Tried With Fire

I've been listening to these talks from the Gospel Coalition Women's Conference re: word-based women's ministry ( here , here , and here ). Concurrently, I've been realizing my own lack in really understanding the importance of the Word and the singularity of the Word as the sole source of authoritative revelation of God from God. It's better late than never, but part of me wishes that I had been taught how to read, study, and rightly value the Word a long time ago. But reading and studying involved the mind, and the mind was somehow at odds with the Holy Spirit. Or so it was taught and inferred. During a severe trial, I read the Word night and day. But I was looking for messages from God about me and my situation rather than the revelation of who He is and letting that change me and my perspective. To make matters worse, a friend, who I looked to as a spiritual mentor, advised me that I could only take verses as promises from God when the Holy Spirit "an...

It is no good telling the bereaved mother that Christ still loves and cares for her if she has only been taught to think of Christ in terms of how he works on her own feelings and in her own experiences. She needs to be able to see that God is much greater than her experience of him; she needs to know that, whatever her current feelings of anguish and despair, God is trustworthy and loving; and she needs to know that assurance is not necessarily about emotional highs but about knowing that God is faithful even though the whole world appears to be falling apart around her. Such will only be possible if the theological environment in which she lives and worships teaches her to understand Christ above all in terms of his historical work of redemption for the people of God; and that will only come about when the emphasis in preaching focuses not on ourselves but on the Christ of the Bible. Setting Christ above all in the context of biblical history rather than our own experience will pr...

Kim is giving away a copy of Reformation by Carl Trueman. It's an excellent book on how the church today needs the reformers' understanding of Christ, the Word, and assurance of salvation.  It's concise but packs a big punch. Check it out!

One of my pet peeves is the notion that Christian women should only read books written by other Christian women on women's topics. I don't think I'm imagining this, am I? While I'm not discounting the value of application-oriented books or women authors, I take issue with the idea that theology and doctrine are dull, dry, ego-bloating, and impractical. Therefore, "don't trouble your pretty little head about such things".  I don't think anything can be further from the truth. Plus this idea about boring theology is also inflicted on men in this anti-intellectual age, minus the "pretty" part, of course. In Sunday's sermon, one of the takeaway points was how we need to go deep in our understanding of God and not merely stay on a temporal plane. As examples, the pastor mentioned a group of young men in their 20's who have studied  Chosen by God by R. C. Sproul and are now tackling a book by Wayne Grudem on doctrine. He also mentioned a...