On the heels of Father's Day, Dr. Albert Mohler offers some good insight on the importance of fathers. Mohler cites four findings from an American Values report from Dr. Bradford Wilcox: 1. Children living with their fathers in an intact, married home are almost 50 percent less likely to be sexually abused than children living in a single-parent home. 2. Boys who grow up with their fathers in an intact, married home are 50 percent less likely to end up in prison as young adults than children living in a single-parent or step-family. 3. Girls who grow up apart from their fathers typically … [Read more...] about Albert Mohler and Bradford Wilcox on Fathers
Archives for 2007
Prominent Southern Baptist Church Elects a Female Senior Pastor
Julie Pennington-Russell, a married mother of two, was voted on Sunday (June 17, 2007) to become senior pastor of 2,700-member First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga. She will begin her ministry with First Baptist on Aug. 19. Pennington-Russell, 46, has been serving as the senior pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, Texas since 1998. She claims that Calvary was the first Baptist church in Texas to call a woman as a senior pastor. The Southern Baptist Convention's current Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) – the denomination's confession of faith – adopted and revised in 2000, limits the … [Read more...] about Prominent Southern Baptist Church Elects a Female Senior Pastor
Desiring God Book Sale — $5 a book!
Desiring God announces a two-day sale: "Every book in our store will be $5 on June 27-28, Wednesday and Thursday next week." What a deal! … [Read more...] about Desiring God Book Sale — $5 a book!
Nine Marks Blog
Mark Dever and the Nine Marks guys have started a blog called Church Matters (which reminds me of Bob Kauflin's blog, Worship Matters). Mark announces: "I'm going to try to kick this off over the next couple of weeks by doing a brief series of 10 influences that I think God has used to bring about the current resurgence of reformed theology among the young. Stay tuned!!" It should be good. Related: Christianity Today story (September 2006) on the same theme. … [Read more...] about Nine Marks Blog
Law and Gospel – Part III
Sorry for the week-long absence of posts. I was out of town, and it was logistically difficult to get enough Internet time to add posts. But we return to our series on law-gospel issues, addressing the second question from my Romans 9:30-10:13 paper. 2. According to Romans 9:31-33 and 10:2-3, what was Israel’s problem? The first option is that Israel’s problem is not vertical (i.e., a legalistic pursuit of law-keeping to earn right standing before God) but rather horizontal. Dunn suggests that the Jews “confused the law and the righteousness it speaks of with works like circumcision which … [Read more...] about Law and Gospel – Part III
Law and Gospel – Part II
Continuing this series from the last post, here is my response to the first question (I have footnotes in the paper that do not transfer into this post): 1. What does it mean that the Gentiles have attained righteousness (Rom. 9:30)? Some think that “attained righteousness” means that the Gentiles gained entrance into the covenant community of God by faith in Jesus the Messiah and apart from the distinctively Jewish works such as circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath. The emphasis is not on how individual sinners are made right with a holy God but rather on how the locus of God’s covenant … [Read more...] about Law and Gospel – Part II