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Road Trip: “What is Faith”, Christ Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama, 10/27/24

By James White — 4 months ago

We chose to record today’s DL just in case the connection went wonky and broke up. But, it didn’t, and we managed to get about 70 minutes in today, mainly on two topics (with a brief trip report at the start). First, we discussed William Lane Craig, his views on Adam, and why this is pretty much just par for

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The 95 Theses: A Reformation Spark

By Ryan Biese — 4 months ago

Luther’s 95 Theses decried the sale of indulgences by developing a number of themes: First, the Christian life is to be one of repentance and daily turning from sin rather than doing things (penance) to obtain pardon and removal of penalty. Here he was critiquing the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance. Second, the Church, and particularly the pope, lacks the authority to forgive sins, only God can do this.

October 31st marks the 507th Anniversary of what historians widely regard as the beginning of the Reformation. Its beginning was rather humble and unassuming: a local scholar and monk hung a poster – written in Latin – inviting philosophical debate over 95 separate theses.
Martin Luther, did not intend to start anything of the kind. Luther merely posed the question of whether it was right for the church to be selling “indulgences” to those who could afford them. According to the Church of Rome, an “indulgence” is a removal of the penalty for sin. According to legend, Luther posted his theses on the church door, which functioned as an “academic bulletin board.” Luther was hoping for a scholastic debate on the legitimacy of this practice.
YouTube Video: The Reformation Polka
At that time, the Pope of Rome wanted money to build a new basilica and to finance it he authorized the sale of indulgences, which promised remission of the penalties of sins in exchange for money.
While Luther’s own prince banned the sale of these indulgences within his territory, Luther was outraged at the idea that his parishioners might be traveling to a neighboring town to buy them.
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Unduly Influenced By Celebrity Culture?

By Tony Felich — 4 months ago

Christian people should be careful not to be too influenced by the celebrity culture of our age when being guided in some way by spiritual leaders who are not their local pastors or elders. Podcast preachers and YouTube teachers are not your pastors. Christians should commit to membership in a local congregation and eagerly sit under the preaching of that church for their primary spiritual nourishment.

It struck me as odd recently when a person I know expressed his personal devastation about a popular preacher falling into sin and being removed from his pastoral position and connected social media teaching platforms. My friend never met the well-known preacher in person, yet he acted as though he was his personal pastor who had fallen into a disqualifying sin.
Several years ago, Carl Trueman demonstrated how celebrity culture has greatly impacted evangelical Christianity in this country. He noted if you ask a person who their most influential preacher was, they would almost always list a well known “celebrity” pastor before their local church pastor(s).
Christian pastors and Christian people need to think honestly about whether this is true. Have we been unduly and unhealthily influenced by celebrity culture?
Allow me to postulate a bit…
The vast majority of those called to be Christian pastors should be satisfied with faithfully pastoring their local congregation and not seek after a wider “platform.” Pastors should know their ministry is to shepherd the flock of God “among them” (1 Pet 5:2). Shepherding includes feeding and tending. “Pastor” means shepherd. It is a hands-on, personal, localized ministry. If a pastor is doing these things in a particular local church, he won’t have much time to be online trying to influence everyone else’s flock. The idea of a pastor building his platform outside his local church seems to be a overestimation of his importance to God’s Kingdom. It’s hard to see how “He (Christ) must increase but I must decrease” (John 3:30), comports with “building my platform.” There are obviously exceptional Christian teachers, but they are much rarer than we think. For most of us local church pastors, we need to know our very limited place, put our shoulder to the plow, pray for God’s sustaining grace, eventually die and be forgotten. Faithful perseverance is our goal, not a massive “platform.”
Allow me to get to meddling…
Christian people should be careful not to be too influenced by the celebrity culture of our age when being guided in some way by spiritual leaders who are not their local pastors or elders. Podcast preachers and YouTube teachers are not your pastors. Christians should commit to membership in a local congregation and eagerly sit under the preaching of that church for their primary spiritual nourishment. It’s certainly a blessing to have so many sermons at our disposal digitally, but I sometimes wonder if such easy access has inoculated people from accountable application of biblical truth. We have a generation of hearers of the Word but not doers of the Word. Your best opportunity to live out biblical truth happens in your local church family where everyone is under the preaching of Scripture (what is true) that will include ways to live it out (what to do). Detaching a person’s feeding (preaching/teaching) ministry from their tending (personal interaction/example) ministry is a recipe for disappointment. Follow your local pastors/elders for spiritual nurture, where you can see their lives as well as hear their preaching and teaching.
In a nutshell, we will know Christianity is in a good place when its adherents cite their local church pastors/elders as their most influential preachers instead of Tweeters and Youtubers. “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith (Hebrews 13:7).”
Dr. Tony Felich is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as the Pastor of Redeemer PCA in Overland Park, Kansas.

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The Practice of Accepting Disappointment

By Tim Challies — 4 months ago

One of the most important habits you can develop is the habit of accepting that life is full of disappointments. One of the best ways to grow in contentment is to accept the inevitability of discontentment. One of the ways you can be most joyful in life is to be realistic about life, to know that the people in it will so often fail to meet your expectations. Having admitted all of this, you can embrace it as the way life is and even the way God means for it to be.

Your church will disappoint you. The pastor will preach some weak sermons, the elders will make some poor decisions, and the members will fail to share every one of your burdens and minister to every one of your sorrows. You will be tempted to become discontent with your church and begin to cast wistful eyes toward other congregations. You will begin to wonder if the path to joy involves picking up and moving on.

Your husband will disappoint you. He will fail to please you, fail to fulfill you, fail to be all you want him to be. You will be given too little attention, sinned against too often, hear too little of your love language. You will be tempted to become discontent with him, to demand more, and to insist that peace will come only on the other side of his personal reformation. You may even be tempted to leave him altogether and start over with someone who promises more.

Your sex life will disappoint you, the wonder of the early days soon giving way to the struggles that come with too little opportunity or too little willingness, too much demand or too much distraction. How many people have made shipwrecks of marriage, family, and ministry because they could not accept the disappointment of a sex life that is imperfect and less than completely fulfilling?

Your parents will disappoint you and so too your children. Your friends will disappoint you and so too your relatives. All will fail you at many times and in many ways. And, of course, you will do the same for them. Your church will disappoint you and you’ll disappoint your church. Your spouse will disappoint you and you’ll disappoint your spouse. Your sex life will disappoint you and it will disappoint your spouse as well. No one will ever fully meet your hopes, desires, and expectations. No one ever can fully meet your hopes, desires, and expectations. And you can’t meet theirs.

I acknowledge that this could all sound discouraging and depressing. I acknowledge that it could be taken as a call to apathy, an excuse to give up effort altogether. But that would be the wrong response. The right response is to accept the reality of imperfection and to be content with discontentment. The right response is to understand that nobody and nothing can live up to your expectations and that nobody and nothing is meant to.

Christians speak often of the ways that beauty and pleasure are meant to direct us beyond themselves to what is ultimately beautiful and ultimately pleasurable. Beauty evokes wonder and wonder evokes worship and worship evokes longing. In that way, the beauties of this earth direct us to the perfect and complete beauties that we will experience in God’s presence. The longing and the ache are a feature rather than a bug, for they point us to the time and place when our hopes will finally be realized and our longings finally satisfied. And it seems to me that there is a way in which disappointment can function in a similar way.

Instead of being discouraged by disappointment, would it not be better to allow it to remind you of the state of this world and, better, the state of the world to come? Would it not be better to allow it to remind you that this world is not meant to completely fulfill you and not meant to satisfy your every longing? Would it not be better to let it increase your desire to be with God in that place where all disappointments will be taken away? And then to enjoy life as it is, not as you long for it to be?

God’s gifts are good and are meant to be enjoyed. Yet none of them can deliver all that they promise.Share

God’s gifts are good and are meant to be enjoyed. Yet none of them can deliver all that they promise. Each of them brings a level of satisfaction but also a level of disappointment, a sense of beauty but also a sense of longing for more. We need to be wary of that longing for more because it can motivate us to make poor decisions or even depraved ones. It can lead us to forsake the ones we love and be discontent in even their greatest efforts and best attempts to love. It can lead us to act rashly and in ways that hurt others and dishonor God.

So when you encounter life’s disappointments, do not be surprised and do not be dismayed. Do not allow them to cause you to turn aside or turn away from those who love you and those God has called you to love. Learn to accept them as an inevitable reality of life in this world. Instead of resenting them, embrace them and allow them to deepen your love and your longing for the only One who will never let you down.

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Cru Ends Controversial Sexuality and Gender Training

By Mary Jackson — 4 months ago

During the meeting and in a follow-up email to WORLD, Johnson referred to the Compassionate and Faithful materials as a “learning experience,” not a curriculum. Since most staff had completed the training, Johnson told me it made sense to incorporate future training on sexuality and gender issues into Cru’s Institute of Biblical Studies for incoming staff and interns. The Compassionate and Faithful materials were designed to “provide clarity” and “align all our staff to a historic Biblical understanding of sexuality,” Johnson said. But for some staff, the ministry’s mandatory rollout of the curriculum did the opposite.

One of the nation’s leading evangelical ministries is discontinuing its controversial staff training on sexuality and gender less than two years after launching it. Cru employees will no longer have access to the Compassionate and Faithful curriculum by the end of this year, according to a leaked recording of a Sept. 26 meeting for U.S.-based staff.
“Our plan going forward is to integrate our LGBT+ equipping into existing developmental venues,” Keith Johnson, Cru’s director of theological education and development, told staff during the meeting leaked on a podcast last week. “Going forward, we think it’s increasingly important for us to speak in our own theological voice.” That means Cru will rely less on “external communicators,” Johnson said.
Cru, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, faced criticism over the curriculum from current and former staffers and from prominent evangelical authors, speakers, and commentators including Rosaria Butterfield, Christopher Yuan, and Allie Beth Stuckey. They claimed it departed from Biblical teachings on sexuality, gender, and God’s design for men and women by allowing Christians to use preferred pronouns for transgender people and to adopt LGBTQ identity labels, among other concerns.
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Cyrus H. McCormick, Bringing In the Sheaves

By Barry Waugh — 4 months ago

One of the greatest gifts by McCormick was endowing four chairs in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest in Chicago. The seminary had struggled to exist for several years in different locations but finally found a permanent site in Chicago in 1859 thanks to a gift of land from some city philanthropists and a $100,000.00 gift from McCormick to endow four faculty chairs.

This biography is not about a minister but instead briefly tells the life of a Presbyterian layman who was an inventor and industrialist. His life began on the farm as did many of the lives of antebellum entrepreneurs. Cyrus’s father Robert was born at Walnut Grove, Rockbridge County, Virginia, June 4, 1780, into the household of a successful and prosperous farmer. Robert was deeply interested in the mechanical aspects of agriculture and was a skilled worker of wood and iron enabling him to improve existing tools and develop new ones. When Cyrus Hall was born to Robert and Mary Ann (Hall) McCormick, February 15, 1809, it was into a home where his future would be directed vocationally towards the machinery of agriculture. But it was also certain his spiritual guidance would be defined by the Westminster Standards held to by his parents as Old School Presbyterians. One biographer of McCormick, Herbert N. Casson, has described the spiritual influences on Cyrus as having been “nourished on” Calvinism from the time when he “first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the Bible” (158). Casson also notes,
From his father he had training as an inventor; from his mother he had executive ability and ambition; from his Scots Irish ancestry he had the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that environed his home came the call for the reaper, to lighten the heavy drudgery of the harvest. (25)
Cyrus invented his first successful machine for reaping grain when he was only twenty-two years old. It was not perfect, but it was the first step towards reducing the great number of people and hours of labor required for harvesting the fields full of amber waves of grain. He demonstrated his new machine to his father by harvesting rye on the family farm. Cyrus did not seek a patent until 1834 after three years of refining its design to improve the machine’s durability and efficiency. He continued to modify the reaper for another five years while living at Walnut Grove and using his father’s blacksmith shop. The first two machines he sold were purchased locally in 1840 but by 1843 he had sold forty reapers in Virginia. His market expanded until by 1845 he was selling reapers in Michigan, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. The market had grown greatly in what is currently called the Midwest, so Cyrus moved his business to Chicago and expanded production with a new factory.
His reaper was described as having provided hunger-insurance for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world, with more than a half million manufactured since the first one was sold in Virginia. (Casson, 188)
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Effectual Calling and New Creation

By Ryan Currie — 4 months ago

After removing the stone, Jesus called with new creation power, “Lazarus, come out.” The heart that stopped four days before pulsed with new life. Lazarus walked out of his grave. Lazarus’s resurrection and gives a picture of what it is like for God to resurrect people who are dead in their sins spiritually. God takes what is dead and morally repugnant from sin and makes it into something alive and beautiful.

Like any other six-year-old, I lived life to the fullest. I climbed the cherry trees, played on the playground with my sister, and built my Legos. One day, a sense of dread and sadness began clouding my carefree days. I didn’t know what was wrong. I explained how I felt to my mom. She gently said, “You need Jesus.” At that moment, something extraordinary happened. I believed in Jesus. I did not have all the theology worked out in that moment of newfound belief. But I knew I needed Jesus. Desperately.
There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a person trusting and clinging to God for grace. True belief is the result of God’s effectual calling. And this effectual call is the dawning of new creation life.
It is often thought that systematic theology is abstract and theoretical. This is far from the case. The great truths of theology help us make sense of everyday life. We experience the truths of theology in life. Theology is systematic because each doctrine is dynamically connected. Effectual calling is organically related to the Trinity, election, creation, the doctrine of sin, atonement, eschatology, and all the other doctrines. Two theological relationships that continue to capture my attention are effectual calling and the new creation.
God’s Call and New Creation
God’s work in the heart is nothing less than a new creation. If God doesn’t do this work, people hear of the death and resurrection of Jesus and respond with anything but saving faith. Apathy, curiosity, mockery, or hostility are common responses to the gospel. But a person will only respond in saving faith if God calls that person and opens the heart to believe.
Just as God spoke and created the universe and everything in it, God speaks to the human heart and creates something new (2 Cor. 4:4). The God who said, “Let there be light!” says, “Let there be faith!” While the gospel is preached or shared, God creates something new in the heart of the person who responds in saving faith.
In systematic theology, the effectual calling, this new creation call, is also known as new birth or regeneration. Jesus taught that people must be born again to believe the gospel with saving faith (John 3:3–8). The Holy Spirit was active in the creation of the world. He formed it, brought order from the chaos, and made it beautiful (Gen. 1:2). The Spirit is also active in the new creation of the believers. Through the power of the gospel, the Spirit causes them to be born again, bringing order to their chaotic and dead hearts and making them spiritually beautiful.
God will one day restore the cosmos and make all things new. This new creation call to the individual through the gospel is the downpayment of resurrection life that will one day overtake all creation.
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The John Money Cult

By Owen Anderson — 4 months ago

The problem isn’t that there is too much individualism. Pure individualism can still result in people seeking God because God is the source of their highest good. Nor is the problem merely that people want to be happy because a consequence of knowing God is happiness and joy. The gender cult is simply an expression of the failure to know God and to know oneself.

Imagine two adults. They are having an argument. The argument is about whether or not one of them is a woman. Adult #1 says, “I am a woman.” Adult #2 says, “no, you’re not.” By what authority is this dispute settled? One answer is biology, chromosomes, and sex organs. But for those in what I am calling the John Money cult, this is not a satisfactory answer. They believe they are being authentic and true to themselves by determining their “gender” based on their sexual desires and how they feel. This is the viewpoint adopted by the vast majority of intellectuals today. So what is a satisfactory answer? What will finally settle this madness that has affected the crowd of “academics” in our day? There is no doubt this is an embarrassing time in which to have lived when future generations are told our intellectuals didn’t know what it is to be a woman. “Don’t kindergarteners know how to figure that out?” they’ll ask.
John Money the Cult Leader
For those who have studied the LGBTQ+ sexual philosophy, John Money is a well known pervert, or rather, a well-known name. Although raised in a Christian home, he set out to make his life’s work overthrowing Christian sexual morality. He was a researcher at Johns Hopkins University working in the field of human sexual behavior. Like Alfred Kinsey, his research was plagued with falsification, gross ethical violations, and more than the usual nonsense for a secular intellectual. He is perhaps best known for having destroyed the Reimer family with no consequences from his peers. He went before the Lord for judgment in 2006.
What is important about him for our question is that he made it so that kindergarteners can no longer answer, “who is a boy and who is a girl?” How? By inventing the terms “sexual orientation,” “sexual preference,” and “gender roles.” These are now terms around which entire university departments are built. At my university (Arizona State), and in my school, we have a “gender studies” program that promises to help the student do the following, “Gender, women and sexuality studies is an interdisciplinary field that involves analyzing societal issues through the lens of feminist theory. Through coursework and scholarly research, you’ll gain critical knowledge and a deep understanding of feminist theory and practice. You’ll also have the opportunity to challenge conventional wisdom about gender and explore many new perspectives.” All of that for only 15K a year. What will the student do with that degree? The first job recommendation is “advocate.”
The Gender Cult
What are these “new perspectives?” Money, like Kinsey, taught that human sexual development begins identity formation in each person from the time of birth. Both did unethical sexual research on children and neither faced discipline, in fact, they are praised as heroes. Their new project is that there is this thing called “gender.” Here is where the kindergartner’s expertise is called into question. The kindergartener knows how to determine sex. It is biological. But does the kindergartener know how to identify gender?
No. But here’s the secret. Nor does anybody else. This is why Jordan Peterson told Matt Walsh, in “What is a Woman?” that gender is a completely unhelpful term in research. It cannot be measured and it is imprecise. Instead, Peterson recommends “temperament” which can be measured. A woman can have a temperament like some men, and a man can have a temperament like some women. The biological facts aren’t in question, and the word “gender” is useless. The solution to a man with a temperament like some women is not to cut him up, it is to help him understand how to use that temperament in pursuit of the highest good.
The Cult’s Failed Solution
The failed solution of “gender” remains with us because it has the features of a cult. What is different about this cult is that it is State funded and taught in all secular and many Christian universities. The United States has had its share of cults. This is the first time that they are given unquestionable status in the university and almost limitless resources. In other essays, I have written about the Marxist cult and its hold on the intellectuals of our days. This gender cult is a close second. They go hand-in-hand so that future scholars will undoubtedly link them.
But why? They share a common problem and common parameters of acceptable answers. The problem is the unfairness of life and the unhappiness this causes. The acceptable parameters are that any solutions must affirm the basic goodness of the individual. The explanation is that the good individual only becomes corrupt due to human society. For the Marxist, this starts with the invention of private property. For the gender cultist, this begins with rules about different roles in life. These rules cause the suppression of the individual’s desires. Suppression leads to inhibition and potentially to neurosis and psychosis.
The solution to the dangers of suppression is to just stop it. Be yourself. Be brave, have pride, and tell the rule-makers of your society to go pound sand. This message resonates with a culture that is already enamored with the individual and the search for happiness. Recently, Carl Trueman wrote about this, however, he was repeating the insights of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom traced the conflict between the Lockean and the Rousseauean streams of thought in America. The Rousseau branch teaches that the individual is good and corruption is due to society.
We know this has had many implications in American thought and life. For instance, criminals are no longer immoral but are forced into crime by need and environmental factors. Our pop culture praises the villain (pirate, vampire, adulterer, thief) and portrays pastors as setting out to ruin everyone’s fun (Footloose). Enter the drag queens reading to children at the public library. Why do you care if a man wants to dress in drag and read to children? Let him live his dream.
Why Do We Care?
One reason to care is that psychology tells us a healthy mind is one that is integrated with reality. If our friend tells us he is surgically removing four inches from his shins because he is the Emperor Napoleon, it is our duty as friends to help him reintegrate back into reality. He isn’t Napoleon. Loving your friend means telling him he isn’t Napoleon and should never carve up his body to try and look like Napoleon. So why do we play this game with gender? Why is thinking you are something enough to make everyone else be forced to agree you are?
There have been many useful answers. An overemphasis on individual happiness. A short-sighted consumerism culture that values immediate gratification. An over-sexed society that is always looking for new ways to be perverse. However, I’m a philosopher and a pastor so I will give a different answer.
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Jesus Will Deliver Us from the Wrath of Jesus

By John Piper — 4 months ago

What we have seen is that the “day of judgment,” or “day of wrath,” will be the day of Jesus’s judgment and Jesus’s wrath, acting by the appointment of God the Father. Therefore, when Paul says that Jesus “delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10), we are not to think of the Son rescuing us from the wrath of the Father, but of Jesus rescuing us from his own wrath, which is also the Father’s. He and the Father are one (John 10:30). The coming wrath is “their wrath” (Rev. 6:17). And Jesus, acting on behalf of the Father, is the deliverer at his second coming.

He Will Deliver Us from the Wrath to Come
Against the backdrop of coming judgment, the second coming of Christ is pictured as a rescue of his people. He is coming to save us from God’s wrath. “[We] wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10). The predictions of the day of judgment foresee a peril looming. Paul says it is divine wrath and that Christ is coming to rescue us from that peril. Peter says that God’s people “are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:5). Hebrews 9:28 says, “Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.” Romans 5:9–10 portrays the death of Christ not only as the accomplishment of our past justification, but also as the guarantee of this future rescue from the wrath of God:
Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
Paul makes plain in 1 Thessalonians 5 that this peril of God’s wrath comes at “the day of the Lord”—the appearing of Christ:
You yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light. . . . For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. (1 Thess. 5:2–5, 9–10)
Jesus Delivers from the Wrath of Jesus
But if we are not careful, we may conceive of our deliverance from wrath at the second coming in a way that badly distorts the reality. It would be a distortion if we thought of God pouring out wrath and his Son mercifully keeping us from the Father’s wrath. It would be a serious mistake to pit the mercy of the Son against the wrath of the Father in this way—as if God were the just punisher and Christ the merciful rescuer. It is quite otherwise.
It is not as though divine judgment gets underway and Jesus shows up to intervene. Jesus himself sets the judgment in motion and carries it out. Jesus is the judge. Jesus brings the judgment. The surprising implication is that when Paul says, “Jesus . . . delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10), he means, “Jesus delivers us from the wrath of Jesus.” This will become obvious as we look at several biblical passages.
Their Wrath
In the book of Revelation, John speaks not only of the wrath of God at the coming of Christ, but also the wrath of the Lamb:
The kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” (Rev. 6:15–17)
There is no sense of God being wrathful and the Lamb being weak. To be sure, this Lamb had been slain. But now he has “seven horns” (Rev. 5:6). He is not to be trifled with. His coming will be terrifying to all who have not embraced his first lamb-like work of sacrificial suffering (Rev. 5:9–10). The wrath is “their wrath” (Rev. 6:17).
The Father Has Given Judgment to the Son
It is “their wrath” and their judgment because the incarnate Son—the Son of Man—is acting in the authority of the Father:
The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. . . . For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. (John 5:22–23, 26–27)
There is a special fitness in Jesus being the judge of the world. He is the one who came into the world, loved the world, and gave himself for the salvation of the world. There is a special fitness that the one who was judged by the world, and executed by the world, will judge the world.
The World Will Be Judged by a Man
Paul seems to have this same fitness in mind when he says that a man has been appointed as the judge of the world by being raised from the dead:
Now [God] commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:30–31)
Peter, in preaching to the household of Cornelius, says the same: “[Christ] commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42). Paul echoes the same conviction in 2 Timothy 4:1–2
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Praying in Jesus’ Name

By Nick Batzig — 4 months ago

Mere intellectual knowledge that Jesus is the only Mediator and the One who fulfills the covenant promises is insufficient for us to receive the promised blessings—we need to exercise personal faith in Christ as the object of the blessings. God has chosen to make faith the instrument of union with Christ. This affects our invocation of the name of Jesus in our prayers to God.

Certain practices have become so familiar among Christians that believers can be in danger of thoughtlessly performing them. We are all prone to simply going through the motions in our Christian lives. For instance, how often have we prayed the Lord’s Prayer without reflecting on the petitions that we are presenting to God? How often have we recited the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed without giving due consideration to the truths that we are confessing? We can easily go through the liturgical motions in a worship service without focusing on what we are doing before God. Similarly, it is altogether possible for believers to close their prayer with the words “in Jesus’ name” or “in Christ’s name” or “for Christ’s sake” as a sort of mindless mantra.
This raises the important question, Why should believers pray to God “in Jesus’ name”? If we are going to employ the name of Jesus in a conscientious way at the end of our prayers, a proper amount of theological reflection is required. Ultimately, we pray in Jesus’ name because He is the only Mediator between God and man, He fulfills all the covenant promises of God, and He is the object of our faith in God. Consider the following.
The Only Mediator
During His earthly ministry, Christ taught His disciples how they should approach God in prayer. He said: “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14). “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you” (16:23). Jesus teaches us to do so because He is the exclusive Mediator between God and man. As Thomas Boston explained:
In whose name are we to pray? In the name of Jesus Christ, and of no other, neither saint nor angel, John 14:13. “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, says he, that will I do.” We must go to the Father, not in the name of any of the courtiers, Col. 2:18 but in the name of his Son, the only Mediator.
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