LEGATO...

Evangelical Christianity is dying. The glory of God is ready to depart. As a movement, we’re growing more and more content in the world. Rather than prefer be absent from the body and present with the Lord, far too many of us prefer to be present with the body and with our future plans. We attend church. But mainly our interest is to learn how to improve our own lots in life. We’re repeating the error of the impenitent thief on the cross to whom Jesus was only a matter of convenience. You can hear it in our prayers. Entreaties and petitions that once reflected verses of the Bible are now strangely at odds with Holy writ. The way He taught us to pray, with hearts submitted to his Kingdom rule, are more and more becoming images of modern man and his quest for successful living. What has become of the spirit of brokenness and humility in our churches? We are forgetting to bow the knee. What has happened to the cry of the penitent thief who, in all unassuming contrition, cried from the dep...

I am a 70 year old American. Yesterday I took part in the first political demonstration that I've cared enough to join since 1961. I went to a TEA party. In my career I was fortunate enough to travel to over 50 foreign countries, and I developed a deep respect and love for the greatest country on the planet, the United States of America. My feelings now are for my government, not my country. They are anger, frustration and shame: • Anger that my government, the administration and the Congress are spending money at a rate that will destroy the future of my children and grandchildren. • Anger that my government, Democrat and Republican alike, will not exercise the fiscal responsibility that we private citizens must. • Frustration that my government will not listen to the warnings. • Frustration that politicians promise reform and responsibility, and once in office, these promises are forgotten. • Frustration that our elected officials are more concerned with re-election than the welf...

In thinking a bit more on the tenuous state of the culture-war, and many Christian’s weariness in it, we should think on a comment by my old friend, Dr. John Frame [Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida] on the efficacy of God’s control over his creation. Frame notes, "To say that God’s controlling power is efficacious is simply to say that it always accomplishes its purposes. God never fails to accomplish what he sets out to do. Creatures may oppose him, to be sure, but they cannot prevail. For his own reasons, he has chosen to delay the fulfillment of his intentions for the end of history, and to bring about those intentions through a complicated historical sequence of events. In that sequence, his purposes appear sometimes to suffer defeat, sometimes to achieve victory. But…each apparent defeat actually makes his eventual victory all the more glorious. The cross of Jesus is, of course, the chief example of this principle"...

Jon Meacham’s article in Newsweek Magazine, “The End of Christian America,” triggered a fresh debate regarding the state of the Christian consensus in America and its future. No doubt a lot of Christian people felt a range of emotions after either reading the article first hand or hearing something of its contents. While the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey, which is at the core of Meacham’s thoughts, claims to have its finger on the pulse of what is oft called “Christian America,” and many are seeing this survey as a prescient indicator of things to come, we should take a step back and try to look at the gist of the article through the lens of God’s sovereignty in history. Perhaps the exercise will make us a little less pessimistic about the future of Christianity in America. There are many errors and false assumptions Meacham extrapolates from the Survey but I will focus here on but one. He fails to consider what history teaches us: that the ebb and flow of a nation’s ...

One of my favorite saying comes from John Murray. “The difference between truth and error is not a chasm but a razor’s edge.” Spurgeon said something like it too: “Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between what is right and wrong; rather, it is the difference between right and almost right.”