jonosmith.com

I just got punched in the kidney by Richard Baxter. He did it from the grave. It was a verbal punch, delivered through his brilliant book: The Reformed Pastor.

If you’re a pastor, preacher, or in some kind of church leadership position, you should read this.
Read it, and leave yourself open to the punch.

If you’re not, you should still read this and pray for your pastors and leaders.

(more…)

“[The resurrection of Jesus] bursts open the constraints of nature and history, promising an overwhelming good of a kind that will not, like any immanent theodicy, leave out the dead, the victims of history whose fate can never be justified by any product of history. Closure — meaning a finally satisfactory resolution of the problem of God’s goodness in the world — is found in trust and hope, not in some explanation of the world that makes sense of evil, and still less in the claim of human power to eradicate the evil that human reason has understood.”

Agree? Disagree? Give me your thoughts…

Currently putting together my sermon for Sunday night on Luke 21.
Lewis has been helpful…

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne’s question “What if this present were the world’s last night?” is equally relevant.

Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that “this present” might be “the world’s last night”; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.

For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.

C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night, (1952)