what's going on here?

becoming a christian

Asked about his conversion and if he found Christians he admired, Tim Keller responds very interestingly,

I saw a small group of people. They seemed thoughtful. You have to have a group of people who embody the kind of Christian you would be if you became a Christian. You say, "These are people like me, or people I would like to be like," and, "I see how their Christianity plays a role in their life so I can start to envy that role and maybe I would like to have it too.

I find that a fascinating insight - and an important one for the church. Of course, it's not a rule. But I do think it's a helpful observation.

david powlison on god's sovereignty in suffering

Especially helpful talk on suffering. Worth sharing as widely as you can.



HT: Justin Taylor

keller: justification & justice

From Out of Ur's report of a talk given by Tim Keller on the topic of justification & justice:

As Keller describes them, the justification people are all about justification by faith alone. Only after being justified can a person live as he/she ought to live. While Keller was in full agreement with this doctrine, he said the unfortunate implication for many of the justification people is the belief that "we are mainly here to do evangelism" and they view "justice as a distraction."
The justice people, on the other hand, tend to downplay or completely ignore the doctrine of justification by faith. Instead they can focus on language about "defeating the powers" or seeking the renewal of communities. Also good ideas, but not if justification is lost in the mix.
Keller believes this rift between justification and justice is completely unbiblical. "Justice and justification," he said, "are joined at the hip. They are a seamless cloth."

Worth pondering.

saturday night spotify: the gabe dixon band

Well, indeed: who? It's funny how a search for one artist (in this case, Mindy Smith) leads to the discovery of another (The Gabe Dixon Band). It's not country but it isn't non-country; it's rock but neither soft nor otherwise. It's a little bluegrass, a little not. You need to give it a listen to get it.


And, yes, Mindy's on there for one song, the lovely Further The Sky.

mary chapin carpenter: i have a need for solitude

atkinson: lamb of god

If you want some well-written, thoughtful meditations on Jesus as the Lamb of God that take you into a deeply-satisfying theological reading of the text, you won't go far wrong with David Atkinson's little book, Jesus Lamb of God.

taking directions from...the dark side

HT: pda-247

the great albums (vii) - dare

The first Human League album after half the band left to work together as Heaven 17, Dare was a triumph, of style, of hype, of synths, of pop.


The sound is about as clean as it could be (and such a contrast to their long-delayed follow-up, Hysteria) and could be argued to be the pinnacle of the electronic pop of the day. You can sing along to it, you can dance to it and it sounded great on the radio.


What's it about? The usual stuff - life, love, loss. It isn't profound; it is mildly pretentious. And it's hugely enjoyable, as a child of its times.


For an added bonus, I've linked to the coupling of the original Dare album and the subsequent release of various 12" remixes, Love & Dancing.

the church & the world

Fried & Hansson offer wisdom on ignoring your competitors, in not letting what they're doing set your own agenda.

"...worrying about the competition quickly turns into an obsession. What are they doing right now? Where are they going next? How should we react? (That mindset) leads to overwhelming stress and anxiety. That state of mind is bad soil for growing anything...When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can't spend that time improving yourself. Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision...(and)...You wind up offering your competitor's products with a different coat of paint." (p.148)

Their words have real application to the life of the church and its mission in the world. Of course, the church needs to know the world it is engaging with, no question about that, and to know it well and deeply. But that kind of knowing is to be grounded in a settled vision (gospel) that allows for the engagement to be redemptively creative.


Or so it seems to me.

ebtg: acoustic

Ben & Tracey: thank you so much, for so much, over so many years. And now I find this on spotify - an unexpected, joyous gift.

I have to say, I never expected to hear EBTG singing Springsteen (Tougher Than the Rest is on here) but it works amazingly well.


All in all: delightful!

thinking out loud 3 - the birth of hope

When we suffer, we need hope. And if we have hope - real, solid hope - we can go on and, somehow, get through the hard times.


I don't doubt that that is true. But I want to set it in the light of Romans 5:4,5 where Paul is speaking about Christians doing the seemingly-odd thing of glorying in their sufferings - how can that possibly be so? He tells us that it can, and does, happen because

we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (v.4)

In his formulation, hope is at the end of the process; it grows out of the development of attested character, which is itself the product of persevering under trial.

If I had been asked to write that sequence I would have opted for suffering-hope-perseverance-character, or possibly with perseverance and character reversed. But I definitely would have put hope next to suffering as the dynamic which alone will allow for perseverance and character, however they are then ordered.


Can we persevere without hope? In 1 Thessalonians 1:3 Paul is quite clear that the endurance seen in that church was the product of hope. I don't think he's suggesting in Romans 5:4 that hope is entirely absent until character is securely formed on the back of perseverance. But maybe he is suggesting that the energising reality of hope is most securely-grounded where perseverance and attested character are the soil in which it is birthed.


Does this mean, then, that such hope is a human construct or achievement, since it depends (at least in part) on perseverance and character? Perhaps Romans 5:5 helps us here: the hope in which we can boast and rejoice will not ultimately be seen to be empty because God has poured his love into our hearts through the gift of his Spirit.


But maybe the even more important question is how we can help those who are suffering - do we simply urge them to hope in God, giving solid biblical reasons for doing so? Clearly that is never out of place and can be of great value. But maybe we need to somehow help them to just keep going, even in the absence of deeply-felt hope, standing with them, holding them up insofar as we can, seeking to encourage the perseverance that develops character and that then gives birth to a deeper, more secure hope.

jeanette winterson: on poetry

A poem is an act of memory. Poetry was first forged out of the need to remember what would otherwise be forgotten – in an oral tradition record-keeping is an art, not an act of administration.

You can read the whole piece here.

nichole nordeman: brave

Brave is a gently rocky, poppish album with some lyrical depth & substance. You might want to give it a listen.

george herbert: the call

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life!
Such a Way as gives us breath,
Such a Truth as ends all strife,
Such a Life as killeth death.


Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength!
Such a Light as shows a feast,
Such a Feast as mends in length,
Such a Strength as makes his guest.


Come my Joy, my Love, my Heart!
Such a Joy as none can move,
Such a Love as none can part,
Such a Heart as joyes in love.

friday night spotify: sound affects

The Jam's penultimate album and from the height of their popularity and prowess. The only shame is it didn't include the single, Going Underground, from a few months earlier - possibly their best moment ever.

powerpoint is dangerous

This article is an interesting read, but for more than just its comments on powerpoint. It was commented that it is dangerous "because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control...Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable." And the problem with bullet lists is that they "take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces."

I think that's also a salient warning against bulletized theology. We want to be in control but grasping after it we fail to see the problem for what it really is, we miss the connections that would make us pastorally more helpful to others. We forget that life is too complex for neat solutions, even biblical ones.

sons of korah: psalm 23

keller: on proverbs

More from the 'pen' of Tim Keller on handling the book of Proverbs.


I especially appreciate his emphasis on the cumulative interpretation of Proverbs - without that, the understanding and application of material from Proverbs can be very two dimensional.


He also writes helpfully on a way to discern and appropriate the riches of Proverbs: in community with others.

ferguson: on grace

A (brief) interview with Sinclair Ferguson on the topic of his new book: grace.