Latest Articles on Guard the Deposit
Fear of the Lord and Being Scared
I've often struggled to describe the meaning of the phrase "fear of the Lord," and I usually end up describing something that skirts around the word "fear." To an extent, this is good--God does not want us to be terrified of him. Still, my explanations fail to do...
A properly ordered love of mammon
I just read a fascinating sermon by Augustine on the love of money for one of my classes. The sermon was given on the occasion of a feast of a martyr, and Augustine's main goal is to undercut the idea that the martyrs were somehow super-human in their capacity for...
The Necessity of Factions in the Church
Edit, 1/22/2011: I have been going back through some old blog posts, and I wanted to write that I do not find this blog post persuasive at all any more. I want to leave it here, but the more I read this, the more I hear Paul's words dripping with sarcasm, not with...
On $4 gas
D. A. Carson writes in his For the Love of God, Vol. 2 for the meditation on Jeremiah 14: Because our own culture tries so hard to detach from God what happens in the "natural" world, reserving for him only private or distantly "spiritual" things, we rush to give...
The Pastorate and PhD Studies
Sean Michael Lucas, a professor of Church History at Covenant Theological Seminary, wrote a very insightful and helpful post on his blog entitled Ministerial Students, Calling, and PhD Studies. I never even remotely considered PhD studies before I went to seminary,...
Come Out, and Be Separate
One of the ongoing struggles of evangelicals is to rid themselves of fundamentalist notions of "being separate" from the world. In the past, especially in the wake of public, humiliating losses in the public square on the issue of creationism (e.g., the Scopes Monkey...
Preaching and Preachers
Is it a good thing that most churches have generally only one man preaching? Obviously, there are some churches that only have one pastor trained to preach, and most churches that generally only utilize one man have other preachers once every 4-6 weeks (on average)....
Ransomed from every language
And they sang a new song, saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,...
Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism
Over Spring Break, I read The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift: The Fissuring of American Evangelical Theology from 1936 to 1944. The book was originally a Ph.D. dissertation in Church History by a Dallas Theological Seminary graduate, and I found it absolutely...
The Death of Death
You have somewhere written, O Christ, that you must reign until you destroy every rule and every authority and power, and that the last enemy to be destroyed will be Death. For you have written that your reign must endure until all your enemies have been put under...
The Faith of Joseph of Arimathea
I have not thought much about the extraordinary faith of Joseph of Arimathea (except to note that he is one of the "good guys" of the gospels), but I just had this thought: he was a "respected member of the Council" (Mark 15:43), which was the very Council that...
Prodigal Brother, Prodigal Son
I don't know why I have never noticed this before, but the story of Jacob's reunion with Esau sounds strikingly like Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son. After Jacob dishonestly and unscrupulously takes Esau's birthright and blessing, he goes off into another land....