The Plodding Preacher

I wonder have you noticed a whole new vocabulary has been adopted and spread within our culture by the media and political elite. ‘Same-sex marriage’ is an oxymoron if ever there was one. ‘LGBT community’ presents a cohesive, friendly face. I won’t bore you with a full glossary of terms. Some others may be pertinent, but I’m sure you could cite more. Changing vocabulary is an age-old tool to brainwash. It was the favorite method  of the Babylonian ruling class to safely assimilate immigrants and erase the memory of their own culture, both political and religious. If you struggle to remember what Shadrach’s Hebrew name was, it helps to prove my point and shows the technique had success! Andrew Kerr

It’s easy to get the idea that “good” Christians experience nothing but victory after victory with nary a temptation or struggle until they cross the finish line in a blaze of glory. But I wonder if the race looks less like a sprint and more like a marathon where the runners are exhausted with just enough strength to drag themselves across the finish line or are carried over by their comrades. It’s in these moments of weakness that we realize how much we need the family of the faith to be arms of support when it’s hard to take the next step. Whether we are the givers or receivers of this help, we aren’t meant to go it alone, Persis Lorenti

Picture this: one in five less-educated young men are not working and not seeking marriage, and they seem happy about it. No one wants to see that, but we’re looking at it. According to  University of Chicago economist Erik Hurst , young men between the ages of 21 and 30 without a college degree worked far fewer hours in 2015 than in 2000, and in 2015, eighteen percent of these men reported not working  in the last year  (up from eight percent in 2000). Hurst describes this as almost one-fifth of the population  simply being idle : not in school and not working. Seventy percent of these young men live with their parents (up from fifty percent in 2000). These young men are not married, not having kids, and not earning an income. They are young, single, childless, and idle. What, then, are these young men doing with their lives? According to Hurst, they are playing video games. Leisure time, largely spent playing games on computers and consoles, doubled from the early 2000s to 2015.

“In trying to be helpful, many churches have failed, because they have failed to be truthful. They have failed not out of hardness of heart, or lacking of kindness, but in thinking that they are more merciful than God. Todd Pruitt

Faith is effectual only if one personally trusts in Christ alone for salvation. It is one thing to give an intellectual assent to a proposition but quite another to place personal trust in it. We can say that we believe in justification by faith alone and yet still think that we are going to get to heaven by our achievements, our works, or our striving. It is easy to get the doctrine of justification by faith into our heads, but it is hard to get it into the bloodstream such that we cling to Christ alone for salvation. R. C. Sproul