Do you really believe the masses will be Christian again? Nonsense! Never again. That tale is finished. No one will listen to it again. But we can hasten matters. The parsons will dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable jobs and […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
Are We Too Sophisticated?
Sophism: false argument, one intended to deceive. Sophist: captious or clever but fallacious reasoner. Sophistic: related to sophism. Sophisticate: sophisticated person, related to sophism. Sophisticated: worldly-wise, cultured, elegant, highly developed and complex. The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1993) G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of […]
Polling For Moral Authority
Yet, within the Church as well as outside it, this perverted notion persists. Truth is conceived on a quantitative basis—no doubt under the influence of statistical reasoning and public opinion polls. It is being assumed that the more people there are with different opinions to contribute, the greater ‘truth’ will emerge from the mixing of […]
Idolatry and Conscience
“In this connection it is not claimed that an unsaved person must come to know every phase of truth about the atonement of Christ before he is divinely prepared for salvation; but it is claimed that the Spirit proposes to make the meaning of the cross sufficiently clear to that person as to enable him […]
Puffed Up Or Built Up?
If a person is offended by God’s Word, that is his problem. If he is offended by biblical doctrine, standards, or church discipline, that is his problem. That person is offended by God. But if he is offended by our unnecessary behavior or practices—no matter how good and acceptable those may be in themselves—his problem […]
Three Biblical Baptisms
I confess three types of baptism: that of the Spirit given internally in faith; that of water given externally through the oral confession of faith before the church; and that of blood in martyrdom or on the deathbed. . . . John names these three baptisms with which all Christians must be baptized “the three […]
Redefinition Evangelism
The gospel partakes of what has been called the “scandal of particularity.” This particularity is sometimes embarrassing to Christians who want to be sophisticated and tolerant, but the specificity is essential to the gospel. Christianity is not a vague cosmic optimism, a utopian vision of everyone loving one another, a formula for success and happiness, […]
Ashamed of the Gospel
Ashamed Of The Gospel What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. Albert Camus1 The above quote from a well-known unbeliever is an amazing admission of […]
Lying – The Denial of God’s Reality
Truth forever on the scaffold Wrong forever on the throne Yet that scaffold sways the future, and Behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above His Own ~James Russell Lowell, The Present Crisis Not long ago, in a prophetic way, the Boston Globe reported, “In our culture, it is not […]
Loving The Unlovely
I suspect that many of us, in our quest after holiness, have imagined that being filled with the love of God would flood our consciousness with a kind of contemplative rapture, or a sense of infinite satisfaction. That is why many have developed a ‘holiness’ turned inward instead of outward; mystical instead of practical; self-centered […]