Political liberty is a tremendous social good. But it can only work when there is restraint on our appetites, and when we put limits to our cravings.

Freedom, in the biblical understanding, is much different than what most folks think when discussing freedom. They believe that freedom means being able to do whatever you want to do. The biblical view says that freedom involves doing what is right. And it involves the idea of being free to serve.
Most folks do not think of servants or slaves as being free. But paradoxically, the biblical notion of freedom has to do with being a slave – a slave to Christ and a servant to others. That is why 1 Peter 2:16 says the following: “Live as people who are free, . . . living as servants of God.”
Paul also speaks in such terms. In 1 Corinthians 7:22 he says: “the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave.” And in Romans 6:18 and 22 he says similar things: “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. . . . But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.”
Three general things can be said about the biblical view of freedom and serfdom. First, there is a marked contrast between the Christian and the non-Christian. The non-believer might think that he is free, but in reality he is a slave. He is a slave to sin and self. The above passages from Romans makes this clear, as do others.
Acts 26:18 for example speaks about how the unsaved are bound by “the power of Satan”. Galatians 4:8 speaks of how non-Christians are “slaves to those who by nature are not gods”. And Hebrews 2:15 talks about the unconverted as those who are “held in slavery”.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it this way: “We are never free. Everybody in the world today is either the slave of sin and Satan or else the slave of Jesus Christ.” Or as R. C. Sproul has said, “The only freedom that man ever has is when he becomes a slave to Jesus Christ.”
And again: “If ever there is a genuine paradox to be found in Holy Writ, it is at the point of freedom and bondage. The paradox is this: When one seeks to rebel from God, he gains only bondage. When he becomes a slave to God, he becomes free. Liberty is found in obedience.”
James Montgomery Boice put it as follows: “The only real freedom you are ever going to know, either in this life or in the life to come, is the freedom of serving Jesus Christ. And this means a life of righteousness. Anything else is really slavery, regardless of what the world may promise you through its lies and false teaching.”
So the non-believer can carry on all he likes about being free – especially being free of God and his requirements. But he is a slave nonetheless. He is a slave to his own sin, to his own selfishness, to his own lusts, and to his own desires. As John Piper says:
Read More

The wide attention recently given to Epstein’s role is an important reminder to American Christians that whatever we may want to argue about the supposedly “good old days,” biblical Christian faith is a lot more marginal in American culture today than we sometimes want to admit.

National and even international news has been all in a tizzy over outspoken atheist Greg Epstein becoming the new president of Harvard University’s chaplains.
Does this mean that Epstein has just been hired for a new job as Harvard’s atheist chaplain? Has he become Harvard’s “chief chaplain”? Does this mean that he now “leads” and is “in charge of” Harvard’s other chaplains? Did these other chaplains decide that they “couldn’t think of anyone better” for spiritual chaplaincy at the university? Is this a big, new change for campus ministry at Harvard?
Contrary to what you may have heard elsewhere, the answer to all of these questions is “No.”
Christians who seek to follow the One who said He IS the truth should be a lot more careful to be accurate than several rushing to comment have been.
As someone who was very involved in Harvard campus ministry while earning my three-year master’s degree there not that long ago, I’d like to clarify some realities that some headlines and hot takes, from Christians as well as others, miss.
First of all, Harvard is not a Christian school.
We at IRD have raised concerns about one United Methodist university hiring a Muslim chaplain, and another United Methodist university hiring a Unitarian Universalist to be its dean of spiritual and religious life.
This is categorically different. Harvard makes no claim to be a Christian institution.
Yes, many commenting on this announcement correctly note the university’s founding by devout Puritans in the 1600s. But such commentaries too often jump right from there to the present day, skipping over such major developments as Harvard’s deep ties with the Unitarian movement, beginning even before the university started its graduate-level Divinity School in 1816. Denying the divinity of Jesus Christ is obviously a huge break from biblical Christianity.
Epstein’s election, by the consensus of his fellow chaplains, does not represent a dramatic new shift and is unlikely to be terribly consequential for Harvard.
Secondly, the overall campus ministry environment at Harvard is multi-faith. This certainly does not mean that Christian and other chaplains there affirm the truth claims of each other’s religions. But as a secular university, if the administration is going to let evangelical Christian ministries operate on campus, it will offer the same level of access to various non-Christian religious ministries.
I would much rather see my alma mater continue its “open” stance of letting us minister on campus alongside everyone else, in a free marketplace of ideas, rather than take a “closed” stance of kicking out all campus ministries.
Harvard’s 43 currently listed chaplains include many evangelical Protestants, but these are less than one third of the total. Other traditions represented include everything from Baha’i to Zoroastrianism.
Thirdly, Harvard having an atheist chaplain is not a remotely new thing. I realize “atheist chaplain” may sound as oxymoronic as “vegetarian butcher” or “pacifist soldier.”
But the reality is that there are a number of essentially humanist congregations in America where atheists have sought to approximate functions religious congregations provide in terms of social community, support through life crises, regular gatherings for interesting lectures and lively discussions, and community-service volunteering—all while trying to keep God out of it. A number of humanist campus ministries seek to similarly offer godless alternatives to traditional student ministries.
I personally do not think that this can ultimately work as well without God. But that does not change the fact that such communities exist.
Epstein has already been a chaplain of the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics (HCHAA) Harvard for years. In 2005 he was ordained “as a Humanist Rabbi from the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism.” And Harvard’s humanist chaplaincy began decades before that, way back in 1974.
Epstein is not the first non-Christian to hold the largely honorary title of president of the chaplains. He is unlikely to be the last. After a humanist student ministry has been established for nearly half a century, is it really that big a deal for the humanist chaplain, rather than the chaplain of another non-Christian campus ministry, to take a brief turn with the title “president”?
Read More

The day is coming soon when “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10)—great and small, rich and poor, well-known and unknown. And what will happen when we stand there? The rubric we raised against others will be raised against us.

“Judge not.” Few words of Jesus are more familiar, even to non-Christians. And when understood, few are more devastating.
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. (Matthew 7:1–2)
In the face of others’ aggravations and sins—their thoughtless comments and annoying tones, their insensitive laughter and failures to follow through—how natural it feels to convict them in the court of our imagination. How gratifying to hear our inner prosecutor give their words or actions the worst spin, and then to close the case before the defense can even speak.
And how easy to forget that one day, the judgments we laid on others will be laid on us; the measures we used to assess others will be used to assess us. One day, we will enter the court of our imagination—and this time not as judge, but as defendant.
How many emails would be abandoned and text messages unsent, how many thoughts would be discarded and words unsaid, how many conversations would be redirected and posts unread, if only we heard our Savior say, with eternal sobriety in his voice, “Judge not”?
Wrong Judgment

Of course, “judge not” does not mean what some would like it to mean. Matthew 7:1 is the life verse of many who simply would like to live in sin undisturbed. Rarely do they read the rest of the chapter, where Jesus warns against “dogs,” “pigs,” and “false prophets” — and expects us to judge who they are (Matthew 7:6, 15–20). Rarer still do they read Matthew 7 alongside John 7, where Jesus commands, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24).
Critical thinking, discernment, and “right judgment” belong to every mature disciple of Christ. But there is another kind of judgment to which Jesus says, “Judge not”—a kind produced in the factory of our unredeemed flesh, marked by a tendency to (1) indulge hypocrisy and (2) withhold mercy.
Hypocritical Judgment

“Let me take the speck out of your eye” (Matthew 7:4). Our words of judgment, whether spoken or merely thought, may seem unobjectionable, perhaps even kind. We really do notice a speck in another’s eye—some small pattern of sin or folly that our brother has failed to see. And don’t we all appreciate the friend who points out the spinach in our teeth or the shirt tag climbing our neck?
But wait: “There is the log in your own eye” (Matthew 7:4). The spinach-noticer has ketchup smeared across his cheeks; the tag-discerner forgot to put his pants on; the speck-remover has a birch tree jutting from his left eye. In other words, “You hypocrite” (Matthew 7:5).
The faults and annoyances of others — that is, their specks—have a way of taking our eye from the mirror and putting it over a magnifying glass. In the moment of offense, how easily many of us assume, without prayer and with scarcely three seconds’ worth of thought, that we are only the observers of specks and logs, and not also the bearers of them. We hear her retort without remembering our own exasperating comment; we bristle at his third reminder while forgetting our own failure to communicate well. We quickly play the role of prosecutor, but refuse to cross-examine ourselves.
Those who “judge with right judgment” do not pass by others’ specks without comment, but they spend some time searching their own eyes before poking another’s. “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5).
Read More

Observations of the primary narrative tension and its accompanying resolution gave us hope that we could sift through the flood of details to discern the author’s main point in this chapter.

When our church’s team of preachers decided to preach through Acts, I knew chapter 27 would be a doozy (notice how I cleverly ignored this chapter in my interpretive overview of Acts). I have always been confused by this chapter and its role within the book, and though I’m sure compelling sermons have been preached on this text, I have yet to hear one of them. I’m used to hearing otherwise fantastic preachers punt on this chapter, in the name of practicality, to talk about “weathering the storms of our spiritual lives.” So the extraordinarily detailed travelogue of Acts 27 is reduced to a parable and a few minor observations (typically surrounding verses 23-25) seeking to inspire us toward deeper trust in Christ—a wonderful thing to be inspired toward, of course!
Therefore, since I’m in charge of managing our sermon schedule, I made sure to assign Acts 27 to someone else. Pro tip: When you don’t know what to do with a text, require a friend or colleague to deal with it instead. This resulted in one of the most exciting “aha!” moments in my Bible study this year.
A Key Structural Observation
The sucker fortunate fellow to receive the assignment was a good man and marvelous student of the word named Tom Hallman. Tom eagerly set himself to observe the text inside and out, to give him the raw materials for a series of interpretive questions. Our practice is that our team of preachers gives feedback on every sermon before it is preached. We collaborate in two phases: the study of the passage and the delivery of the sermon. So in that first phase, Tom regularly laid before us the fruit of his study for comment and evaluation.
And Tom made a key structural observation that shed tremendous light on the passage for me. In following the narrative’s plot, Tom observed that the main conflict centers on the centurion’s failure to listen to Paul’s counsel in Acts 27:11. This led Tom to recognize a few arcs within the plot:

Acts 27:9-20: Paul speaks, and the centurion pays more attention to others. The result is that all hope of being saved is abandoned.
Acts 27:21-44: Paul speaks, and the Romans start listening to him. The result is that all are brought safely to land.

These observations of the primary narrative tension and its accompanying resolution gave us hope that we could sift through the flood of details to discern the author’s main point in this chapter.
Read More

Christians…should model humble engagement with scientific findings. Christians should not pretend that science is a perfect, objective, infallible source of truth. But they also shouldn’t have cynical attitude every time a scientific discovery is made.

As an engineer, I read scientific papers quite frequently. I am convinced most people do not know how to read scientific papers intelligently. This doesn’t need to be the case: you don’t have to be an expert to think critically about a study and its results. In a society which is obsessed with scientific discovery and “scientific truth,” Christians in particular need to be wise when engaging with modern science.
If you want to better engage with scientific findings, you are going to know certain questions to ask as you read scientific papers. Additionally, you are going to have to get a good grasp of the uncertainty inherent to any good science. Recently, I read a book that gives both a series of questions to ask of a scientific paper as well as a good analysis of the uncertainty inherent to science in general.
The book is called “Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth” by Stuart Richie. Although written by a non-Christian, it is an essential read for any Christian working in a STEM field and is useful for any believer who finds themselves looking up the latest “scientific study.” For today’s Book Quote of the Week, I want to look at questions Stuart Richie says you should ask when reading a scientific paper.
Is everything above board? Authors from reputable universities, companies, labs? Journal published in look professional?
How transparent is it? Can you find data set online anywhere?
Was the study well designed? How was the control group treated? When seeing headline claim, should ask “compared to what”
How big is the sample? How many subjects were included from the final sample and why?
Are the inferences appropriate? Causal language when only a correlation study? Experiments on animals jumped to humans?
Is there bias? Does the study have obvious political or social ramifications and do the scientists write about these in such a way that seems less than impartial? Where was the study funded?
How plausible is it really? If study involves human participants imagine yourself having taken a part…did the environment of the study even approximate the setting that the scientists want to know about?
Has it been replicated? Stop relying so heavily on individual studies
Questions from “Science Fictions:How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth” by Stuart Richie
What the Quote Means
These questions come at the very end of “Science Fictions.” The entire book looks at the ways researchers intentionally or unintentionally publish results which are misleading in one way or the other. The results can be over-hyped, they can ignore important data, or the conclusions can be impossible to replicate in a future study. All of these questions laid out by Richie are designed to help you as you read scientific papers to ask the simple question “is this true?”
Some of these questions are harder to answer if you don’t have a STEM background. But the basic questions of “how was the study designed? Who were the people who did the study? What were the conclusions of the study and do they make sense?” are always useful to have in the back of your mind when reading a “scientific conclusion.”
Now, the goal of these questions isn’t to cause you to never trust another scientific conclusion again. Rather, they are tools for you to more intelligently discern whether an article like “10 Superfoods which reduce aging instantly” is something you should read and take to heart, or not. These questions help you sort the “wheat from the chaff” so to speak.
Read More