Category: Blog
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The Most Helpful Matthew Commentaries
As soon as a teaching semester ends I begin excavations on my desk, digging through the layers of books to find the desk itself. This semester I got to teach the gospel of Matthew at the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles, so a thick growth of Matthean reference works needs to be cleared away…
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Prayer for the Class of 2011
Father in heaven, Lord of hosts, God of Israel: you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You are the God, you alone, who made these students and gave them to us for a season. We pray for them today in the same way as King Hezekiah prayed for his…
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#NotReallyHeresy
A few weeks ago I started a silly hashtag at my Twitter account (fredfredsanders), describing heresies in a way that totally missed the point but somehow were instructive anyway. It didn’t exactly trend, as they say, and I ran out of ideas after about a dozen. But if you’re into terrible puns on recondite topics,…
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A Personal Relationship with Jesus (Theremin)
“Where in the Bible does it say we should have a personal relationship with Jesus?” This seems to be an increasingly common question. My knee-jerk reaction to the question used to be, “It’s presupposed everywhere in Scripture!” Meanwhile I would be thinking in the back of my mind, “Here is somebody who doesn’t have a…
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The Words of Jesus
Rudolf Ewald Stier wrote a unique commentary back in the nineteenth century. According to his biography, it began as an exposition of Jesus’ chief parables, but Stier found so much power in the parables that he decided to write a commentary on every word spoken by Jesus as recorded in the New Testament. The series,…
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Invoking God the Father
Father, who so loved the world that you gave your only Son; Father, whose love was made manifest in sending your Son into the world so we may live through him; Father, who predestined us in love to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ; Father, who loved us so much that we should be called,…
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The Best Gardener Ever
Recently, my church had a Kidz Camp. We were coming up on Easter and wanted to give the kids a sense of the truly weird thing that happened when God raised Jesus from the dead. I got to tell the story, complete with a talking Elmo doll that wouldn’t talk at first, and only did…
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The Best Book on the Doctrine of Scripture
The best book on the doctrine of Scripture has never been written, and is by J.I. Packer. Every time I teach on the doctrine of Scripture, I find myself reaching for a few J.I. Packer quotations that have coalesced in my memory to form a complete statement on bibliology. But when I reach for the…
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Gates of Adamant are Broken
An Easter poem by C. S. Lewis, only printed (so far as I know) in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963 (HarperSan Francisco, 2007), p. 955. The poem is from a June 1958 letter to Francis Turner. It’s not the kind of thing that could stand on its…
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From Information to Wisdom
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, education is a college student’s job. You don’t get a salary, you don’t get health or retirement benefits or paid vacation, but it is still your job, and a peculiar one at that. You do not make things or sell things. You neither maintain nor fix things. You are a…
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Protestants, not Protesters
Today (April 19) is the anniversary of the 1529 Protestation of Speyer, which is generally regarded as the first time that the word “Protestant” was used to refer to a religious position distinct from Roman Catholicism. A coalition of German princes and leaders refused to abide by the imperial ban on Luther’s teachings, and called…
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Algernon Crapsey’s Heresy Trial
Algernon Crapsey worshiped telegraph poles, but that’s both better and worse than it sounds. It was April 18 in the year 1906 that Reverend Algernon Sidney Crapsey (1847-1927) was put on trial by the Episcopal Church in the state of New York for teaching, preaching and writing contrary to the Christian faith. He was found…