By Greg Gibson
Theistic Evolution’s Achilles Heal: Pre-Fall Death
“The Genesis record is a beautiful picture of God’s creation. Order, purpose and harmony permeate His completed work. Man relates righteously to God; Adam and Eve relate lovingly to one another; and animals dwell peacefully among them. No sign of conflict, fear, violence or death appears, until the day Adam sinned against God. That’s a problem for evolution—a big problem. Christians who flirt with evolution have some serious explaining to do when it comes to the existence of death before Adam’s transgression. How can God pronounce a world filled with violence, disease, suffering and death “very good”? Answer: He can’t. (GG: The new creation will be a restoration of the pre-fall creation. There will be “no more death” in the new creation, just like the pre-fall creation.) The Achilles Heal of Theistic Evolution by John MacArthur
7 Beliefs of the New Atheism
“The points detailing the distinctions of the New Atheism are as follows…
1. Celebration of Atheism – no sense of mourning as seen in the “Victorian Loss of Faith”…
2. Changed and clear direction of attention – No longer the philosophical rejection of God but a rejection of the God of Christianity specifically…
3. Explicitly based in scientific argumentation…
4. Attack upon moderate and liberal Protestantism…
5. Belief in God is not to be tolerated…
6. Theism is seen as harmful to children – teaching a child theistic beliefs is tantamount to child abuse and on the same level as (if not worse than) physical abuse…
7. Theism should be eliminated because of all the harm it has brought to humanity”…New Atheism? Yea, yea, yea whatever… by Carrie Hunter
Good and Bad Reasons to Leave Your Church
“Good Reasons for Moving On—The Four P’s
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1. Providential moving
2. Planting another church
3. Purity has been lost
4. Peace of the church is in jeopardy due to my presence
Possible Reasons for Moving On – The Three S’s
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1. Spouse…
2. Special Needs…
3. Special Gifts…
Reasons Often Used Which are Insufficient
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1. Children’s Ministry…
2. Buzz…
3. Youth Group…
4. Church has changed…
5. New Pastor…
6. I’m Not Being Ministered to…
7. Music…
8. There are others…”
Jason Helopoulos on Good Reasons for Moving On by Jason Helopoulos
Seminary Training by Dr. Jesus
“Here is the heart of the problem: we had taken a great means of grace and a critical support for life and faith and the crucial tool of our ministry – Bible understanding – and had turned it into the end, rather than the means to the end. We told ourselves we were mature Christians because we were educated rather than because we delighted ourselves in the Lord. We turned our devotions into comprehension exercises.” Training Preachers by Marcus Honeysett
Pastors: Visit Your Men at Their Workplaces
“Pastors, go to where your men work. During my past 4 years as a pastor in the Bay Area I quickly discovered that one of the most important things for me to do was to hang out with men in my church at their workplace. This helped the men. It showed them that I care about their callings, how they spend 50+ hours of their week, and the people they work with. This helped me. It taught me about the unique opportunities & challenges men were facing in their different workplaces, it opened my eyes to a world bigger than our church, and it helped set new trajectories for my preaching and discipling.” What is one of the best ways for a pastor to gain evangelistic opportunities? by Brian Croft
Pastoring Women
“We want to reflect on what he uniquely and wonderfully intends for women in the life of the church, and how to specially pastor them.” See 9 articles from the 9Marks e-Journal Pastoring Women
Bible Inerrancy: Annotated Bibliography
“Behind the centrality of expositional preaching is the assumption of the authority and truthfulness of God’s Word…I’ve saved the best for last. If I could just recommend one book on the inerrancy of the Bible it would undoubtedly be this one—John Wenham, Christ and the Bible (Tyndale Press, 1972 [UK]; IVP, 1973 [US]).Wenham’s book has been through three editions and makes the simple point that our trust in Scripture is to be a part of our following Christ, because that is the way that Christ treated Scripture—as true, and therefore authoritative. (Robert Lightner, a professor of Systematic Theology at Dallas Seminary published a similar book a few years later, A Biblical Case for Total Inerrancy: How Jesus Viewed the Old Testament [Kregel, 1978].)Wenham had first put these ideas in print with a little Tyndale pamphlet in 1953 called Our Lord’s View of the Old Testament. In Christ and the Bible, Wenham, an Anglican evangelical who taught Greek for many years at Oxford, has done us all a great service in providing us with a book which understands that we do not come by our adherence to Scripture fundamentally from the inductive resolutions of discrepancies, but from the teaching of the Lord Jesus. Only because of the Living Word may we finally know to trust the Written Word. May God use these resources of those who’ve gone before us to equip and encourage us in so trusting.” (HT:JT) Inerrancy of the Bible: An Annotated Bibliography by Mark Dever
