Faith for Faith

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up (Rm. 15:1,2).

As God has ordained it, his church is comprised of many people of many varying strengths and degrees of faith (cf. Rm. 12:3). And in spite of these variances, God has ordained that his church be one Body, united for the sake of his glory. And as such, the attainment of unity in the church for the sake of God’s glory must come through love and longsuffering, for the church at present remains in a fallen world and will, because of the variance within it, contain those who fail.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Fridy Night Bible Study | No Comments »

What is speaking the truth in love? It is a question that I seem to ask to myself incessantly, for there are many who take offense to many of the things that I write and speak, and there are many who claim that I do not write and speak in love. It is a question that judges me whenever I hear of the offenses and the hostilities that some of my writings raise, and it is one that causes to me to examine every topic that I address and every word that I use to address them. It is a question that haunts my soul and my very purpose for existence, and one that causes me to question the very path that I have walked thus far. And being such a reoccurring question, I have addressed it before in my soul and in my writings and will likely address it for the rest of my life.

What then is speaking the truth in love? If you were to take a random survey of people in our country, you would likely receive a host of different answers. If you were to ask the question of a person of a postmodern persuasion, you would likely get an answer similar to, “Speaking the truth in love is not speaking at all, for truth is relative to the individual, and to force one’s opinion of truth upon another is offensive and intolerant and therefore unloving.” If you were to ask it of another, you might get the answer, “Speaking the truth in love is sharing what is true in such a way that it presents one’s view of truth as an opinion thereby making compliance to it optional and thus making it inoffensive.” If you were to ask it of one who professes to be a Christian, you might get an answer like, “Speaking the truth in love is sharing the truth of God’s Word in a way that is not judgmental and that withholds matters that might offend a person and turn them away from a church or the Faith.”

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 2 Comments »

I do not encounter this often in real life, but in the advent of “fake life,” of the world of blogs and Facebook, I seem to encounter this often, namely the use of strong and despicable rhetoric to propagate or tear down everything from politicians to the saving of some squirrel in the hills of eastern Mongolia. All people believe in and fight for something, and, for some reason, the internet brings out the worst of it. And this is not to say that people should not have strong convictions or that there are not causes to fight for, however, many people will say things on the internet that they would never say in real life. And for some odd reason, many of us feel as though the internet is a safe haven for us to express our passions and thoughts and that when things are said on the internet, those words somehow “do not count” or affect people. This, of course, is not true and is ridiculous, for things said anywhere, whether in person or on the internet, truly do count and truly do affect people.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Theology | 5 Comments »