Christ & Culture

It was a distinct moment of realization, a head-slapping, should-have-known-it nugget of truth that I had just heard. Dr. Mohler, at the 2018 U.S. Banner of Truth Minister’s Conference, made the simple point that we, as Christians in modern America, should not be at all surprised that our doctrine...
I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I see someone asking a Christian author to sign a book; there’s something about it that just seems so antithetical to who we are as Christians. It’s not a sin, just one of those things that feels odd. That being said, there is one book I do have signed by the...
It is a struggle to live out our faith. But we can see that in ways that owe more to secular trends than to Scripture and obscure the teaching that our lives can show the beauty of life in Christ and his gospel. There is a tendency in Christian circles today to emphasize struggle, brokenness,...
No Place for Truth Jonathan and James are discussing a book that influenced both of them decades ago. Why would they be talking about it now, and what is the book’s relevance for today? 25 years ago, David Wells wrote No Place for Truth, a microscopic analysis of how the purpose of the church and...
The story of the man born blind in John 9 is well known. It’s one of those stories that take work to read because we have to disabuse ourselves of contemporary concern for those with disabilities. For example, there were no Seeing Eye dogs, Braille books or reading machines. This man was a beggar...
Simonetta Carr joins Jonathan and James today. She opens up about very difficult times in her life, during which she dealt with schizophrenia in her family, which would ultimately claim her son. In Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them, Simonetta recounts her experience as she learned much about...
Kata Bethlen – A Faith Preserved Kata Bethlen (1700-1752) started her autobiography with her most painful memory: her forced marriage, at age 17, to her Roman Catholic half-brother. Her family – one of the wealthiest and most influential in Transylvania – had firmly adhered, for generations, to the...
The triplet of sin-related requests embedded in the Lord’s Prayer ends with the shortest, but in many ways the most potent of them all: ‘Deliver us from evil’. As many commentators point out, there is a measure of ambiguity over whether it should be rendered ‘…from evil’ or ‘…from the evil one’...
Alcuin of York – More Than a Scholar In 781, a Saxon monk named Alcuin had an encounter that changed his life and became the catalyst of the dynamic but short-lived Carolingian Renaissance. The man he met was the Frankish King Charles (later known as Charlemagne). As many others him, Charles was...
If I could preach only one sermon, I would preach my one allotted message to the visible church. I would preach with the weighty concern that the baptized are on an irreversible course toward eternity. And the baptized, those well-ordered around the outward expressions of the covenant, are most...