The Christian Life

• KILLING CHRISTMAS: TAKING THE CHRIST OUT OF CHRISTMAS 
  People keep wishing him, “Happy Holidays.”  Not “Merry Christmas,” but “Happy Holidays.”  He even saw a TV commercial for Kay Jewellers.  Husband and wife are sleeping, clock ticks over from 5:59 to 6:00, and husband starts awake. He jumps out of bed and yells “Honey, get up, it’s the twenty-fifth!!!”  Next, the whole family is bounding downstairs and you see the tips of a few branches with lights and out comes the gift. The wife opens it and it’s a beautiful diamond bracelet from where?  Why, Kay’s of course!  She is delighted, he is excited and wishes his lovely wife a “Happy Holiday.”
   
• On Losing Heart 
  While it may seem Southern overreaching to set quotations from Ezekiel and Robert E. Lee side by side, it’s really not. They deal with the same problem: how do we keep up our courage when God moves so slowly and mysteriously to do justice, to punish the wicked, and to build his kingdom?
   
• TOO MUCH GRACE
  Just to show that the road to trouble is paved with good intentions, consider this.
   
• Calvin on Psalm 22:9-10
  It is the Holy Spirit who teaches the faithful the wisdom to collect together, when they are brought into fear and trouble, the evidences of God’s goodness to sustain and strengthen their faith.
   
• Two Cautions and a Cure 
  No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon… Christ warns us here plainly: You cannot serve two masters.  You will serve one or the other, and there is no middle ground.  Period.  No excuse of ours can soften this warning.
   
• Snake handler Theology 
  A little over a year and half ago our little church lost our pastor, and since then I have been filling in.  April 7, 2002 was the first Sunday after Easter.  The readings for that Sunday were Psalm 111; Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 1:3-9, and; John 20:19-31.  They took me down a strange road. – FS
   
• The War on Character 
  Although self-restraint underlies all character, our present commercial government – The Symbiosis --  undermines it from all directions.  What then is the way back from Babylon to Eden? 
   
• The Word Was Made Flesh 
  It is mutely instructive that when God set about to reveal his full grace to men, he did not send a shipment of systematic theology textbooks.  Nor did he send instructional videos, nor philosophy Ph.D.s, nor notebooks full of syllogisms.  Rather, the Word was made flesh.  When men needed to behold God in all his grace and truth and glory, the Word was made flesh.
   
• Whipping on Down the Line
  You don’t think about it when you’re disciplining your children, but in fact you are doing your future daughter- or son-in-law, grandchildren and great grandchildren a favour.  The benefit and blessing of the discipline  accrues not just to the child, but to his spouse and children.
   
• Salvation by Food 
  Something wrong creeps into our thinking if we fail to understand that means are not causes, efficacious in and of themselves.  This is hardly an abstruse or pointless distinction.  If we fail to hold means in their proper place, we will abolish mankind.  Most of the world is busily doing just that.
   
• Assurance 
  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.  For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
   
• Lay Hold the Covenant 
  Genealogies are like slide shows – everybody has one and nobody wants to see another one, especially not yours.  But bear with me, dear reader, and presently I will unravel a meditation that I hope will calm your fears and repay your effort.
   
• The Paranoia Industry 
  Some of the people I hear from live in astonishing fear.  They seem to think that the “government” combines in itself all the power of God and Satan both, with a nuclear submarine thrown in for good measure.  More astounding yet, said government employs all its manifold nefarious forces for no other purpose than to spy on them.  They seem to forget that nothing happens outside the will and purpose of God.
   
• Manning Woman & Womanning Men 
  What hurt in watching the female [better the technical word here] midshipmen [here an impossibly oxymoronic noun] was not that they were women among men trying to be men, but that they were women stripped of womanhood.  This painful travesty makes a man involuntarily reach out to cover them.  Yet even as that thought crossed my mind I knew that these poor denatured women would manfully shove aside any such sheltering arm.
   
• Christian Freedom  
  Before we commit ourselves to a lifestyle and worldview, we ought first to ask some sharp questions.  Is true freedom “the absolute liberty to do anything I want”?  Or is it something else?  In fact, is freedom even possible for human beings?  Can we as creatures ever be absolutely free?

• Does God Deliver? 
  Do the Scriptures promise only eternal salvation, or do they also promise temporal deliverance? That is, does God save only in eternity, or does he also act in time and space to save his people?
   
• Cross What Cross? 
  Most protestant denominations don’t observe Lent, maybe because they’re afraid somebody will accuse them of being Roman Catholics. Still, I think that’s a risk worth running for the gain of setting aside a special season to ponder the sinfulness of our sin, the righteousness of Christ, and the grace of God in our salvation.
   
• The One Foundation 
  From time to time even a very old and tired brain like mine sees something from such a different angle that the whole world lights up with a new clarity. 
   
• BUSY
  More than a decade ago Mr. Merrit Newby of Alabama sent me this little admonition. I don’t know where it originated, I don’t even know why it impressed me so much, but I have never forgotten it. It has hung on my wall since then, and become a touchstone to cure distractions and worries.
   
• Veggie Tales 
  This morning my boys, Tucker and Bedford, were glued to the Veggie Tales video with the "Bunny Song" ("Oh, I ate the Bunny"). I heard the big cucumber sing "I’ll obey my momma ‘cause she loves me so." It occurred to me that the cucumber would obey not because he loves Momma Cucumber, but because she loves him so.
   
• Whose Yoke is it? 
  "I think it is those words you hear every Sunday in the Communion Service, right after the confession of sin and the announcement of pardon, the first of the "comfortable words": "Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him.
   
• Grace, Obedience, and Liberty in Christ 
  Only too well I understand what a slippery concept grace presents to our fleshly and legalistic minds. When I try to explain it, I fall into what sounds like either mystery or mechanism (Philippians 2:12-13), so I have to resort to analogy.
   
• Grace 
  For some reason or other, we think Christianity aims at giving us all these things. We think of Christianity as a gigantic self-improvement movement: Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, and Susan Powder, all rolled into one, the Holy Trinity of Self-Betterment.
   
• Sound Sense or Utopian Nonsense 
  At the busy corner of Summer Avenue and Sycamore View in Memphis stands a historic marker headlined, "Nashoba." In a few brief sentences it recounts the story of Frances Wright’s failed socialist colony in the 1820s. 
   
• The Only Thing That Matters  
  In the first article about the Leaven Community last month I lacked room to describe more fully what I find disastrous in modern industrial society ("modernity", for short). This month I want to describe for you a disease that flourishes in that society, one of the "disasters" I want to escape.
   
• Temptations  
  There is a pattern that encompasses the history of all mankind: the first Adam and the second Adam. That first Adam fails a temptation, and by his failure condemns all his children to death. When the test is offered a second time to the Second Adam, he passes and saves all his children.
   
• Graveyards Are for the Living 
  Ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, gentlemen of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and other guests, I thank you today for the honour you have paid me by inviting me to speak on this exalted day and noble occasion.
   
• Studying God 
  Christian people today devote a tremendous amount of time to studying God. In private individual Bible studies, in church and para-church Bible studies, on TV and radio, in books and audio tapes and video tapes and CDs, in Sunday school, and even in the great service of worship on the Queen of Days, it seems most of our efforts heavenward are directed to studying God.
   
• Jesus Rocks, or Does He? 
  Long ago I relinquished any youthful claims to rapier wit, unique insight, mental gigantism, and a millennial reputation for intellectual excellence.  All that I gave up, recognising that my only gift is the Gift of Stating the Obvious.
   
• The Tears of Esau 
  I have spent a week struggling against writing this article – I knew where it must take me, and I fought against the trip.  But I have only one gift – Stating the Obvious – and now duty makes me exercise it.
   
• States' Rights and Christian Liberty 
  At the beginning of my career as a professional defendant, I had occasion to file some papers in Marion, Arkansas, the Crittenden County seat.  Now I was coming out from under over ten years of wandering in the wilderness of Randianism and libertarianism.  My idol had been Liberty – complete autonomy.
   
• The Just Shall Live by Faith 
  “The Just shall live by faith.” That’s  one of the best known Bible verses in the Protestant world.  After all, discovering that verse in Romans 1 led Luther to begin the Protestant Reformation, didn’t it?
  As is often the case with widely accepted opinions, we find looking closer that we don’t understand this verse at all.  In fact, we began to wonder just how well Luther understood what Paul meant when he quoted “The just shall live by faith.”
   
• The Taste of Heaven
  Some ideas really grate on modern-day Gnostic Christianity – for instance, even to whisper that the promises of God might contain something physical. Still, I can’t shake the idea. I understand that the land God gave to the ancient Hebrews only foreshadows the True Promised Land that we receive from Christ, Eden restored.  It is the taste of heaven that linghers on our tongue and whets our appetite for the meal to come. 
   
• The Family
  Even though we know that the Scriptures contain everything we need for life and godliness, sometimes they seem to present only a riddle.  Where do we find the key?  The Scriptures themselves always offer us a key to that riddle, so that even the simplest can understand.