Here is a wonderful essay by D.A. Carson, offering some preliminary guidelines to answer the question, “What parts of the Bible are binding mandates for us, and what parts are not?” He sets up the problem like this: “Greet one another with a holy kiss”: the French do it, Arab believers do it, but by and large we do not. Are we therefore unbiblical? Jesus tells his disciples that they should wash one another’s feet (Jn. 13:14), yet most of us have never done so. Why do we “disobey” that plain injunction, yet obey his injunction regarding the Lord’s Table? If we find reasons...

Arno was inseparable from Mr. Penguin. The little Haitian boy was almost three years old, and the plush penguin with the word “love” inscribed upon it was his most treasured object. The orphan and his penguin were always seen together. The boy had been given the penguin just after his birth. A Dutch couple was in the process of adopting him almost from the start of his life — they had been matched to him when he was only two months old. The penguin represented a promise. The process of adoption took two years — the length of time considered adequate to determine that no living ...

Here are two back-to-back headlines from Reuters: White House: Obama backs letting tax cuts on rich expire Obama pushes Congress to pass small business plan Don’t you see the obvious disconnect here? I cannot, for the life of me, understand why these people in Washington, and why Americans around this country, don’t get it. I’ve ranted endlessly that the people providing from 7 to 8 out of ten new and existing private sector jobs in this country are the very people that Barack Obama wants to hit with tax increases. What about this is so difficult to understand? I know that go...

Here’s an interesting analysis of a “problem” that is, in truth, a crisis. Thanks to Justin Taylor for this post. David Nienhuis, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, has a helpful piece in the Modern Reformation on the problem of evangelical students “familiar” with the Bible but still essentially illiterate. Here’s an excerpt on how it happened: Christians schooled in this rather anti-intellectual, common-denominator evangelistic approach to faith responded to the later twentieth-century decline in church attendance by looking not to more substantial catech...

Here is a two-part article by David Powlison that I pray God would be used to help many break a destructive pattern of sin. Here is an excerpt: Imagine that your heart, your true inner self, is a room filled with your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and perceptions. Some are good and full of light, and some are bad and full of evil and darkness. There are two ways to clean out the evil and darkness and bring light and goodness to the whole room. You can eject the evil bodily: Fight the sin! Say no! Call your accountability person. Repent. Remember the Bible. Cry out to God for mercy. That’...