P. Andrew Sandlin's Podcasts, Preaching, and Lectures: Recent Episodes
P. Andrew Sandlin
Full-orbed biblical Reformational truth by the founder and president of the Center for Cultural Leadership.
How a handful of German intellectuals between the World Wars conspired to topple the Christian culture of the West — and how they succeeded.
Jesus Christ has all the Crown Rights over every aspect of our lives, because he purchased us with his own blood.
We are his bondslaves.
Most modern Christians, including pastors and theologians, navigate from redemption out into the world and life.
Creational Christianity begins its navigation elsewhere, and earlier.
For this reason, it ends up at a very different —and superior — destination.
Biblical preachers were exemplary preachers: again and again they invoked biblical examples. This message points to nine biblical figures as examples either to follow or to avoid. These include short prayers, imprecatory prayers, impromptu prayers, intercessory prayers, and many more.
Q & A at the end.
Everything else is expendable for the kingdom, and the King rules not only our own lives, but also the arts, science, economics, politics, education – every area of life
The evils of both culture and church today are as much epistemic as anything else: where do we find a reliable word of revelation?
We’ve turned away from God‘s revelation to competing revelations, and have thereby turned to darkness, destruction, and damnation.
Politics is not neutral. Politics in the Bible is not neutral. And politics in the church should not — and in fact cannot — be neutral.
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The Christian Faith is built on a crusade — waged God’s way, by the power of the Spirit.
We all know (or should know) about Christ’s sovereignty in his church, but its actual meaning should pierce our heart.
Christians’ prayer and vision are often lackluster because they lack a grasp of the Lord in his present mode of victorious existence.
This is the epistemic foundation of the Christian Faith, and there is no other. Trust the Bible with the heart of a child.
A hard-hitting, whirlwind summary of the path of intellectual apostasy in the church and culture.
Until we settle the absolute cosmic Lordship of Jesus Christ in our individual lives, families, churches, and all of society, we’ll be tinkering around the edges of the world‘s great problems. “Jesus Is Lord” is the church’s first and the Bible’s great foundational creed.
From ReformCon25: Biblical Masculinity repudiates both Leftist egalitarianism and alt-right paganism, including “Reformed” paganism.
Quit trying to be a man. Be God’s man.
Recovering creational norms and returning to the Cross of Jesus Christ will solve almost any marriage problem.
The gospel is all about what God in Christ has done, is doing, and will do in restoring and enhancing everything that was lost in the Garden of Eden. The final gospel success is the final resurrection of man and the present heavens and earth.
While liberals ordinarily overemphasize the “already” of the already/not yet, conservatives tend to overstress the “not yet.”
A pox on both their houses.
The Bible teaches that salvation is entirely by grace, and not by works, and equally that there can be no salvation without works. This is an apparent, not an actual, contradiction.
God deals with nations as nations, God blesses nations that adhere to biblical law, and God judges nations that turn their back on God and his written word.
The most Christian political philosophy in the current philosophical Overton Window is classical liberalism. But Progressivism (Democratic Party) and the New Right (the Republican Party) are squeezing it out.
“Our good God, our ever-flowing God, our God of Yes and Amen, has always been able to promise far more than we are able to believe. God loves to bury our finite faith under an avalanche of promises and gifts.”
We cannot grasp the Christian worldview as we should if we do not understand the covenant and the kingdom.
The Christian Faith is deeply anti-antinomian. This is a brief elaboration on the Bible’s teaching concerning God‘s law in creation, his law in Moses, and his law in the new covenant.
Every movement away from the Bible is a movement toward an alien, competing word, and that word always leads to darkness, chaos, and damnation.
The Christian worldview is founded the creational worldview. To confuse this sequence is to twist both Christianity and creation.
The United States is the most spectacularly valuable political experiment in world history – because it was founded on Christian principles.
Fundamentalism, modernism, scholasticism, and postmodernism are bad ways of interpreting the Bible.
The canonical or covenantal or worldview-ish way is the only right way.
A brief, direct, easy-to-understand explanation of one of the most harmful ways of thinking in the modern church.
A recognition of “the near impossibility of simple refutations” might lead to a mutual laying down of arms in the acrimonious sacrament wars of paedobaptists (and paedocommunionists) versus credobaptists (and credocommunionists).
If you’re discouraged and distraught over the surrounding depraved culture or persistent, personal difficulties, you might be helped by this bold, full-throated, biblical defense postmillenialism.
No matter how dire our situation, Jesus Christ is our utterly impregnable hope, and to rely on anyone or anything else is an insecure confidence.
We are saved by Christ and his redemptive work alone, but our salvation inevitably produces godly works. None who live after salvation will enjoy eternal life if they lack good works. We are justified by a working faith.
To know God’s calling in your life, immerse yourself in the manual of his cosmic operating system.
What is a Christian worldview, and what is its primary competitor in the Western world today?
The protology and eschatology of the Bible include promises of the advancement and victory of Christ‘s kingdom before the final, perfected eternal state. We must live as victorious people — because we are.
The Bible festers with God’s promises to his people, and living consistently in those promises means living in consistent hope and victory.
Creation is the backdrop and prerequisite of our Lord’s redemptive work, and to bypass creation is eventually to overturn the gospel.
The optimal time to trust Christ and serve God is childhood and youth, not middle and old age. God‘s preventive grace is greater than his recovering and grace, and the apex testimony of God‘s work in the world is children and young people serving him with unremitting zeal.
Salvation is much bigger than most Christians suppose. Unless we see salvation (as Paul does in Ephesians) in its personal, corporate, and cosmic dimensions, our view will be impoverished.
To live in an atmosphere of prayers to live in constant expectation for God to do both small and mighty things. To live in this atmosphere of prayer is to live a transformed, victorious life.
The family is a part of the creational OS. The blinding assaults against it in postmodern culture (socially constructed sexuality, homosexuality, gender reassignment surgery, and so on) are assaults on reality itself.
Widespread biblical law presupposes a Christian culture and society, and that culture and society will inevitably lead to biblical law.
Satan attempts to replace God’s very good created world with his diabolical alt-world. The goal of aggressive Christianity is to destabilize, delegitimize, and decimate his world.
The biblical God is often consumed by zeal, and his holy jealousy fuels his zeal, which burns against the ungodly and rescues his people.
This talk to Christian high school students at the Worldview Leadership Academy is the simplest, most basic presentation I’ve ever given of the dominant, secular elite vision of our time.
Behind the Marxism distinctive to our time is the towering shadow of Hegel and his dialectical view of reality.
Want to be liberated from the intellectual tyranny of the present? Know the worldviews that created our postmodern world.
The utopian revolutionaries are savaging every last residue of Christian culture, and the church’s double-decker Christianity has abetted the savagery.
It’s not possible to properly grasp biblical
worldview or theology without grasping covenant and kingdom.
The ascended Lord is presently ruler of the nations, trampling down his enemies by Spirit, gospel and law, and our prayer, evangelism, and life should aggressively reflect this cosmic reign of our Lord.
Satan offers man an alternative reality to God’s good created world, but God in Christ is de-privileging, deconstructing, and demolishing that world.
Knowing God’s will for our lives is both easier and harder than we think: easier because there’s nothing mystical or mysterious about it, harder because it commits us to go against our apostate world at every point.
There are two valid, indispensable modes of practicing our faith, but in our times, one is preferable. Do not bypass normative Christianity for extraordinary Christianity.
Seeking first the kingdom of God presupposes knowing what it is: God’s rule in the earth. To seek first his kingdom is to seek to extend his righteous rule everywhere.
If left free to flourish, Christianity always produces a Christian society. Christianity is not inherently anti-cultural; it is only anti-anti-Christian cultural.
One of the most pernicious myths of the church is that children must grow up before they can be zealots for Jesus Christ. The most productive Christians in history were following the Lord before they can remember.
Contemporary evangelicalism fosters a worldview that marginalizes and attempts to escape from creation. It’s a defeatist worldview.
God plays favorites. He pours out his favor on those who love, trust, and obey him. Zealous Christians ARE better than everybody else.
The Al Davis School of Eschatology — “Just Win, Baby.” Jesus is the present ruling king, and despite all the machinations of hell, he’s beating down evil and will eventually destroy it. Therefore, live in joy and hope and optimism.
No sacrifice is too great for the Kingdom, but the Kingdom cannot be limited to a personal devotional hobby.
God loves to bury His people beneath an avalanche of promises. It’s remarkable how our orthodoxy tends to extend to everything except trusting his promises.
The Bible does not hold up the saints of those eras as enjoying more successful prayer lives than ours.
Alien worldviews in the church have rendered it impotent against an unbelieving cultural onslaught.
All of those justified in Jesus Christ are eternally secure, but all who abandon the Faith are without hope and destined to eternal judgment.
No single human factor contributes more to the advance of Christ’s kingdom than mighty, faith-drenched, persevering prayer.
Every generation historically claims it lives in unprecedented times, but certain aspects of our times are in fact objectively unprecedented, and they are unprecedentedly evil as a result of one great philosophical twist and one great ecclesial heresy. The Christian calling is to overturn these ideational errors, restore the Faith, and take back the West for Jesus Christ.
Western civilization and its multitudinous blessings are unthinkable apart from Christendom. As the West abandons Christianity, it cuts itself off from the societal lifeblood that makes it possible. It’s a form of cultural suicide.
God’s grace is not individualistically soteriological. He saves only those who trust in His Son, but His grace is so powerful and pervasive that it gradually transforms all of culture and life. We must be Genesis 1-2 Christians, not Genesis 3 Christians.
The ontic Trinity is not a hierarchy, and the Holy Spirit is every bit as great as the Father and Son. Subordinating his greatness is both heretical and blasphemous.
Positing good works as a means of justification is apostate moralism. Refusing to posit good works as an inescapable fruit of justification is apostate antinomianism.
Forgiveness rarely restores us to the previous glory, and nothing short of a white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ will suffice to protect us from evil.
The oldest, most pernicious, and most persistent Christian heresy has now become the underlying heresy of our culture. Expressive individualism, same-sex “marriage,” “transgenderism,” and Cultural Marxism are all deeply Gnostic.
Why is the church great? Because it is (1) the custodian of orthodoxy, (2) the community of memory, (3) God’s prized possession, and (4) God’s agency for victory in history.
The old, classical Marxism was about coercive economic equality. The new cultural Marxism is about coercive (un)ethical equality. And Critical Race Theory is about coercive racial inequality, a new form of dangerous racism.
The failure of today’s church is principally a failure of leadership. The cure: mighty men of God, bold, sacrificial, devout, exemplary, Bible-drenched, prayer-addicted, church-loving.
Jesus Christ is great for many, many reasons. Here are two of them: he is the mediator of creation, and exercises his Lordship over all the cosmos. Second, he loves righteousness and hates lawlessness.
This is the Lord that we serve, and his greatness in these matters and all others is incomparable.
The modern conservative church has been plagued by pessimistic, unbelieving, and anorexic eschatology. The biblical hope of a glorious future on the earth should animate all we do.
The Marxist gospel is good news to lazy, irresponsible, envious rebels. It must be demolished by the biblical Gospel.
The Bible does not so much hold up prayer as great, but answered prayer. The failure of church and Christianity in culture, and the failures of our lives, are largely due to our lack of bold, uncompromising, fervent prayer based on the promises of the Word of God.
The extent to which Western civilization has been great is the extent to which it is been Christian. In abandoning Christianity, we are abandoning our greatness. Our only hope is a restoration of Christianity, not merely as an individual existential experience, but also, and more fully, as a great cultural force.
There is no teaching of the word of God more important than God’s love — several as important as, but none more important than.
A major design of the gospel of Jesus Christ is to create an antithesis between righteousness and unrighteousness and to disestablish wickedness in the world.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central truth of the Christian Faith, and it is the heart of biblical hope and eschatology.
God is a God of rules. This truth should bring us great comfort. If it annoys us, and if we think it undermines God’s grace, we are severely mistaken. Gods grace depends on his rules.
Several decades ago a Canadian schoolteacher Everett Storms read the Bible through 27 times specifically counting God’s promises. The number he came up with is 7,487. We might dis‐ pute that number, but of this there must be no doubt: you can find thousands of God’s promises in the Bible. If you read nothing but divine promises in the Bible, you would be occupied for a very long time. If you removed the promises from the Bible, you would no longer have a Bible.
If we’re true Christians, and living in sin, we’re like zombies: the living dead; we’re alive, but carrying around the residue of the defeat of death every‐ where we go.
Paul says this is no way to live. This is not the Christian life.
Biblical faith requires a radical antithesis between Christians and non-Christians. We must stand squarely against today’s hegemonic Leftism, discriminatory Cultural Marxism, radical sexual antinomianism, and rabid hate.
A podcast for young adults (12-19) warning of good things that too easily become bad things.
An explanation of the dominant worldview of our contemporary cultural elites. The intellectual roots of “social justice,” “multiculturalism,” “cisgendering,” “toxic masculinity,” “white privilege,” “heteronormativity,” “trigger warnings,” “identity politics,” and “intersectionality.”
All religions, including (perhaps especially) the regnant secular religion, are exclusive. They simply exclude different things. Christianity alone fosters political liberty and it alone creates human flourishing. To abandon Christianity is to invite political tyranny and individual despair.
It’s stupefying that God requires we search out and ponder and relish and express gratitude for His works, while this topic is almost never expounded or even mentioned today. This talk highlights several leading divine works and shows how we can correct our time’s dangerous omission.
The Christian Faith is inherently public, and if it’s merely private, it’s not genuinely Christian. Gnosticism, ecclesiasticization, the Radical Reformation, Pietism, Revivalism, and Darbyism — all these have engendered a distorted, privatized Christianity.
Ours is a world awash in Modernity and Postmodernity. They have dismantled Christian culture — from Baudelaire to Derrida, Stravinsky to Queen, Joyce to Lyotard. Modernism eats itself alive as Postmodernism. The only cure is a return to reality — creation ... the Triune God.
We should be shaken by the tumult in world, because God is doing the shaking. He is very loudly shaking away the evil, because it is not his will to give peace to a rebellious world. Just as he shook and pulverized apostate Judaism to make way for the true Jewish church (Christianity), so he is shaking and pulverizing the apostate gentiles to make way for his comprehensive kingdom. We should rejoice in his earth-shaking victory.
The words “science” and “religion” are often depicted as irreconcilable opposites. But what is the worldview behind that perspective? Is it a valid representation of reality? How do we respond to the claim that religion and science should stay in their own lanes? Is Darwinism a reasonable explanation of the origin of the universe and the development of life on earth?
An introduction to the philosophy underlying Cultural Marxism, the dominant ethos on virtually every non-Christian (and many a Christian) campus in North America. It is contra-biblical and must be crushed at all costs.
Modern science was launched almost exclusively by Christians and on distinctly Christian premises. In fact, modern science would’ve been impossible apart from a Christian worldview. Darwinism, by contrast, is an atheist explanation of the physical world that dehumanizes man and trashes creation.
Conventionally conservative groups like the Southern Baptist Convention have tried to champion Critical Theory, the analytical tool of Cultural Marxism devised by the Frankfurt School of the Weimar Republic and transplanted to the United States by men like John Dewey. This podcast is a simplified explanation of Critical Theory and a brief critique, showing that it is contra-biblical, self-refuting, and culturally destructive. To attempt to maintain it as a critical tool “within a Christian context” is to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what it actually is.
The elite social vision of our time has infested nearly every aspect of our society — including the church. And it is utterly poisonous.
Secularists and pagans say that Christianity is the blight of the Western world. All to the contrary: all of the great blessings they take for granted are bequeath by Jesus Christ, Christianity, and Christendom.
The Bible isn’t just a book for church and theology. It’s a book designed to orient all of our lives and culture. A narrow theology has led us to a narrow faith. And failure.
Why are Christians so defeated in their individual lives, families, churches, and culture? Often because our prayers are paltry, anorexic, and unbelieving. When we get serious about prayer, God is serious about answering.
Christians today are under increasing persecution internationally, including in the United States, but this is not an unprecedented development. What is it about Christianity that makes it such a frequent target of persecution?
Satan’s end game is not to make all moral choices equally acceptable but to make immorality alone acceptable.
Almost all great revival and reformation begins with a revival and reformation of prayer, great, persevering prayer, not prayer that mildly accepts the status quo as the will of God or hides behind the eternal decrees. If you want great Reformation, start praying.
Our time suffers from an abysmal ignorance about God’s law. This talk summarizes what the Bible teaches.
Discussing three identifiable groups within the present evangelical controversy surrounding “social justice.”
If you’re enduring great trails and hardship just now, never assume that God is the author, and always assume that he delights to deliver his people who cry out to him in faith. Our God is a good God, and he wants only what’s best for us.
Jesus Christ is mediator of creation, not just redemption, and he is vitally interested in material creation: the visible church, clothing, architecture, and physical healing.
The Christian goal must be to de-normalize the current godless plausibility structure and re-normalize the holy plausibility structure. Q & A about supporting Donald Trump, the genetic predisposition to homosexuality, secular presuppositions in children’s movies, and the logical consequences of a homosexual plausibility structure.
There can be no “Christian liberals,” and conservatives cannot long preserve their position if they abandon the Faith. Libertarianism, constitutionalism, and paleo-conservatism will not sustain conservatism. Christ alone sustains politics.
Gnosticism is the most dangerous and recurrent heresy in Christian history. It increasingly corrupts both modern church and culture. The cure is Creational Christianity, which has been tragically missing in the modern church.
Two mutually irreconcilable philosophies and and worldviews were on graphic and dramatic display last Thursday. One was godly. One was ungodly.
Why are recently conservative evangelicals fallling for the “social justice” of Cultural Marxism? Because grace, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
Direct, unapologetic treatment of controversial topics: Radical sexual autonomy (springing from Enlightenement, Romanticism, and existentialism) versus biblical covenantalism. Homosexualization versus sexual fidelity. Egalitarianism versus Complementarianism. “Sexual identity” (both heterosexual and homosexual) versus male or female. And the normalization of singlehood and celebacy versus the creational norm of fruitful marriage.
The gospel is calculated to create an antithesis between good and evil and gradually purge evil by the blood and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Soft-pedaling righteous living is an assault on the gospel.
Science is not only not in conflict with Christianity. Apart from Christianity, there can be no science.
Classical Marxism (dialectical materialism and state socialism) and Cultural Marxism (human liberation and identity politics) are the greatest ideological threats to Christian culture.
P. Andrew Sandlin and Jeffery J. Ventrella on libertarianism, biblical and natural law, the LGBT agenda, marriage as a prepolitical and preecclesiastical institution, separation of church and state, and much else.
The worship of man in the culture and church is the new idolatry standing under God’s judgment.
Man’s God-appointed work in the world is the Cultural Mandate. God’s self-appointed work in the world is his Kingdom. Understanding these foundational truths is fundamental to the Christian life.
Are the Jews God's chosen people? What about the nation of Israel? Who are God's elect?
Abraham's faith is a model for every other father,and the covenant promises of nearness to the Triune God, godly descendants, and dominion in the earth are our covenant promises, too, in Jesus Christ.
Salvation is found in the true Seed of Abraham, whose faith we fathers should follow in leading our families.
Christians often so mystify God's will that it becomes nearly unknowable. This message tells you how to ascertain God's will for your life.
The Bible alone will solve this problem: mental health therapy, gun control, and naive views of human nature will not.
A residue of the ancient evil heresy survives today in a church embarrassed by or opposed to God's created order.
If globalism means universal (revelatory) ethical standards and the universal scope of the gospel, its right. If it means refusing to make judgments about cultures, it's wrong.
The glaring deficiencies of our wobbly church and apostate culture correspond strikingly to the distinctive contributions of Puritan Christianity. A new Puritan reformation would go along way toward remedying the deep deficiencies in church and culture.
The great Reformation dictum is not merely a slogan or a proposition. It is a way of living. And without it we cannot be biblical Christians.
If we won't crusade against Satan and sin in all areas of life, we will lose the Christian Faith.
Genesis 1 and 2 were written not simply to satisfy our curiosity about how the universe began, but also to lay out God's "operating system" for his cosmos. Today, all seven of the creational norms revealed in Genesis are under severe attack. The calling of Christians is to urge the world — and the church — to return to creational sanity.
Allowing the truths of creation revealed in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 to shape and reshape our thinking and living is an imperative in today's contra-creational world. Here are ways to do that.
By stressing redemption to the relative neglect of creation, evangelicalism contributed to the present climate of sexual chaos. Only by a return to the sequence of the Bible's story line can we begin properly to combat that modern autonomy.
The first and most rapacious Christian heresy survives in churches that preach theologies of escape and a culture that ravages God's creational norms to fulfill its depraved dreams of utter autonomy.
As God-ordained spheres, the family, state and church each has unique duties and unique limitations. Each must stay within its ordained role.
Christianity is built on a crusade, and you can't preserve a position without crusading for it.
It's not enough to avoid the evil surrounding us. God calls us to expose and reprove it.
Fake News is a natural and anticipated consequence of preferring to live in Satan's alt-world intentionally severed from reality.
The Health and Wealth Heresy is rivaled today by the Sick and Poor Heresy, the spuriously pious idea that robs God of his glory and tramples his promises by assuming that illness and poverty are the expected common lot of his faithful, world-conquering saints, and that we should never pray in faith, expecting deliverance.
Christianity was never intended to be limited to "quiet time" or the church or personal evangelism. The vastly successful manmade medieval and Enlightenment project of dividing life into what Francis A. Schaeffer termed the lower story of "the real world" — education, logic, science, law, politics, the arts, economics, for example — and the separate upper story of Christianity is the utter denial of biblical faith.
Since the gifts and calling of the sovereign God are irrevocable, those who have been devoted to God as children or youths cannot easily escape his loving clutches. This is a warning to rebellious children, and a comfort to godly parents.
Christian intellectuals are a great gift to the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, but intellectual snobs are a blight on the Lord's name.
The greatest confidence we can have in prayer is not that we are praying successfully but that our Lord is praying successfully for us.
P. Andrew Sandlin discusses with his sons Richard (academic) and Ben (GIS specialist) the current political climate. Lighter and more humorous episode.
In times of great trial and vexation and pain and death, do not ask only, "Where was God in all this?" Ask also, "Where was Satan in all this?" God has chosen not to eliminate evil within history, but to defeat it by his Son.
God hates self-righteousness, but he loves righteousness. In an age that excuses unrighteousness by appeal to grace, never apologize for being righteous.
There can be no Christian Faith without the so-called Old Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures are the foundation of the so-called New Testament church.
Classical liberalism, libertarian Marxism, and nativist populism are vying for the Democrat and Republican parties. One of the three philosophies will be left out in partisan the cold.
We won't make America great again until we know what made America great in the first place.
We live in a cosmic war zone. If we do not allow this fact a prominent place in our spiritual calculation, we will play right into Satan's hands.
If you what to know what Christian culture is, why we need it, and how to create it, listen to this.
If you want to change your life, family, church, and nation, eliciting God's approval and reformation and revival, pray like Daniel.
The overarching social vision of the West, embraced by nearly all of its elites, springs from the revisionist Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. It explicitly advocates the destruction of Christian culture and its replacement with egalitarian culture — leveling all moral hierarchies except the privileged hierarchy of state-enforced secularism and/or paganism.
The life-giving sexual worldview of the Bible versus the death-dealing sexual worldview of modernity. They are antithetical.
Noah was favored by God because he walked with God, he trusted God, and he obeyed God. God did not favor Noah because he was like the ungodly world, but precisely because he was different. Sons and daughters of the Reformation must learn: God blesses obedience.
Christianity shaped Western society to such a degree that it's impossible to understand it without the Faith, which imparted our greatest cultural blessings. Ours is not a post-Christian world. It is a post-Christendom world. That's what we must revive.
Beware of complicating the biblical picture of obedience. Obedience isn't always easy, but it's never hard to understand.
While there are reasons for pessimism in our present cultural climate, realism demands optimism.
The Christian's goal, by the power of the Spirit, is to destabilize, de-legitimize, and deconstruct the abnormal world and reassert the normal world.
As long as you accept the world as it is, you'll never be a mighty man or woman of prayer. Godly prayer warriors never assume that the status quo in a sinful world is the will of God. They pray to change it.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is God's good news calculated to overwhelm the world in very public ways. It is not simply a plan to "go to heaven" but to redeem the earth. A lecture delivered to Christian Concern in London, England.
Two objectives of consistently reasoning rebels are to (a) create an entire conceptual world in competition with the real (God's) world and (2) intimidate Christians into thinking that the sinners' fake world is the real world.
God is jealous, and he won't allow humans to share their submission to his authority, their affection to him, and the world's allegiance to him.
Christians must abandon their spiritual somnolence and dead orthodoxy and rouse themselves to hold onto God if they are to expect any church or cultural reformation.
Crucial to the Christian worldview is common grace, God's kindness toward and gifts to unbelievers, and a critical means of preserving continuity in history to expand his Kingdom.
Two mostly competing views of redemption have emerged among conservatives. The one we embrace shapes our entire outlook on life and eternity.
Pietism, Apocalypticism, and Retreatism — these are bad church ideas that are responsible for much of the political apostasy baptizing our present society.
A wide-ranging interview by Allison Burr from "Cultivating the Kingdom" on the meaning of the Gospel, the role of Christian education, the Christianity of the American Founders, the philosophical "inward turn" of existentialism, expectation in prayer, and much, much more.
Gospel ministry is not chiefly about redeeming sinners for heaven but redeeming a sinful world in all of its dimensions. The best gospel ministers (in pulpit, classroom, auto repair shop, software lab, art house, state house, investment house) are those who practice this world-redeeming gospel.
Conservative Christianity is now paying a heavy price for the underdeveloped gospel it has preached for the last few generations. The cosmological gospel of Jesus Christ designed to reorient an entire sinful cosmos is the robust gospel that can — and will — reverse our present cultural apostasy.
If you understand God's providence, you will be filled with comfort even in the most dire circumstances — God is not far off. He's constantly "meddling" in His world.
We often hear today that the exhortation "Quit sinning" is a Pharisaic, grace-less moralism. It is nothing of the kind. The critics are often simply influenced by the antinomian temper of our times.
Our apostate times are hazardous for single young adults. God's Word shows them how to avoid the hazards.
The secular plausibility structure and its implementation as both the sexual revolution and economic rigging have created a sin-sick culture in the West that only a new Christian culture can heal. Christian culture reflects confident truth in an age of chaotic relativism, offers liberating redemption in a time of enslaving depravity, and inspires joyous hope amid an environment of cynical despair.
Christian culture in Europe, Russia and North America was ruined by many factors, but one of the most destructive was the Kantian "flight to the interior," which abandoned vast stretches of "public" life to anti-Christian forces. A paradigm for the reversal of this ruin can be found in the neo-Reformational paradigm of Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, Herman Dooyeweerd , and Cornelius Van Til. All of life must be redeemed by recourse to God's written Word.
Christian Culture is rooted in the creation order and in ancient Israel. It sprouted in the Constantinian Edict of Milan and flowered in Byzantium and in medieval Europe. It blossomed in the Protestant Reformation. Not to know THIS culture is to be ignorant of vast stretches of Western civilization and to be impotent in confronting our present apostate culture.
We have every reason to be pessimistic about Western man's capacity to employ technology to dehumanize culture, realistic about the historical evidence that cultural evil is routinely overturned, and optimistic about God's promises that Jesus Christ will create a global godly culture in his Father's good time.
The role of shame in fostering obedience and how God prefers a heart for hi to flawless procedural obedience.
We live amid a youthful generation marked by folly, but God has the solution to that problem.
The church hasn't "replaced" Israel, but neither is God operating two plans. God has one plan, and one people.
Christians are righteous judicially and experientially — and we need both kinds of righteousness.