Parchment & Pen Blog

One of the most discouraging (and blindsiding) things in life is to follow the Lord for some time, feel like you’re on the right track, be involved in the His work, and feel the definite guidance of the Holy Spirit…only to find yourself, as time passes, becoming a worse Christian. Sometimes we feel like we are going through sanctification in reverse. Our latter self seems more depraved and dispassionate than when we first picked up the Cross. Do you feel that way? Do you feel like you are a worse Christian now than you used to be?

Why do good Christians often go bad?

I write this post out of experience. So often I feel as if I am going backwards. So many times I have awoken, realizing I have less hope, faith, and love than I did the day before. It scares me. I know that “he who began a good work in me will perfect it” (Phil. 1:6), but why aren’t I being perfected? When I look back on my last twenty years as a believer, I don’t always see a progressive growth from worse to better, but a decline in the virtues that God is supposed to be developing within me. I remember John Piper once said, “When do I doubt God?  Not in tragedy, but when I see the slowness of my sanctification.” Not only is our sanctification often slow, but it sometimes goes the opposite direction.

Here is a list of ten issues that cause good Christians to go bad that are less obvious than the blatant sins we often blame for such a state.

1. Dried-up Passion

When we first begin to follow the Lord, life is new and exciting. We are going to do great things for the Lord. We can’t wait to see what is around the corner. Our passions are high and our commitment is unwavering. However, at some point down the road we find ourselves tiring and slowly replacing this passion for what we believe to be the new “reality.” The answers that we had at the beginning are not so simple. God’s hand is heavy and his movements at a crawl. We started the race sprinting, but now we are taking break after break – and we are not that far down the track! Our passion dries up and we begin to consider whether we need to run this race at all. We shuffle along, hands in our pockets, kicking up dust as we go.

Christ tells us that we can lose our first love: “But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place– unless you repent.” (Rev 2:4-5)

2. Entitlement for Sorrow

It is so easy to go through so many trials and troubles that we cut ourselves some slack. This is something I have done quite a bit over the last six years. Things have been so hard in my family (most of you know the stories). I held up great at the beginning, but at some point I began to feel sorry for myself. In doing so, I allowed myself to enter into self-destructive self-pity.

Unfortunately, this will often be the advice of others. “You’ve got to start thinking about yourself [insert your name]. After all, not many people have to go through what you have been through.” If we listen to this advice, we will quickly replace our spiritual life for one of paralyzing sorrow. And, even though this sorrow does not help anything, it is addictive and counter-productive to all we know.

The Lord tells us: “If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, then how can you compete with horses?” (Jer 12:5). There is the ever present reality that our pains and sufferings may very well get worse. We must be weary of advice that may come our way which says we are entitled to sorrow. We are entitled to joyful suffering for the sake of Christ. Continue Reading »

Sacraments [ 26:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Join Michael Patton, Tim Kimberley, JJ Seid and Sam Storms as they continue their series on Roman Catholicism by discussing the Sacraments.

One of the earliest signs of the healthy development of the mind of a child is that he or she starts responding to everything with a simple question: Why?  Every parent knows this and knows that it can drive you nuts, but it is a reassuring trademark of the kid’s normal intellectual growth.  To ask “why” is to solicit a reason for the truth of something. What begins in childhood is supposed to continue throughout the course of life. We believe things on account of other things, or in words, for reasons.

That’s not to say that every preference in every area needs to have an argument that supports it. In matters of artistic predilection or taste, no reasons are required other than, “I just like it.” Whatever kind of music sounds good to you, enjoy. Feel free to load up your device and belt it out at your leisure. You don’t really owe anybody a sophisticated explanation. You also don’t have to make a case for how and why certain foods taste better to you than others. They just do.

But what if I treat everything else this way? What if I take political stances, proclaim spiritual realities, assert opinions about history and offer declarations about moral principles – all “just because”?  After all, maybe those views are simply the ones I like. Does that suffice? Do I need reasons or can I just say that I believe those particular things, period?

I’ve been surprised time and again to run right up against this way of thinking in recent years. At first I was caught so off guard by it that I wasn’t sure what to say in response. It was so foreign to me that a blank stare was my only reaction. But I’ve been trying to learn just how I can begin to demonstrate how utterly wrong-headed it is for people to hold beliefs for no substantive reasons at all. So permit me here to say some things about it, starting with those who profess to be Christians who think along these lines, and then moving on to the larger context of society in general. Continue Reading »

As most of you know, it is hard for me to write an unbiased review about any superhero movie. Either I go in with too many expectations, get my hopes dashed, and kick dirt all the way home while calling for the coming of Christ…or I see the movie seventeen more times before I even considering sharing my thoughts with others. You must understand, there were only three career possibilities for me since the night I was conceived: pastor, country music singer, or superhero. In the interest of full disclosure, I almost chose the last.

Though my license tag says BATMAN3, Superman is my first love (he just does not have a cool car that I could be expected to name mine after, like Batman). Ever since I was six years old, when the first Superman came out, my imagination has been consumed with Kal-El’s greatness in a world that did not deserve such grace. After all, who can really do what Superman can? No one in the entire comic world, DC or Marvel, can compare. The legend of Superman has, at times, had to blush at his seeming perfection; through time, his creators have had to insert ways for this immortal to (possibly) fall. After all, when you have a guy who can displace entire planets, who is really going to serve as a legitimate foil for his powers? But the big screen has never seen a Superman who lets loose. The closest yet has come in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, where Superman finally breaks free from his cardboard box and punches Dark Side through an entire city. But even then, they held back the Man of Steel’s power to make it interesting.

Let me start with this: This is not your mom’s and dad’s Superman.

This is Superman in the raw. Now, don’t get bent out of shape, apart from a few incidentals here and there (and these will probably be spoiled by people in the comments who blast me for calling these “incidentals,” so don’t read them if you don’t want to know), the boy scout we all know and love is still there. But it is darker. It is not that Superman himself is darker, but this movie re-imagines Superman and reads between lines that often get left unexplored (except for those of us who watched Smallville). You enter into the struggle of Superman’s two sides at a deeper level than any previous movie. You may find yourself saying a silent prayer for Clark as he attempts to overcome the reality of his power and let bullies skate without witnessing his wrath.  Continue Reading »

John Shelby Spong’s newest book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, was released this week. For those unfamiliar with Spong, he is a retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, and the author of a string of notorious books such as Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1992), Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1999), A New Christianity for a New World (2002), and Jesus for the Non-Religious (2008). The recurring theme in these books, reflected in some of the titles, is that Christianity must stop being Christianity and become a mildly spiritual humanism. (Spong actually won the 1999 Humanist of the Year award.) Spong is a devotee of the liberal humanistic theology of Paul Tillich (1886-1965), a German-American theologian who argued that God was not a personal Creator but the ground of being, or being itself. This is a philosophically sophisticated way of saying that God does not exist, of having one’s God and eating It too. Spong has also written several books attacking specific traditional Christian beliefs and values, such as Living in Sin? (1990, against traditional Christian sexual values), Born of a Woman (1994, no virgin birth), Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (1995, no resurrection of Jesus), and Eternal Life: A New Vision (2010, no heaven or hell).

Spong claims, both in the book and in an article on Huffington Post promoting the book, that The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic is the result of an “intensive five-year-long study” of the Gospel of John and of Johannine scholarship. “I have now read almost every recognized major commentary on John’s gospel that is available in English from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries” (Fourth Gospel, 8). Unfortunately, it doesn’t show. Continue Reading »

There used to be a time when your loyalty to the Protestant cause was judged by how much you hated Catholics. But today, with all the ecumenical dialogue, the Manhattan Declarations, the ECT council, and the postmodern virtue of tolerance, people are much more willing to let bygones be bygones. “Maybe we overreacted” is the thought of many.

To the Catholics, Protestants are no longer anathema (which is pretty bad), but are “separated brethren” (which is not so bad).

Attitudes are changing, we could argue, for the better. But have the issues changed?

Four hundred years ago we had a “situation” in the church. We call it the “Great Reformation.” Catholics understand it as yet another rebellious schism. The first major division in the Christian church happened in 1054 when the Eastern church got fed up with the Pope and thumbed its nose at him (or something like that). The Great Reformation was the second. For Protestants, this was not only a reforming of the church, but a reclaiming of the Gospel, which had been obscured and overshadowed by the institutionalized church of the day.

While there were and are a lot of issues that divide Roman Catholics and Protestants, there are two which overshadow the rest: authority and justification. The issue of authority has been called the “formal” cause of the Reformation, while the issue of justification was the “material” cause. In this brief post I would like to focus on these two issues.

1. Authority: Where do we go for truth?

To the institutionalized church of the day (now known as the Roman Catholic Church), both Scripture (written tradition) and Tradition (unwritten tradition – notice the capital “T”) represented the one ”deposit of faith” that was handed down from the Apostles. The church, as represented by the Pope and the congregation of bishops, protected and guided by the Holy Spirit, could interpret both infallibly. Think of a three-legged stool. These three entities (Scripture, Tradition, and the Church) support the stool of ultimate authority for the church.

To the Protestants, this represented an abuse of authority. While the institutionalized church had authority, it did not have ultimate authority. While tradition (notice the lower case “t”) was very important and to be respected, it did not share equal authority with Scripture; rather, it served Scripture. Everything, including unwritten tradition, the councils, and the Pope, had to be tested by and submit to Scripture. Protestants repositioned both the church and tradition underneath Scripture. Continue Reading »

It’s been amazing to see such overwhelming support to kickstart Textual Criticism. This is the last hour to help us launch this and take a strong stand to win back the mind for Christ.

Never again will you be able to get a T-Shirt, the much-needed Textual Criticism course, a book from Dr. Wallace and full digital access for such an amazing low price.

For the next hour you can still get involved by clicking here.

We are so excited for the Church to finally have a well-produced, thorough AND accessible study of Textual Criticism!

Learn more, watch videos, see all the great prizes and be a part of it all by clicking here in the next hour…before it’s too late.

Excited to team up with you to disciple the Bride of Christ,
Credo House Team

Never again will you be able to get a T-Shirt, the much-needed Textual Criticism course, a book from Dr. Wallace and full digital access for such an amazing low price.

For the next six hours you can still get involved by clicking here.

We are so excited for the Church to finally have a well-produced, thorough AND accessible study of Textual Criticism!

Learn more, watch videos, see all the great prizes and be a part of it all by clicking here in the next 6 hours…before it’s too late.

Excited to team up with you to disciple the Bride of Christ,
Credo House Team