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No matter how stringent one's "regulations" — "Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch" (Col. 2:21) — the sinful nature that resides in everyone's heart is untamable by self-effort alone.
This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.
Getting ready for Christ’s coming is a practice in humility.
In writing City of God, Augustine sought to demonstrate that the events of 410 were but a glimpse of all history.
The church does well to remind the world that God is unmasked, indeed, that God has unmasked himself in the person of Jesus.
Ashes and dust do not need the services of spiritual EMTs; we need a Second Adam from whom we regain life itself.
Death can make us feel like tourists or strangers traveling across the landscape of someone else’s life.
Duke is my dog-in-training; although, sometimes I suspect I am actually his person-in-training. Regardless, we have both been learning a lot.
Imagine a world in which it is always winter but never Christmas. Imagine a place where Deep Magic from the dawn of time requires the blood of the innocent be shed to save the guilty.
On that day the mourners were shocked to discover that behind the veneer of her bright smile lurked a fathomless darkness, whose depths she made manifest only when she despaired of life in this world.