"If you want me to I'll make you whole. I'll only do it though if you say so."

Ripped straight from the biblical text . . .



Apparently, "only willing love is worth the price" of Christ's atoning death. This is so bad I really thought I was watching a parody until I saw the video caption that tells where this came from.

The really beautiful irony is that the first words you see are "Jehovah reigns." The rest of the song proceeds to define the limitations of his "reign." The unwillingness to separate from those who trumpet this kind of abuse of Scripture is just one of the reasons fundamentalism has lost its credibility as a movement.

HT and tip from Paleoinformant "Lumpy"

"We Preach Culture When We Should Be Preaching Christ."

Today I started listening for the umpteenth time (but the first time in a long time) to a message preached by Tim Jordan at the 2003 Heart Conference at Northland Baptist Bible College. Jordan is the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church and chancellor of Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. His message wrestles with the appropriate methods for speaking and applying biblical truth to contemporary culture (contextualization).

While addressing the prevailing mindset in fundamentalism, he made the statement quoted in the title of this post. Jordan explicitly opposes the seeker mindset, which hands over control of the church's worship to unregenerate people, but he speaks boldly to the culture of fundamentalism with statements like these:

We need to begin a process of exegeting our beliefs, because some of what we believe, God didn't say. . . . A lot of the stuff isn't against what God said. It's just not what God said. So is that valueless? It might have great value. That's not the point. The point is, it's not what God said. . . . We are afraid of the truth.

We think if we can get people to live like the Cleavers, then they will be holy.

We [pastors] are really not mad that our people are different from Christ. We're mad that they're different from us.

We somehow glorify error to the right like it's better than error to the left.

If you can order this message from Northland, it will be well worth the investment.