Hyper-Headship and the Scandal of Domestic Abuse in the Church
Justin Taylor gives a summary of a much-needed sermon from Jason Meyer.
TGC15Â resources are now available
If you weren’t able to attend the Gospel Coalition’s 2015 National Conference, or you missed a session here and there, TGC has made the media from every plenary session and all the workshops available online (and it’s free).
Beware Gluten-Free Preaching
Philip Bethancourt:
In Christian preaching, it’s not gluten that is dangerous, but gluten-free. For Spurgeon, just as it would be absurd to make bread without flour, it is unthinkable to preach a sermon without Christ.
The gluten of the gospel must be kneaded into every Christian sermon, despite the many ways pastors are drawn to preach gluten-free today. Here are three of them to beware. If we bypass Christ in any of these aspects of the sermon, we are removing the gluten of the gospel from our text.
Four signs your ministry is all about you
JD Greear:
Sadly, most of us can all too easily recount stories of pastors who betrayed their congregations, who hurt the very people God had called them to love, who—in short—made their ministry all about them.
Some of these pastors may have had their own inflated sense of grandeur from day one. But more often than not, these are the same guys who entered the ministry legitimately wanting to serve others, not angling to build an empire. And yet somewhere along the way, they got a taste for glory. And instead of being the shepherds of God’s people, teaching them to have faith in God, they become stumbling blocks, impediments keeping people from considering God at all.
Five Words that Measure the Boldness of Faith
Michael Kelley asks, “how do you measure faith?”
Well, one option would be to look at results. Jesus was the One who said that even with a small amount of faith, faith the size of a mustard seed, you could tell a mountain to get up and move and it would (Lk. 17:6). In our minds, this looks like a focus on results. That the one with faith will be able to believe that a certain thing should be, and it will be. That’s how we know how big our faith is – it’s based on whether or not that which we can conceive actually becomes reality. But I want to propose a different measure of faith, one not based on results but instead based on something bigger and better than those results.
And you can describe this kind of boldness of faith in five words:
“Even. If. He. Does. Not.”
Those Who Think Read
JD Payne:
Whenever I go a while without extensive reading and thought, I can feel it. It is like the feeling that comes to people who have longstanding exercise routines interrupted for some extended period. They begin to have a strange internal omission, a stressor they are unable to put their fingers on until they hit their treadmills. Once they hit them, they feel an immediate relief and satisfaction. An ahhh moment.
If we are too busy to think, then we are too busy. And if we are too busy to read, then we are too busy.