Picture your bathroom. Now picture your toilet. Now, you know that space behind the toilet, the disgusting place where nobody goes? The place that, if you should happen to drop your toothbrush, it means that you’ll just have to buy a new one? Okay, that place is like your heart. Or at least the sinful parts of your heart. All kinds of junk lives back there: lying, back-biting, lust, pride, bitterness, anxiety, envy.

Sanctification is our effort by God’s grace to clean behind the toilet, to remove the muck and the mire that still inhabit the dark recesses of our hearts. But sanctification can go wrong in all kinds of ways. Legalism is attempting to clean behind the toilet without any disinfe…

Continue Reading →

And behold, I saw a white horse. Its rider’s name was Success, and Envy followed him.

Envy is a movement killer. And if you ask me, it is probably the fundamental danger facing the modest movement called Young, Restless Reformed (YRR) in the years ahead. Envy is a movement-killing sin precisely because it combines such deadly opposites. Envy is a gaping maw, a roaring lion seeking to devour, the relentless ache of the shriveled heart. At the same time, envy is a chameleon, masquerading as the smooth flattery of imitation one minute and righteous indignation at injustice the next.

God Multiplies a Movement

If you listen to the Old, Settled Reformed talk, they’ll tell you that 30 years ago,…

Continue Reading →

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is again a topic of conversation, and for good reason.

Christians, in particular, have rightly celebrated the portrayal of the beauty of mercy and grace in this moving 150-year-old tale. Most of the theological analyses have contrasted Javert, the law-obsessed Inspector, with Valjean, the grace-transformed thief.

And while much of this analysis has been spot-on, it’s important that a central biblical and theological reality not get lost. Let me put it this way: Many people regard Javert as the consummate legalist, the embodiment of a single-minded preoccupation with perfect obedience to God’s righteous Law. The problem is this: he’s not.

Which Law?

Make n…

Continue Reading →

God is an Author. This world is his story. We are his characters.

I first heard of the analogy sitting in a college philosophy class, and I’ve used it ever since. I find it personally fruitful and pastorally helpful in addressing everything from God’s sovereignty and human freedom to the two wills of God to the problem of evil. It’s what you might call a potent metaphor.

And a biblically faithful one. God speaks the world into existence (Genesis 1). He upholds it by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). All the days ordained for us were written in a book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16).

The Causer of All Things

A couple of years ago one of my colleagues at Bethlehem College a…

Continue Reading →

The question is always the same. Where was God?

After the initial shock and horror subsides, after the news crews go home, we’re always left with the same question: So where was he?

Did he know ahead of time what was going to happen one week ago today? Was he aware of the shooter’s plans? Does he have foreknowledge, foresight, the ability to peer into what for us is the unknown future? Christians who take their Scriptures seriously can’t help but say yes. God knows the end from the beginning. Indeed, he declares the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:9–10), and this exhaustive foreknowledge is one of the distinguishing marks of his deity.

Was he able to prevent it? Was his arm too short…

Continue Reading →

Psalm 111:2 reminds us of a fundamental principle: Delight leads to study. A Lover can recall every feature of his Beloved’s face. A mother knows every dimple, hair, and birthmark on her baby’s body. When we recognize something as full of splendor and majesty, careful attention is no chore. When we are fascinated, when we marvel at some wonder, when our hearts rise with delight in some reality, the natural and unavoidable response is to move further up and further in, to seek after the object of our affection, to devote concerted effort to observing, understanding, and evaluating what we love and then to feel, apply, and express what we’ve seen.

“Great are the works of the Lord, studied b…

Continue Reading →

Having examined the form of education that Lewis rejects, we turn now to a brief summation of his own view. The following tenets are not the whole of Lewis’s educational paradigm, but instead form some of the nonnegotiables that Lewis felt were under particular attack in his day.

The Tao

Genuine education embraces the Tao. For Lewis, the Tao appears to be a combination of the absoluteness of reality and the human way of life that conforms to this reality. In other words, reality simply is a certain way, and human beings are called to order their lives by the pattern of the Tao.

Lewis believed that some aspect of the Tao was present in all major ancient philosophies and religions (C…

Continue Reading →

For me, one of the most exciting elements of Scripture is its use of typology. Put simply,

[Typology is] the idea that persons (e.g., Moses), events (e.g., the exodus), and institutions (e.g., the temple) can — in the plan of God — prefigure a later stage in that plan and provide the conceptuality necessary for understanding the divine intent (e.g., the coming of Christ to be the new Moses, to effect the new exodus, and to be the new temple) (Graham Cole, He Who Gives Life, [Wheaton: Crossway, 2007], 289).

I love to read the New Testament and see the ways in which the biblical authors read their Old Testaments in light of Christ. I love that Matthew depicts Jesus as the true Israel,…

Continue Reading →

We’ve seen, in Part 1, that Lewis’s critique of modern education begins by highlighting the marginalization of value statements, the separation of fact and value, and the creation of men without chests. However, Lewis is not merely lamenting the loss of virtues like courage, fidelity, and sacrifice. For he knows that nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of these virtues, men will turn elsewhere to find meaning and purpose.

The Appeal to Instinct

Lewis rejects the notion that those who are debunking “traditional values” are themselves value-less. “A great many of those who "debunk" traditional or (as they would say) "sentimental" values have in the background values of their own whi…

Continue Reading →

Part of my goal in writing these posts is to commend the Narnian stories as a component of Christian discipleship. In doing so, I’m not merely contending that we can read them profitably as Christians, but that C. S. Lewis intended these stories to inculcate Christian values, habits, and truth.

We’ve already seen that he intended these stories to “steal past the watchful dragons” that hindered true affections for God and Christ and that he believed that fairy stories should be read by adults as well as children. But another way to approach the issue of discipleship is to reflect on Lewis’ critique of modern education in his brilliant little book The Abolition of Man.

Lewis regarded the t…

Continue Reading →