleship
“That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sins departs. ”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Elvaisms #1
My grandmother’s first language is German, and she began speaking English when the world was very different than it is today. Here are some expressions she uses:
Well, I better hyphenate in my room and get out of your hair.
Hand me a bobbing pin, will you?
I think it’s good to be interesting in what’s happening in the world.
There you are, my little fuddy-duddle, my little cat.
See against whom you fight.
“Be sober, therefore, and awake, and open the eyes of your understanding, and see against whom you fight, that it is not against man, but against God.”
— Hans van Overdam, Martyrs Mirror