Category: Links

Celebrity Pastors

Why I’m Grateful for the Idea of “Celebrity Pastors”.

Thabiti Anyabwile hates the term “celebrity pastors,” but everybody should love the pastors who are celebrities. I think Mark Dever started this whole thing by calling John Piper a “Rock Star.” John Piper hated that too.

Incidentally, Johnathan Leeman, the author of the post linked above, is also the author of my new favorite book.

The Essence of Faith

The Essence of Faith.

I think this is good as far as it goes, but it’s still wrong. To a certain extent, it should be as obvious as anything that we should trust an infinite God, infinitely. And our lack of ability to do that even a little bit is probably a pretty good measure of how far short of God’s glory we fall in other areas.

BUT. It’s not as though God makes it obvious and easy to trust in Him. He delights in being trustworthy, and He wants us to delight in his trustworthiness by trusting Him. And to delight in Him more and more is to trust Him more and more. But trusting more and more requires greater and greater challenges to that trust. So God deliberately sets up scenarios where the risk is ever greater to take Him at His word.

If faith were easy, it would just be presumption.

And it might have been a pretty good deal, too

At Isegoria, a quote from David Lind: ““If the day World War II ended, Stalin had sent all his German prisoners home, giving them a big box of food for their families and a wallet full of Reichsmarks, the Communists would have taken all of Western Europe.”

But, if Stalin had been able and willing to do that, Communism would have been the right choice. A totalitarian won’t and a communist can’t.

The original article is full of good ideas, some more realistic than others.