The capitalist says, ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ The socialist says, in effect, ‘You scratch my back or I’ll break yours.’
(Randy Alcorn, in Money, Possessions and Eternity, describing the need for coercion in socialist systems that view wealth as a zero-sum game).
Here’s a good description of how Scripture should operate in the life of a believer:
Merely affirming that the Bible is inspired accomplishes very little. Asserting its authority isn’t much better. The inspiration and authority of the Scriptures are of value to us only so far as we change our beliefs to conform to its principles and alter our behavior to coincide with its imperatives.
(Sam Storms, in the Foreword to Note to Self: the Discipline of Preaching to Yourself, by Joe Thorn: Crowssway 2011).
This description is offered for us to cherish the Word of God as superior to to any other pretender for ultimate truth. Does the Word change us?
J.I. Packer assesses the Calvinist mindset:
What Calvinists have practised in the past and seek to re-establish in the present is a type of evangelism which does justice to the truths that God himself is the true evangelist, that it is he who brings souls to new birth, that the local churches are the basic evangelizing units, that evangelism must be fully integrated into local church life, and that evangelistic practice must be reverent, worshipful, and worthy of God.
It is difficult to find a more pithy statement of the issues appropriate to the Calvinist-Arminian divide today. There is only one problem. Packer wrote this in 1966. It appeared in an article entitled “A Calvinist — and an Evangelist!” in The Hour International (London, August 1966) (reprinted in Serving the People of God: The Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer (Paternoster 1988)).
Forty-six years ago Packer saw the caricature of Calvinism as anti-evangelistic, and sought to correct the error in part by cataloguing the numerous stalwarts of evangelistic practice who also happened to be Calvinist. Or, as Packer proposes, by citing men who were ardently evangelistic because they were Calvinists.
Jonathan Leeman has an excellent treatment of the nature of church membership and how it relates both to God’s love and discipline, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline.
In describing how an individual submits to a local congregation of which he is a member, Leeman challenges us to consider what biblical submission to others looks like when it comes to choosing where we live:
Living close to church is hardly a biblical requirement, but it may be prudent, even loving. Our culture’s formula for home selection is simple: how do I get the most for least? But a Christian no longer belongs to himself. He belongs to Christ and Christ’s people. Shouldn’t his formula for home selection, therefore, look a little different? Why not instead choose a residence that will let us count others more significant than ourselves and look to the interests of others?
Leeman describes how believers should consider the location of a good church before looking for homes, how members should obtain counsel from elders when thinking through family moves, and consider where other members of their church live in order to facilitate congregational community.
The transfer of faith from parents to children is not automatic. Anyone familiar with the gardening analogy will understand that the roses don’t just happen; weeds happen. Puritan William Gurnall describes the need for parents to tend the garden of their children’s minds with the transfer of the faith:
This is the difference between religion and atheism; religion does not grow without planting, but will die even where it is planted without watering. Atheism, irreligion, and profaneness are weeds that will grow without setting, but they will not die without plucking up.
Parenting our children in the faith is hard work. God equips us for the task.
…there are many areas of life in which God has no intention of levelling out the distinctions between us. Consider the obvious: God does not value intellectual or aesthetic equality among people. He does not value equality in finances, talents, and opportunity. It is God who deliberately ordains inequalities in many aspects of our lives.
…
One measure of our wisdom as God’s image-bearers is whether we share this perspective with God. One measure of our reconciliation with God is whether His sovereign decrees draw from us a response of worship or resentment.
Raymond Ortlund, in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.
In the partnership of two spiritually equal human beings, man and woman, the man bears the primary responsibility to lead the partnership in a God-glorifying direction.
Raymond Ortlund’s definition of male headship, in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. Ortlund continues:
It is God who wants men to be men and women to be women; and He can teach us the meaning of each, if we want to be taught.