Unhealthy churches cause few problems for the healthiest Christians; but they are cruel taxes on the growth of the youngest and weakest Christians. They prey on those who don’t understand Scripture well. They mislead spiritual children. They even take the curious hopes of non-Christians that there might be another way to live, and seem to deny it. Bad churches are terribly effective antimissionary forces. I deeply lament sin in my own life, and sin’s corporate magnification in the life of so many churches. They seem to make Jesus out to be a liar when he promised life to the full (John 10:10).
Mark Dever, Preface to the Second Edition, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, (Crossway, 2013), 17.
The confession that a man, named Jesus, is the Christ, the Only-Begotten of the Father, is in such direct conflict with our experience and with all of our thinking, and especially with all the inclinations of our heart, that no one can honestly and with his whole soul...
Renowned New Testament scholar Gordon Fee recently passed into glory, but a former student tells a story about Fee that reminds us of the resurrection. John Crosby received his Master of Divinity degree at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in 1982 and recalls this...
"An ordinary male unrestrained by religious or moral scruple, and faced with a wide variety of willing partners who demand no emotional commitment, or even to know one's name, before having sex -- that man will likely behave exactly as most gay men do." Rod Dreher...
Wow, sobering