Where Have all the Godly Men Gone?

Where have all the godly men gone? These days I ponder that question with increased frequency and concern. If the lack of godly men were only a matter of personality or ministerial preference, then little would be lost. Such is not the case, though. The church is in great need of awakening and renewal; and, in the spirit of Richard Baxter, its greatest need might well be godly men.

Not that long ago, “man of God” was a common and honored descriptor in the church. The phrase ranked alongside “great preacher,” “brilliant theologian,” or “gifted writer” in frequency and surpassed them in value. Now, it seems as though the designation “man of God” has gone the way of the bus ministry and the youth choir—a largely passé referent to a bygone era of church life.

It is as though someone snuck into the shopping mall of the Kingdom and changed all the price tags, upsetting and inverting God’s value system. We have increased the mundane and ancillary aspects of Christian ministry, all the while cheapening its true virtues and values. In God’s economy, though, character is valued over talent, and holiness over giftedness.  Continue at Jason K. Allen

Columns from Tabletalk Magazine, January 2013

The January edition of Tabletalk is out. This issue features articles examining the biblical call to Christians to develop and exercise the skills of listening well, meditating deeply, and thinking carefully in every area of life. These virtues have been increasingly ignored over the past few decades, particularly as our culture strives to increase our busyness and distraction. The Word of God, most notably the book of Proverbs, exhorts God’s people to cultivate the disciplines of deliberate and careful listening, meditating, and thinking, beginning with His Word and applying these virtues in the family, the church, and the world.

Contributors include R.C. Sproul along with Eric Watkins, Tedd Tripp, Jonathan Leeman, Gene Edward Veith, Matthew Miller, R.C. Sproul Jr., Gerrit Scott Dawson, Douglas F. Kelly, Justin Taylor and D.A. Carson.

We do not post all of the feature articles or the daily devotionals from the issue, so you’ll have to subscribe to get those. But for now, here are links to several free columns and articles from this month:   Continue at Nathan W. Bingham

The Rise of Extreme Tolerance

The world may value compromise and tolerance as supreme virtues, but they have a devastating effect on preaching. As more and more evangelical pulpits reflect the surrounding culture, it’s time for Christians to proclaim a distinctively biblical worldview.

Many evangelicals (once known for a very prudent and biblical approach to doctrine) are fast becoming as doctrinally clueless as the unchurched people they are so keen to please. At least three decades of deliberately downplaying doctrine and discernment in order to attract the unchurched has filled many once-sound churches with people who utterly lack any ability to differentiate the very worst fast doctrines from truth. I constantly encounter evangelical church members who are at a loss to answer the most profound errors they hear from cultists, unorthodox media preachers, or other sources of false doctrine.

In the church today, there is a growing reluctance to take a definitive stand on any issue. Discernment is frankly not very welcome in a culture like ours. In fact, the postmodern perspective is more than merely hostile to discernment; it is practically the polar opposite. Think about it: pronouncing anything “true” and calling its antithesis “error” is a breach of postmodernism’s one last impregnable dogma. That is why to a postmodernist nothing is more uncouth than voicing strong opinions on spiritual, moral, or ethical matters. People are expected to hold their most important convictions with as much slack as possible. Certainty about anything is out of the question, and all who refuse to equivocate on any point of principle or doctrine are therefore automatically labeled too narrow. Zeal for the truth has become politically incorrect. There is actually zero tolerance for biblical discernment in a “tolerant” climate like that.  Keep Reading >>>

Where has Critical Appreciation Gone?

The death of John Stott has led to a veritable flood of accolades and uncritical adulation over the last few months. A recent example was the memorial service for him at Wheaton College which raised a number of questions in my mind. One was the issue of what Stott himself would have thought of it. I never met him but he seems to have been a modest and unassuming man by all accounts; it was thus probably a relief to him not to have to be there and listen to the hyperbolic claims being made for him and his ministry by others.  We can presumably assume that one who did not live for the praise of men during his lifetime is probably not too bothered about it afterwards either. 

 

The second question, or perhaps better, observation, was why the art of critical appreciation seems to have disappeared from the culture of the modern world, especially the modern evangelical (for want of a better term) world.

Even as I write, I have just been passed an article from USA Today in which Stott is described as one of the Christian church's `most universally beloved figures.'  Only an American could have written that.  Back home in Britain, Stott was a more ambiguous figure, great man though he undoubtedly was.  Like all great men, his faults were as dramatic as his virtues, from his conscientious objection to war service in World War II to aspects of his theology to his ecclesiastical strategy.   Keep Reading >>>