I self-published my second book on Amazon. I gathered together a series of articles from this blog concerning my sudden and dramatic conversion to a Reformed worldview and put them together in a short 40-pager:
The Kindle version is $.99 and the paperback is $4.95. If you’re interested, check it out HERE
I published my first piece of fiction! Well, don’t get too excited. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of my salvation by God’s grace, I just self-published the first story I wrote as a true born-again Christian.
It’s a simple, brief allegory of the Christian life, based on the parable in Matthew 7, demonstrating the contrast between a house built on the rock of Christ and a house built on Satan’s sand. I used a painting made by my now-retired pastor for the cover illustration, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.
The book is currently available only on Amazon. The Kindle version sells for $0.99. The paperback version is $4.99.
Click here if you’d like to check it out.
In a previous post, I made observations about the connected nature of religion and politics. In this post, I want to elaborate on the distinction between the three terms I used to describe the Religious Nature of Politics.
Religion: All persons are inherently religious – even if they do not adhere to any particular religious system or dogma. Everyone has faith convictions. By this I mean every person holds to presuppositions about the world beyond the senses they believe to be true. We could not logically function in society without these assumptions. You may believe a divine creator made all things and all things hold together by His will and purpose. You may think the universe is governed by certain scientific principles that have coalesced over time into the world in which you live. Neither assertion can be proved or disproved with absolute certainty. They are faith convictions. Faith convictions are either theological (divinely transcendent) or Ideological (humanly immanent) in nature.
Continue readingSometimes I get asked what Calvinism is. Calvinism is the doctrine clearly stated in Scripture that Salvation is of the Lord. Every conceivable component and step along the way is ordered and orchestrated by the Lord in His divine providence.
Calvinism is the sure knowledge that our sin is insurmountable in our own strength.
Calvinism teaches we can’t wash away our misdeeds; We are unable to cleanse our own thoughts; We do not have the virtue to obey the simplest of the commandments; Our good deeds don’t have the power to outweigh our wicked ways.
Calvinism is the conviction that salvation is beyond the reach of our arms and we must rely on an alien righteousness to make us right before God.
Kamber Shenae Doback-Lucas
Job’s friends had the best of intentions when they sat down with him in the ash pile remains of the life he had built for himself. Job mourned the loss of his vast wealth and personal health, but most of all he mourned the loss of his seven sons and three daughters. See, God permitted Satan to afflict Job and take away all that he cared about. Satan sought to turn his soul away from the God he adored. In the end, Satan’s challenge ended in failure. Job’s heart remained steadfast. But this does not mean Job did not suffer greatly – he did: He endured doubts and anguish. He had many burning questions, but no answers. He questioned his own integrity. He lost the will to live. His friends were no help at all. In fact, they blamed Job for his miseries, claiming God blesses the righteous and curses the wicked. And since Job had experienced unprecedented disaster on every side, they could only conclude he had sinned greatly and should repent for his wicked heart. However, we are told in the opening verse of the book that Job was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Later in the story, another friend, younger in years, but more accomplished in wisdom joined the conversation. He rebuked Job’s three friends and explained how God sometimes uses human suffering to purify and teach us things in a way that no other means will suffice. He counseled that it is our duty to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God in those moments.
Continue readingBabylon had rejected God and his Word. A culture that rejects God on a large scale loses his divine protection against evil. It is like the principle of diffusion that everybody was taught in physics: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’. We are spiritual beings, and we also cannot stand a vacuum. Cultures have a certain spirituality, be it a good one or a bad one. Cultures cannot stand a spiritual vacuum. When you have the Holy Spirit, he fills the vacuum and prevents a great deal of demonic activity and self-destructive actions among the people. Where the Holy Spirit is strong in a culture, even unbelievers are blessed. They are not saved, but they are kept from many forms of pollution. But when a culture turns its back on God, the Holy Spirit, to some degree, is withdrawn, leaving a vacuum. Guess who rushes in to fill it? The evil one and those fallen created beings, former angels, who now are demons. Thus, Babylon, an important, powerful culture that has rejected the God of the Bible, does not realize how far the demonic realm has taken charge of its activities.
Douglas F. Kelly, Revelation, A Mentor Expository Commentary (Ross-shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2012), 336.
When it comes to the recent controversial topic of Christian Nationalism and what type of government Christians should strive to establish, we read here Douglas Kelly’s conviction that no neutrality can exist when it comes to a philosophy of government. A culture must have convictions and those convictions will inform government policy. What kind of laws should a country full of Christians have? A secular one? Secularism is not neutral. It denies objective reality by rejecting the existence (or at least the involvement) of a divine being working in the affairs of this world. A nation whose God is the Lord will be blessed. A nation built upon Satan’s sand will decay and collapse in due time.
Nice isn’t the nice word we were brought up to believe it is. Nice has developed over the years, at least in my mind, into an insult on par with being called a pitiful low-life chump. If you want to hurt my pride and wreck my self-confidence all you have to do is say, “What a nice guy you are.” Aside from the fact that this phrase permanently friend zones a hopeful young man courting a lovely lass, a nice guy is simply a person the so-called complimenter judges as having no discernable virtues other than a kind of generic bland niceness, or Vanilla Nice if you will. So please, don’t do that – to anybody, but especially to me. If a gentleman is handsome, smart, strong, etc. then he’ll be described as either handsome, smart, or strong by those who know him. But in a situation where an average guy with not a lot going for him is described with the sentiment, “Oh, well… he’s kinda nice and all.” Yeah, that’s the kiss of death for your ego right there. Buh-bye.
In a theological sense, Vanilla Nice is even more pernicious. I’m not being hyperbolic; It is a parasitic ideology disguised cleverly in a Christian skinsuit with the doctrinal label, love thy neighbor tattooed all over. Before your eyes roll all the way around your head please let me state my case. Nice is not – I repeat – is NOT synonymous with kindness. Kindness is a Christian virtue. In fact, it is a fruit of the Spirit. Find nice mentioned as a moral or ethical virtue in the Bible – I dare you. It’s not there; Not even in the HDPV – Hippy-Dippy Progressive Version. You might approximate niceness with smooth things in Isaiah 30:10 but even then, smooth things are not cast in a positive light. Unless you think prophesying illusions is ethical conduct. You may ask, “If these words aren’t interchangeable, then what makes them differ?” Let me explain. Nice is what you are to people when you want them to like, respect, or favor you in some way that will benefit your own ego or social standing. Heck, Nice is the middle name for almost every sociopath you meet. Vanilla Nice is self-interested by nature. It is a selfish, narcissistic impulse that utilizes flattery, good manners, charm, and eloquent speech, to gain the favor of individuals, groups, or voting blocks, to receive some societal, personal, professional, or ego-centric benefit.
Kindness, on the other hand, has keenly in mind the needs of others. Kindness seeks the welfare of your neighbor, the highest possible good for their physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Kindness is rooted in truth. The consistent application of both law and gospel is showing kindness to our neighbors. Demonstrating that all sinners stand condemned before a righteous and holy God isn’t nice in the modern application of the term, but it is most certainly an act of kindness. It may make some angry, others sad, and yet others indifferent, but it is always compassionate to let your neighbor know he is about to walk right into the fire. Kindness is telling your neighbor to flee the wrath to come. It might be uncomfortable. The conversation might lean awkward, the silence may become deafening, and the tension may thicken like a rolling fog, but you can walk away knowing you have fulfilled the law and shown kindness in the most sincere manner possible. You may not gain social clout. You might be called a wet blanket and be disinvited from socialite hobnob functions but kindness cares not a whittle about such things. It is others minded, which is humility. Vanilla Nice is just too vanilla, too bland, too self-seeking to handle authentic biblical kindness. The imp of Vanilla Nice will not allow you to warn others of God’s judgment on sin and wrath toward sinners. It risks the friendships that provide you with benefits. Their eternal welfare is secondary to your status among peers, it risks the treasury of merits you have accumulated for yourself in the form of social capital.
This is not the ethic of the Christian committed to the way of Christ. Proverbs 27:6 says “faithful are the wounds of a friend.” What this means to me as your friend is, “Demonstrate your love for me, pierce my soul with truth that I may live!” It is not easy to forsake community for consecration. The path can be lonely. Scorn and vitriol will be flung at you from many directions. But let your heart be comforted in the knowledge that you have overcome the sinister subversion of Vanilla Nice, and have crossed the threshold into true biblical kindness. This fruit of the Spirit will bear fruit of its own – for fruit always reproduces after its own kind. You will find companions on the path to your celestial home. Some of them will be grateful brethren, who benefitted from the wounds of your kindness. So don’t be nice. Nice is not a virtue. Nice is not the standard for Christian behavior. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (Eph 4:32)
Predestination is the dirty fourteen-letter word of modern evangelicalism. It is the that-which-must-not-be-named doctrine of the majority who despise it. It is ever only breathed in whispers by those who are convinced of its biblical foundation, lest they roil the placid waters of Lake Kumbaya. It doesn’t need to be this way. We can have a lucid conversation on the matter without a donnybrook breaking out in the church parlor. Perhaps much of the consternation over the concept that God elects a people unto Himself prior even to creating the dust that the first person is formed from comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.
So often I hear a froth-mouthed opponent of the doctrine say (between spurts of saliva) something like this:
If God predestinates our salvation then nothing we do matters. We’re all just muppets churning out episode after episode of the only show on TV, written, produced, and directed by the Great Jim Henson in the Sky.
Continue readingImagine if you will, a couple, a man and a woman, winding their way up a mountain trail together, hand-in-hand, doting on one another. The man spies an encroaching bear and jumps out in front of his wife, weapon in hand, and fights the bear off with all his might. He suffers wounds in the confrontation but successfully protects his wife from injury.
Later on down the road the couple sets up camp for the night. The husband, worn down from the fight and hurting from the woulds he sustained falls into a fast, fitful sleep. The wife is dozing off when familiar growls in the distance startle her. She turns to wake her husband but sees him slumbering peacefully. She doesn’t want to interrupt his rest, raise his fear and anxiety level and force him to move his aching body in response to the lurking menace. After all, she reasons, the bear was probably only trying to play around with them in the first place, before her husband overreacted and caused it to become aggressive. The wife perceives no real threat and leaves her husband be and falls asleep at his side.
The description of what follows is too graphic for those with delicate sensitivities. Needless to say, the journey of the couple ends only moments later in a blur of blood and bone. Continue reading
A Peculiar Pilgrim 