A Profession, A Confession

“Thanksgiving is the highest form of worship and praise for it simultaneously exalts the majesty, sufficiency, and graciousness of God’s providential provision and confesses our utter, complete, and abject dependence upon Him for our all-in-all. Thanksgiving is thus both a profession of who God is and what He has done and a confession of who we are and what we have not done, what we cannot do.” – Alexander Whyte

Dear Writers of HBO

Dear Writers of HBO,

I recently saw one of the trailers for your latest series True Detective. I’ll be honest: it looks like a thoroughly forgettable mashup of Justified and Silence of the Lambs. I could be wrong about that, of course – but I doubt I’ll be sticking around to find out.

And anyway, that’s not why I’m writing this.

I’m writing this because of something Matthew McConaughey says at the end of the trailer, during a conversation with Woody Harrelson. It goes like this:

WH: “Do you wonder ever if you’re a bad man?”

MM: “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.”

Which is where I start scratching my head and ask, “Since when?”

Call me woefully old-fashioned, but I thought that job belonged to the good guys. So did I miss something? Was there a transfer of responsibility somewhere somehow that I simply failed to notice?

I’m not asking for men in spotless white hats, mind you. I’m only wondering why I ought to give a damn about your good and evil when the biggest difference between them seems to be that one is a lighter shade of black.

Again, call me old-fashioned – but it’s a little hard to carry the fire when all you’ve got is a pocketful of cold, grey ash.

The Baloney On Your Theological Sandwich…

… also known as “full-time Christian work.” It’s not as healthy or holy as it looks.

Many glorious truths were recovered in the Reformation, and one of them was the doctrine of vocation. Unfortunately, this is part of our Protestant heritage that we have shamefully neglected, and have almost lost. One of the principal indications that we have lost this doctrine is that we nowadays speak easily and readily of ‘full-time Christian work,’ as though there were anything else for a Christian to do. The reestablishment of two ‘holiness’ layers of occupations in Christendom has been a terrible loss.

(Douglas Wilson, Father Hunger, p. 98)

Too Far Away

A Thousand Daily Opportunities

“Ironically, sometimes people who are the most determined to avoid the sacrilege of putting things before God miss a thousand daily opportunities to thank him, praise him, and draw near to him because they imagine they ­shouldn’t enjoy the very things that God has made to help us know him and love him.” – Randy Alcorn