What I Read Online - 02/08/2013 (a.m.)

• Prepare for Gay Marriage | HeadHeartHand Blog

  • 1. Prepare our children
  • That privilege – of waiting until our children are old enough and of presenting the beautiful before the ugly – will be increasingly denied us by the normalization and display of homosexuality in the media, in schools, and in the malls. This is going to be tough, but we will have to teach our children much earlier and about much more than we would ordinarily choose.
  • 2. Prepare to love

  • We don’t need to prove our spiritual manhood by condemning homosexuality in every sermon and prayer. Keep the focus on the saving love of Christ, no matter how tempting it is to get into constant condemnation mode. Remember, there are probably homosexuals in most of our congregations. Try to win them, not beat them.

     

  • 3. Prepare for jail
  • If the UK pattern is a model – and it looks as if US campaigners are using the same playbook – they will pass “hate-crime” legislation, press charges against us, shame us in the media, stigmatize our businesses and churches, threaten us with the loss of our children, and impose substantial fines, all in the hope to scare us into silence. But when none of these things move us, the legal penalties will intensify until eventually some of us, maybe many of us, will end up going to prison for it. We’d better get ready for that inevitable reality
  • 4. Prepare for betrayal
  • This is going to be a sifting time. Some Christians will cave. Prominent preachers will compromise. Famous Christians will distance themselves from believers who have fallen foul of homosexual campaigners
  • This is going to be a sifting time. Some Christians will cave. Prominent preachers will compromise. Famous Christians will distance themselves from believers who have fallen foul of homosexual campaigners
  • 5. Prepare a refuge?
  • 6. Prepare for eternity

• Simonetta does it again — this time in Bitesize – Reformation21 Blog

  • The purpose of the Bitesize series is to present the life of an important Christian in 120 pages or so.  This volume is particularly to be welcomed.  Simonetta writes very well and she knows her subject.  That she has consulted on the volume with scholars of the stature of Herman Selderhuis indicates the quality and historical integrity for which she is aiming.
  • One point of contemporary significance: as the contextualisers out there are now arguing for what are called ‘Insider Movements’, it is good to remember that the kind of questions being asked by them — e.g., How should a Christian behave in a violently hostile culture? — were very pressing at the time of the Reformation. The correspondence between Renee and Calvin touches on just such issues.   It was called ‘Nicodemism’ in those days.  The name has changed; the issues have not.  Truly, there is little or nothing new under the sun.

• Get Low – Kevin DeYoung

  • You will never be a Christian until you accept that there must be bad news on the way to good news. We will not know our only comfort in life and in death unless we are willing to see our misery. The goal in Christian preaching is not to have us all wallow in condemnation. But the question is this: How am I to live and to die in the joy of Christ’s comfort? The answer to that question begins with knowing your misery.

     

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.