Dever @ Acts29

I'm hardly the first to post this, but these comments are worth reposting here:

Mark Dever recently spoke at the Acts29 Network 'boot camp' in Chicago. Here's an excerpt from his remarks:

Our differences are enough to separate some of my friends—your brothers and sisters in Christ—from you. And perhaps to separate them from me, now that I’m publicly speaking to you. And I don’t want to minimize either the sincerity or the seriousness of some of their concerns (things like: humor, worldliness, pragmatism, authority).

But I perceive some things in common which outweigh our differences — which the Lord Jesus shall soon enough compose between us, either by our maturing, or by His bringing us home. I long to work with those, and count it a privilege to work with those whom My Savior has purchased with His blood, and with whom I share the gospel of Jesus Christ. I perceive that we have in common the knowledge that God is glorified in sinners being reconciled to Him through Christ. This is not taught by other religions, nor clearly by the ancient Christian churches of the East, or by Rome, by liberal Protestant churches, by Mormons, the churches of Christ, or by groups of self-righteous, legalistic, moralistic Christians. And not only do we together affirm the exclusivity of salvation through faith alone in Christ alone—we agree on the sovereignty of God in life and salvation, the regenerate nature of church members, the importance of church membership and discipline, the baptism of believers alone, the priorities of expositional preaching, and evangelism, the importance of authority and a growing appreciation for the significance of complementarianism. These are not slight matters. And they only fire my desire to encourage you and cheer you on, until you cross that finish line that the Lord lays down for us.

That's just awesome stuff.

The long, cold winter...

Well, a handful of people have nagged me regarding the complete lack of updates to this blog. This is surprising. First, I'm surprised there are a handful of people to even notice that updates had died. Second, I'm surprised any of them really would care.

I'm humbled and grateful.

So, I will endeavor to do a better job getting updates posted. I'm teaching again and starting to work with our church's missions board. I imagine that one or both of these will spur some ranting and raving.