Fear and Trembling

Every person who is responsible to pick songs for corporate worship should read the essay that Justin Taylor quotes at his blog . I reprint Taylor’s quote below. From Carl Trueman, “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in The Wages of Spin (pp. 159-160): Perhaps . . . [the Western church] has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as little short of embarrassing. A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party—a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is—or at least should be—all about health, wealth, and happiness corrupted the content of our worship? . . . In the psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest ...

Craig Blomberg over at the Denver Seminary web page has an interesting article at the link below on the one statistic churches never seem to track: how many die in their faith. If we believe in the old-fashioned doctrine of perseverance of the saints, we know that only those who carry on to the end truly prove their salvation to be genuine. So how many converts leave the faith before they die? Those who do prove their salvation was not real in the first place. Denver Seminary Blog

Check out this link.

The study at this link should generate some conversation around the web.