The Tulip Driven Life

I can remember enjoying LAN parties in high school. About six or eight of us would get together, drink 8 Red Bulls, eat 15 slices of pizza, 20 cookies, and stay up all night blowing each other to smithereens while shouting not so nice things. The game was usually HALO. I had a good time, but I could never quite enjoy it like many of the others because they owned the game, and I did not. They understood the intricacies and nuances of the game that I was unaware of. So when Jonathan Lee or Adam Perrell no-scoped me from the other side of the map and flipped out in celebration, I couldn't fully appreciate the talent and skill that was involved. I couldn't understand the magnitude of the moment. This was because I didn't understand HALO very well. However, I do know baseball pretty well, and I can tell you, I get goosebumps every time I see a short stop making a diving stop in the hole, scamper to his feet in an instant, and fire a bullet over to the first baseman, who scoo...

Okay, I am taking this in a different direction than what I had originally planned, but bear with me- if you stick through this post, you might be moved to action in a powerful way. In order to fully understand what I am going to be talking about for part 2 of this series, you really, really need to go and watch this speech by Al Mohler, talking about  the disappearance of God.  By that, he means that in America, especially in Europe, and around the globe, the Christian worldview is being and in some cases has been lost. New wave atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens are working not merely to make atheism a viable option, but to make belief in a god as well as catechism of any kind illegal! They want to take away all religious freedom!  They see religion as the great disease, the sickness of mankind. It has been said that mankind is incurably religious- now Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, and others belie...

I've believed in the TULIP, the doctrines of grace, the five points, the biblical way in which God saves man, for a little over three years now. And I've been reforming everything ever since. Understanding rightly how God saves you for the first time, changes everything. It changes your view of God, of Christ, of man. That's an all-encompassing, paradigm shifting, truth, and all one's theology and all one's life must be conformed to it. Unfortunately, we seem to have something of a melting pot of Calvinism- we take a little charismatic teaching and attach it to a Calvinistic soteriology, or a seeker-oriented church preaches Calvinistic soteriology (which, on all accounts, makes zero sense whatsoever). But I believe that even those who do not add these more extreme admixtures can still fall into the trap of thinking that the five points are enough, that Calvinism is enough, that Calvinism speaks to salvation and nothing else. On the contrary, because Calvinism ...