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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Light and Heat in Biblical Preaching and Teaching



"For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ. (Col 2:1-2 ESV)



"I can see how he might be interested in truth, because they are troubled by Gnostic Judaizers who want to teach things contrary to the word of God; so the balance of truth and love. We always have to put those two together. There are so many Christians who think of Christian love as sentimentality, and their ideas of truth are so fluent as to accomplish anything that might be religious. And then on the other hand, there are some who are very, very particular about their Christian doctrine, but they do it in the kind of spirit that leaves people very, very cold because their cold right in their hearts, and the result is that the precision of the truth which they have come to understand, gets itself a bad name for its coldness.
So the apostle; and this is true whether it is taught here or not, the apostle and the writers of Scripture are very interested in preserving truth, but they are also in seeing that when we teach the truth and when we seek to live the truth that we do it in Christian love, not sentimentality, in Christian love. Christian love that is thoroughly compatible with a gentle and kindly rebuke. So that's concern number one."  S. Lewis Johnson, commenting on Colossians 2:1-2

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