Sublime

The justified pastor—the man justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to God’s glory alone, who happens to be a pastor—when taken on his good day or bad day, ministry high or ministry low, will be received with gladness and welcome. Clothed in the righteousness of him in whom you trust, how can you be turned away? You will not b

a contrast life aimed at communion.

The gospel well preached and applied will make ministry messy. Things will change. I often think of it like the beating of a rug—you’re gonna get a lot of dust in the air. There will be a thick cloud. The gospel stirs stuff up. But our God is not an author of confusion. So as things get messy, while the gospel is creating a safe space for sins, hur

Do we love God and others enough to drop the pretense and just be ourselves? Only the gospel simultaneously provides the humility and the confidence the pastor needs to be his real self. The pastorate is no place for image-managing, for worrying about our own PR. In any event, if everybody likes you, something’s wrong, and if everybody hates you, s

We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself—when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it. And s

To take a step back once more, when people write about “atonement theology,” the tendency has been to go to Paul and Hebrews and to come to the gospels only for those detached phrases that will support (or so it seems) the kind of “theological” construct that has already been culled from Paul.