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Today Is Sunday
Today is Sunday. It’s the first day of the week—the day my Lord rose from the dead. All four Gospels record that Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1). The Romans called this day “the day of the sun” (dies solis) because…
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How the Past Has Impacted Parenting
Family life looked much different before the Industrial Revolution. Here’s a brief survey of some cultural and social developments since the 18th century that have impacted current family discipleship (Some of this material is adapted from Ryan Steenburg with Timothy Paul Jones, “Growing Gaps from Generation to Generation,” in Trained in the Fear of God, edited by…
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Embracing Singleness, Valuing Marriage
As our culture tends to postpone, forego, and even redefine marriage, the church rightly pushes back by stressing God’s plan for marriage and its inherent goodness. But where does this leave single people? There are vast numbers of Christians who, for a variety of reasons, are still single, have become single, and may remain single…
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Why Are People Taking Longer to Grow Up?
Extended adolescence. It’s something we’ve all heard about, seen, and maybe experienced: people are taking longer and longer to reach adulthood. What is adulthood? They say you’ve reached it when you finally leave home, finish school, become financially independent, get married (and possibly have a kid). In one of his lectures for the class Leadership…
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Michael Hill on Educating the Conscience
In the concluding chapter of his book The How and Why of Love: an Introduction to Evangelical Ethics, Michael Hill offers practical steps to living a Scripturally moral life. He divides these steps into the two major categories that comprise morality: decision-making and character-development.[1] For moral decision-making, Hill suggests that we (1) start with the…
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Christian Virtue Ethics
Stephen S. Bilynskyj’s essay “Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Virtue” champions virtue ethics as a superior approach to moral decision-making. Working from the writings of Stanley Hauervas, Bilynskyj insists that, for a Christian, ethical questions must be addressed within the redemptive narrative and the Christian’s identity with Jesus Christ. He puts it this way:…
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Seeking. Satisfied.
“O God, you are my God. I will seek you earnestly” (Psalm 63:1). What does it mean to seek God? It is not as if God is lost, or even that he hides himself. Indeed, “the heavens declare the glories of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19). We must seek…
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How the Congregation Benefits from Preaching that Honors Authorial Intent
In an earlier blog post, I discussed how a commitment to authorial intent drives the content and application of expository sermons. In this post, I discuss how this commitment benefits the congregation. First, preaching that honors authorial intent teaches the congregation what is truly important. A heavy diet of topical sermons can give the subtle…
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Is $241,080 Too Much to Raise One Kid?
Today’s breaking news line on the CNN homepage grabbed my attention: “A child born last year will cost a middle-income couple an estimated $241,080 to raise for 18 years.” There are three main reasons I couldn’t help but read the article: 1) my 3-year-old daughter, 2) my 1-year-old son, and 3) the baby Christa and…
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The Centrality of Authorial Intent in Expository Preaching
Because of my preparation for some classwork and upcoming preaching responsibilities, I’ve been thinking a lot about expository preaching, particularly the importance of authorial intent. The priority of authorial intent is something every preacher must come to grips with, particularly because of the strong temptation to skew a passage to make it fit the message.…
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Jonathan M. Threlfall 