Saturday, 4 May 2024

The Gospel Coalition

The Gospel Coalition

Blog can be found on:

http://theologica.blogspot.com/

Why We Are Fighting in California

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A proposed California bill (SB 1146) is making headlines this summer as the latest in America’s ongoing religious liberty balancing act. The government wants to protect individuals from discrimination while also protecting the First Amendment rights of individuals and groups to freely exercise their religion.

SB 1146 is a bill that seeks to protect LGBT students from discrimination; in reality, though, it would unfairly discriminate against faith-based colleges seeking to live consistently with..

Why We Should Be Grateful for Flourishing Evangelical Seminaries

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The Story: New data reveal that the largest seminaries in America are the most orthodox and evangelical.

The Background: Each year the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) compiles data on their member schools (currently 231 in the United States and 41 in Canada). Chelsen Vicari of the Institute on Religion & Democracy examined the latest data and found that “students seeking training for church ministry in the United States are largely attracted to evangelical Protestant seminaries, a tren..

Don’t Write Just to Get Published

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For those of us who love words, we’re drawn to the clack of the keyboard and the parsing of meaning on the page. We feel alive as we wrangle words into sentences; some of us even feel closer to God as we work out our faith by writing about it. Time spent writing feels important, even holy.

But for many of us, running parallel with our love of writing is the desire to get published. This desire can be fueled by the culture at large, which says our writing only matters if our readership is huge a..

Let’s Sing the Beauty of Confession

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<a data-cke-saved-href="http://thegospelcoalition.bandcamp.com/track/i-am-ashamed" href=&am..

Making Gay Friends Post-Orlando

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Hugely dramatic events tend to take over the meaning of the names of the places that witness them. Whatever a place-name’s literal meaning might be, its cultural and historical significance ends up being tied to what happened there. Take Hiroshima. It might literally translate as “wide island,” but that’s no longer its cultural meaning for us. It has become a byword for the first-ever application of atomic warfare.

The same is sadly true for any number of places that have borne witness to awful..

Stop Having Quiet Times

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In the psalms, relationship with God happens out loud. More than 95 percent of the psalms express or invite audible words. Most are spoken directly to God, though often psalms speak to others, inviting them to join in. Some even gives “voice” to the inanimate creation.

So when we read, we hear what’s written, because so much of it is actually happening out loud.

I cry out to you.

Hear the sound of my voice.

With my song I give thanks.

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Shout for joy.

Incline your ear to me, and..

The Problem of Praying for Our Children

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I have a prayer problem. Instead of letting prayer draw me closer to God, I can let it take me down winding paths of worry.

Let’s see. What should I pray about for my kids? Well, let’s start with all the things that could go wrong. That sounds logical.

Like Peter, I start to focus on the waves instead of the Savior, waves that haven’t even arisen and probably never will.

I recently taped a photo of each of my four kids into my prayer journal so I could look at them when I prayed. As I began ..

Rediscovering J. C. Ryle’s ‘Holiness’

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Editors’ note: Taking the advice of C. S. Lewis, we want to help our readers “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” which, he argued, “can be done only by reading old books.” Continuing our Rediscovering the Forgotten Classics series, we want to survey some forgotten and lesser-known Christian classics. Previously in this series:

On the Road with John Bunyan (Louis Markos)
Dynamics of Spiritual Life (Douglas Groothuis)
J. C. Ryle’s forgotten classic, Holiness: ..

Have You Met Augustine the Evangelist?

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He was a zealous evangelist who preached with urgency and compassion, exhorting his hearers to believe the gospel. He believed hell was at stake and all who died in their sins would go there.

This doesn’t sound like Augustine as we typically think of him, does it? It sounds more like Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield or Charles Spurgeon. The Augustine we know is a philosophical theologian and church official in North Africa.

The image of Augustine as a pastor delivering evangelistic sermon..

The Excommunicated Member Who Thanked Me

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Six years ago, our elders put Jack under church discipline.

Last week, he thanked me for it.

Our church tries to practice formal church discipline in obedience to Scripture (Matt. 18:15–20; 1 Cor. 5:1–5; Gal. 6:1–5). Because we’re human and flawed and faulty, however, we don’t do it perfectly. But we must practice it. Our consciences are captive to the Word of God.

The only stories you ever hear about church discipline are the bad ones. That’s partly because there are lots of ways to foul it ..

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