Weekly Roundup: 2019.06.01
Denny Burk on whether churches should allow women to preach to men, Jason Seville on meaningful church membership, and John MacArthur on personal integrity; lastly, a quote by B.B. Warfield on becoming weary of God.
Resources
Should churches allow women to preach to men? | Denny Burk
The role of women has become a hot topic within the Evangelical church. Burk provides clarity and helpful analysis of the current events, especially within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and illuminates the Scriptures.
I have written about this issue numerous times in the past (e.g., here and here), so it is no secret where I stand on all this. Still, it is worth considering Kathy Keller’s challenge on this point. Is it really “injustice” and “disobedience” when churches do not allow women to teach or to lead men? This is a question worth considering because contemporary conversations are being pressed more and more in terms of justice.
Meaningful Membership & Shepherding the Saints | Jason Seville | 9Marks
This is just one of the many good articles from 9Marks’ new Journal edition, “Church Membership: Following the Lord Together”.
Let’s begin with a parable:
A man had a hundred sheep, and one of them had gone astray. As he sat out to leave the ninety-nine in search of the one he paused and thought for a moment. Wait, maybe I had ninety-nine to begin with. He turned back and went about his business. The End.
Pursue Integrity Relentlessly | John MacArthur | Ligonier Ministries
How high is the moral and ethical standard set by God’s law? Unimaginably high. Jesus equates it with God’s own perfection: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (v. 48).
That sets an unattainable standard, of course. But it is our duty to pursue integrity relentlessly nonetheless. Perfect ethical consistency is a vital aspect of that consummate goal — absolute Christlikeness — toward which every Christian should continually be striving (Phil. 3:12–14). No believer, therefore, should ever knowingly sacrifice his or her ethical integrity.
For more articles saved over the years, see my Evernote collection.
Quote
This quote comes from B. B. Warfield, as quoted by Paul David Tripp in his book Dangerous Calling.
We are frequently told, indeed, that the great danger of the theological student lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things. They may come to seem common to him because they are customary. As the average man breathes the air and basks in the sunshine without ever a thought that it is God in his goodness who makes his sun to rise on him, though he is evil, and sends rain to him, though he is unjust; so you may come to handle even the furniture of the sanctuary with never a thought above the gross earthly materials of which it is made. The words which tell you of God’s terrible majesty or of his glorious goodness may come to be mere words to you—Hebrew and Greek words, with etymologies, inflections and connections in sentences. The reasonings which established to you the mysteries of his saving activities may come to be to you mere logical paradigms, with premises and conclusions, fitly framed, no doubt, and triumphantly cogent, but with no further significant to you than their formal logical conclusiveness. God’s stately steppings in his redemptive processes may become to you a mere series of facts and history, curiously interplaying to the production of social and religious conditions and pointing mayhap to an issue which we may shrewdly conjecture: but much like other facts occurring in time and space which may come to your notice. It is your great danger. But it is your great danger only because it is your great privilege. Think of what your privilege is when your greatest danger is that the great things of religion may become common to you! Other men, oppressed by the hard conditions of life, sunk in the daily struggle for bread perhaps, distracted at any rate by the dreadful drag of the world upon them and the awful rush of the world’s work, find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider whether there be such things as God, and religion, and salvation from the sin that compasses them about and holds them captive. The very atmosphere of your life is these things; you breathe them in at every pore: they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God!
— Dangerous Calling, Paul David Tripp. Chapter 8: “Familiarity”. pp. 113–114.