Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Overcoming Sin & Temptation - Book Review

In some ways I found this a difficult review to start, so much material covering such an important subject, where to start?
My first observation is that this book cannot be approached with a view to skim reading or anything similar.
Although some of the archaic language has been sifted there is still a lot of words that are not commonly used today, if at all. (There is a glossary so don't dispair)
That being said, it does mean that you will have to focus fully whilst reading this book and not allow yourself to be distracted. All that effort will be worth it.
As John Piper used to say to his sons if they complained that a good book was hard to read "Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds."

In this book you will find diamonds in abundance and seams of pure gold, but you will have to expend effort to get there, but it will be so worth it.

The whole subject of sin is rarely handled in such a forthright and honest way in todays 'touchy feely, 'I' centered' Christian world.

Although hundreds of years old this could have been written today such is the relevence.

Yes, this book will require you to expend much effort, but you will be rewarded with excellent truth and gifted with wisdom in this crucial area.

Read this book, again I say, read this book.

This review may be short, but others are so much more eloquent than I and as such I will leave it to them to give you more of an insight into the actual material.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

A few women wasting their time

It is sad to see some women wasting so much of their time and spiritual energies trying to prove that the Bible doesn't really say what it is saying and even if it is it doesn't really mean it!!!
Get that? (oh, and if all else fails, then it was added by a scribe and as such can be ignored anyway or Paul didn't write it so it shouldn't be included in Scripture, and so on, and so on)

I am of course refering to the issue of women in leadership in the Church.
From Genesis to Revelation the teaching of the Bible is that leadership in the Church is to be men only and that in the home the man is head of the family.

Now at this point certain female bloggers often start accusing the writer/speaker of supporting violence against women in the home etc, in essence trying to cloud the issue with lies and emotional rhetoric (not to mention slander)

No matter how much sound research, word studies, Biblical evidence is brought to bear it is automatically dismissed because it doesn't say what they want to hear.

Wayne Grudems excellent resource 'Evangelical Feminism & Biblical Truth: an analysis of 118 disputed questions.' is often pilloried by these same people, but I have yet to see them dispute the 118 questions or the veracity of their origins. As usual it is just claimed that Grudem is wrong or it is implied that he is a lousy theologian/academic or despite the fact he is a Professor of NT he actually does not have a grasp of the subject.

These sort of personal attacks are okay from their side, but a travesty if the slightest hint is made that their abilities in these areas are, shall we say, verging on the incompetent.

Stalled review

My review of 'Overcoming Sin & Temptation' is taking longer than I thought, but it will appear soon ;-).....hopefully.
I think I am letting the material overwhelm me somewhat.