Paul's Passing Thoughts

One of the key objectives in advertising is to create dissatisfaction with what you have, and then offer a solution. In the email advertisements I have been receiving from T4G, that is exactly what they are doing in regard to our personal walk and our church affiliations. Think about that—the goal is to create dissatisfaction with yourself, others, and your church. Not only that, we Christians have a tendency to be hard on ourselves and even harder on our church to begin with.  To point out the things that  Christians struggle with  in regard to themselves and their church, and then claim to have the solution, is a form of manipulation that is unbecoming of men who call themselves elders.

Not only that, it’s divisive. Say pastors, any of your people going to the 2012 T4G? Well, they are going to be taught how bad you stink as an elder! It wouldn’t be so bad if their solutions were the real deal, but such is not the case. Sure, we have a problem with churches in our day, but antinomianism is certainly not the solution! New Calvinists are simply offering another version of what got us where we are today: easy believeism; for example, Paul David Tripp’s “resting and feeding” description of the Christian life. We have gone from a lack of emphasis on sanctification, to saying that sanctification doesn’t exist at all because it is the same thing as justification.