Liam Goligher is pastor of Duke Street Church in Surrey, UK, and he is a solid British preacher. His two messages on the Lord’s Prayer were very good. Unfortunately the church is revamping it’s website and audio archive. The old one is still active but will soon be defunct.
Adrian Warnock has a 4 part interview of Liam plus a video interview:
The audio page for the church is here.
A website has been launched to provide resources and audio for the great preacher Eric Alexander. There’s a fair bit of audio available now, and it will continue to grow as the site creators convert and load new material. This will be a fabulous resource for expositors and lovers of expositional preaching.
A few words about wise commenting.
Comments are a great tool. On one hand they can provide encouragement and new information, but on the other hand they can be greatly misused. I must say I’m fortunate because I only have a small fraction of the commenting problems that many other blogs are overrun with. Yet, because FBH links to so many preaching personalities, I see a fair share of comments from people who have axes to grind or hamstrung hobby horses to parade.
I don’t want to repeat what other posts have said so well, such as Nathan Busenitz articles The Blog in Our Eyes at Pulpit Magazine. But I do have 10 specific things to say about comments.
Before you comment on any blog consider these points:
1.) Your comment isn’t going to change Christendom, or the world for that matter. If that’s your goal, save your time and redirect your energies elsewhere. Commentdom will not be your arena for success.
2.) If you fancy yourself as a modern day Martin Luther with 95 theses of protest to post, let me affirm to you that you’re dead wrong. If your comment has more than 5 points then it no longer qualifies as a comment. Keep it out of the comment box. Start your own blog and post your thesis there. Send yourself comments if that makes you happy. I’m a strict 5 point Commentist.
3.) Check to see if the blog has guidelines for commenting. Many blogs have published guidelines that they would like you to follow (Faith by Hearing has one on every page). Look for guidelines before you comment. You just might save yourself some time.
4.) The word ‘comment’ doesn’t equal ‘debate.’ Take some time to get to know a blog before you comment. It might not be a blog that is interested in debate. Not all blogs are. Don’t assume your contrary point of view will be valued…or read, for that matter. Take your fight where it’s welcome.
5.) If you have to copy-paste your comment from Microsoft Word then make your own blog to post your opinions. I would love for someone to program a comment box that doesn’t allow copy-pasting. One comment I found this week calculated to almost 12,000 words (do you really think I even considered reading it, pal?). And the copy-pasters often place numerous copies of the same exact comment on every post that is tagged with the same preacher. One is enough, already.
6.) If you are maligning someones character, just stop. Credibility does not ooze from a comment box. Aside from the fact that it’s a form of character assassination, your comment will carry absolutely no weight. Nobody in their right mind is going to lower their estimation of a good preacher because JR Anonymous wrote something negative about him in a comment box. Think about it!
7.) Don’t be inflammatory. Give yourself some distance from the subject before you draw the sword. If your comment is really that important then it will be important for you to remember 2 days from now. If not, you will forget it and spare us your divine wisdom. The world doesn’t need another swashbuckling ‘commentador’ to skewer the ‘foolish’ Christians.
8.) If you do have a viable disagreement, consider first bringing the issue to that man directly. Make a phone call. Send an email. Write a letter. If this is not appropriate, then support your point with real meat and avoid hearsay. Stick to the issue and be as brief as possible. No preacher is perfect. But with all wisdom, treat the matter as Paul outlined in 1 Timothy 5 bringing an accusation against an elder — you approach it with humility, wisdom and great care.
9.) If your comment is an argument and has an “us” against “them” flavor, rethink it. It’s very easy to oversimplify someone’s opinion or perspective, which then leads us to making assumptions that are far from a fair representation. This would be a straw dog in the end.
10.) Stick to the relevant topic of the post. Don’t use your comment as a platform to ride your hobby horse into town. We have the King James-only horse, the Sabbath-observance horse, the Baptism horses, the ‘Jesus-didn’t-die-on-Friday’ horse, the Genesis-Creation fill-in-the-blank horses, the Hymns-only horse, the Prophecy/Millennial horses, and I could go on and on ad nauseum.
For those of you who have your own blogs and allow comments, I have a word of advice: Do not allow comments to be automatically posted if you are able. You don’t owe everyone the right to post their viewpoint on your blog. Many simply have no edifying quality to them at all, are filled with discouragement and often give the world cause the blaspheme Christians and their God. In the end your faithful readers suffer. Bad comments are almost as insidious as bad blog writing, and the internet is so congested with garbage, why add bad comments to it?
Let’s hope the future holds an age of responsible comments.
Christ United Reformed Church has posted a number of Michael Horton’s Adult Bible Classes. The different classes include:
An Introduction to Systematic Theology
Six Major Arguments in Romans
Our Worship
Christ & Culture
God & Suffering
Mark Dever and Al Mohler got together on Al’s radio show to talk about a wide variety of issues. First and foremost, they talked about how preaching is sorely lacking in the church today, which brings awesome implications if you consider Martin Luther’s statement that a church isn’t a church unless the preaching of the Word is there. People are converted and fill these churches, but they are starved.
Mohler makes the powerful observation that good preaching reaches into the deep recesses of the heart where only the Holy Spirit can go. A good church fundamentally must be a preaching church.
The questions they field from callers and emails are:
Wayne Grudem tackles the gamut of spiritual giftedness, taking specific classes to focus on the gift of tongues, healing, and prophecy (sometimes inaccurately called a word of knowledge).
Wayne does a gracious job of providing a balance of perspectives. He is not a cessationist, but he does have some helpful controlling ideas that should be true of these gifts and their use. I found this to be a very helpful series of addresses in understanding some of the difficult aspects that these issues tend to carry.
Grudem has almost changed my mind about prophecy and it’s place today. He carefully explains what it’s not, which paves the way for understanding what it is. He did his doctorate on this subject of prophecy, and his efforts in this area should not be quickly dismissed.
There are 3 messages on Chapter 53 of his systematic theology.
Michael Horton raises an alarm about the condition of our churches and the youth who are following us, as he discusses his book Christless Christianity on Christ the Center. Horton clearly explains the gospel understanding and basic theological position of the average evangelical American who attends church. Quite frankly it’s frightening.
Wayne Grudem takes 3 sessions to look carefully at the gifts of the Holy Spirit for the believer in general. This does not include a specific look at the ecstatic, charismatic gifts.
I think two of the most helpful things to come out of these 3 sessions, which is not talked about so much, is, one, that these lists of gifts that Paul talks about are not meant to be exhaustive. There are very common and needed gifts for the proper functioning of the church body, such as pastors, teachers, etc. But the Spirit can gift a believer with a giftedness for some very specific work of God, or gifts that are needed in different ages.
And two, giftedness sometimes changes as the needs around believers change. We are not given wooden gifts that never change. Giftedness changes according to God’s work among a people.
At this years Twin Lakes Fellowship, Dr. Ron Gleason delivered an informative overview of the life and significance of Herman Bavinck. This is a nice addition to Ron Gleasons interview at Christ the Center about Bavinck.
Al Mohler addresses the eclipse of manhood that we see today on his radio show. Mohler asks the question, what should we be telling young men today? What do we believe about manhood? Very important subject that we all should be thinking about.
Faith by Hearing 