Douglas Wilson made some interesting points, which I have noted myself growing up in various churches. Here’s a quick excerpt from his post:

“The apostle Paul resolved to know nothing but Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 1: 22-24). I grew up in a tradition that interpreted this as requiring a simple gospel message every Sunday. So every seven days, the faithful saints gathered, and heard a message explaining to them how they could become Christians. And then an invitation to go forward was given.

Early in my ministry I determined that it was necessary to preach from the entire Bible, and not just from John 3:16 and its close cousins. This meant preaching through Zechariah, and Deuteronomy, and Proverbs, and so on. And yet, the apostolic comment was still there.”

To read the full post, go to his blog.

It is incredibly important that we share with unbelievers how to receive Christ. However, if you are going to a church, and that is all the pastor is doing… sharing John 3:16, Romans 6:23, and a few more select verses… you are not growing. That church is dead or dying. God gave a whole 66 books to learn from, not 10 verses to repeatedly chant aloud.

“The Bible teaches that Christ, who is the fullness of all things, is nevertheless filled in some important sense by His bride, the Church. So a man’s wife is not an afterthought, or a footnote. When woman was created, it was not God saying, “oh, yeah.” Just as the glory of the new covenant is the crowning glory of all that went before, so also woman is the crowning glory of man. She is the crown, the capstone. This is basic to scriptural imagery, and it is not to be confused with the Victorian ideal of putting women on a pedestal. The biblical picture is not that of a porcelain doll, but is rather consistent with what we find throughout Scripture, which is the idea of the weight of glory. The role of the man is not trivial in this, for he must bear or carry that weight. He must have broad shoulders, and must know what God has called him to do. When God speaks, everyone, both husbands and wives, must proceed with gladness to their appointed station, and in such obedience, each one will find a peculiar and designated glory.”
-Douglas Wilson
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“In a brilliant essay, Lewis sketched out the features of what he called the “Inner Ring.” In human groups there are often two hierarchies, one official and permanent, the other unofficial and shifting. The latter is the Inner Ring.

Lewis believed his most important insight was not the existence of the Inner Ring (on reflection, everyone knows what he’s talking about), but its domination of our desires, motivations, and actions: “I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”

I want to tip Lewis’s Inner Ring on its side. When we do that, it becomes temporal rather than spatial, and instead of Inner and Outer we talk about Ahead and Behind. Instead of a boundary, we see a horizon, the horizon we know as the Cutting Edge. The desire to be at the Cutting Edge is the desire to bathe in the glow of the new, to the desperation to be seen as the wave of the future, the craving to be recognized as the first to see the rising sun.

Hence my thesis, a paraphrase of Lewis: I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be on the Cutting Edge and the terror of being left Behind.

We check the news online four or five times a day (or an hour) for the latest gossip, not merely to be informed but to be perceived as informed. We buy new clothes every season because we don’t want to be out of style. We have to have the latest iGadget, preferably before any of our friends have it.

Ideas also follow trends. (Definition of postmodernity: The social condition in which all culture is a subsidiary of the fashion industry.) We want to read the latest books not because they communicate wisdom, but to be seen reading the latest books. We need to be up on the latest developments in theory because they are the latest developments in theory.

The Cutting Edge dominates entertainment perhaps more than any other sector of life. What accounts for the millions who go to see a film on the first weekend? Who can still laugh without embarrassment at comedies or comedians from the Paleolithic 1990s? Or who can avoid a cringe or a giggle at the special effects of the original Star Wars? Sometimes these are sound judgments: Sitcoms often really are lame (but why did people laugh twenty years ago? – the Cutting Edge). Special effects start looking goofy only a few years after a movie’s release. Just as often these judgments of taste are made because we are swept along by the herd rushing headlong to the Cutting Edge.”

-PETER J. LEITHART

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Who is a God like You,
Pardoning iniquity
And passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage?

He does not retain His anger forever,
Because He delights in mercy.
He will again have compassion on us,
And will subdue our iniquities.

You will cast all our sins
Into the depths of the sea.

He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?

Various Quotes from “A Grief Observed”, by C.S. Lewis.

Introduction (By Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ step-son) –
“Encountering amid her reading of a wide variety of authors the work of the British writer C.S. Lewis, she became aware that beneath the fragile and very human veneer of the organized churches of the world, there lies a truth so real and so pristine that all of man’s concocted philosophical posings tumble into ruin beside it. She became aware also that here was a mind of hitherto unparalleled clarity.”

From the book –
“I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now.”

“Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

“The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.”

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

“Reality never repeats.”

“It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”

“The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness?”

“I had been warned – I had warned myself – not to reckon on worldly happiness.”

“If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards.”

“Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it.”

“Nothing less will shake a man – or at any rate a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses.”

“If my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better.”

“I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal?”

“A sinful woman married a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured.”

“But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us?”

“I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’”

“You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.”

“And then one babbles – ‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?”

“Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?”

“It doesn’t matter that all the photographs of H. are bad. It doesn’t matter – not much – if my memory of her is imperfect. Images, whether on paper or in the mind, are not important for themselves. Merely links.”

“The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.”

“Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?”

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’”

“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unaswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.”

“I think life is rather like a lumpy bed in a bad hotel. At first you can’t imagine how you can lie on it, much less sleep in it. But presently one finds the right position and finally one is snoring away. By the time one is called it seems a very good bed and one is loth to leave it.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 354

“Your experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 356

“Surely in a work of art all the material should be used. If a theme is introduced into a symphony, something must be made of that theme. If a poem is written in a certain metre, the particular qualities of that metre must be exploited. If you write a historical novel, the period must be essential the the effect. For whatever in art is not doing good is doing harm: no room for passengers (In a good black and white drawing the areas of white paper are essential to the whole design, just as much as the lines. It is only in a child’s drawing that they’re merely blank paper).”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 412

“Two men had to cross a dangerous bridge. The first convinced himself that it would bear them, and called this conviction Faith. The second said, ‘Whether it breaks or holds, whether I die here or somewhere else, I am equally in God’s good hands.’ And the bridge did break and they were both killed: and the second man’s Faith was not disappointed and the first man’s was.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 448

“As to whether God ever wills suffering, I think he [Rector] is confused. We must distinguish in God, and even in ourselves, absolute will from relative will. No one absolutely wills to have a tooth out, but many will to have a tooth out rather than to go on with toothache. Surely in the same way God never absolutely wills the least suffering for any creature, but may will it rather than some alternative: e.g. He willed the crucifixion rather than that Man should go unredeemed (and so it was not, in all senses, His will that the cup should pass from His Son).
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 379