At least temporarily I will be blogging at http://anunnaturallife.blogspot.com

Blogger would not let me access custom templates here. So, if you're interested, click on the link and check out my new blog, An Unnatural Life.

As a person who believes veritas vos liberatit (the truth shall set you free), I spend my life trying to live the truth and convince others to live it. I am convinced that the Bible is God's Word, that it is truth, and that we can know and follow God by following the teachings in the Bible. The world I live in does not believe that, so my life is lived like a tree trying to grow against the wind. That is what the trees in west Texas do. The prevailing southwest wind blows the trees so that they grow toward the northeast. They should not. They should grow more to the south, because there is more light to the south.

I find that some who believe that the truth will set you free are shaped, not by the prevailing winds of culture, but by the battle they fight with the truth. Archeological examination of the remains of English bowmen reveals that their bodies were misshapen. Their shoulders were crooked, the bones in their arms unequally thickened because they spent their lives bending the powerful bows that drove their arrows. They were bent by the fight, and bent by the enemy. Sometimes our love of the truth bends us so that we forget that we were made to grow toward the Light . . . not toward the battle.

Our first calling is not to be warriors, but children. While violent men take the kingdom by force, heaven is populated by children, not warriors. Those who are tossed by every wind of doctrine, who are more at ease with their culture than with God's truth have another problem. Those who believe that the truth will set you free must not be imprisoned by their battle for the truth. We must remember that the battle is the Lord's and that we are His children. While our culture seems determined to doubt the absolute truths of God, we who believe in them must remain in them by remaining in Christ. Abiding in the truth will shape us. Sometimes fighting for it will mishape us.

Defending the gospel is not the first responsibility of the preacher; preaching it is. - D. A. Carson (see link below)

We live in a pluralistic society; one that questions the veracity of the Bible, and is becoming increasingly Biblically illiterate. We live in our own context, but if we are to live a Christian life we must live by truths that transcends context as Christ transcends context. Much of professing Christianity today is not enamored with the preaching of the gospel; the transcendent truths of God found in the Bible. Postmoderns say that we as finite beings do not have the ability to know transcendent or absolute truth and so we cannot proclaim it. They believe we can only consider truth, make our own judgments, and live by them, but we cannot preach anything as the absolute since it has been touched by fallible humans.

Yet, that is exactly what the apostles did. They lived in a society that more pluralistic than our own. They preached the gospel of Jesus Christ in a world that constantly accused, harassed, and mocked them. The gospel spread into and through the great skeptical learning centers of the day and, by the end of the third century, some estimate that one half of the world known to the apostles was Christian.

We shoud not be dogmatic legalists, thinking that we have this all figured out. But, we can and should be convinced in the power of the gospel. We can and should preach it and, when we do, we will experience the freedom of the gospel; whether anyone else believes or not.


http://preachingtoday.com/skills/gettinggospelright2008/offirstimportance2.html