Faithful Application of the Word of God

Is The Epistle of James Really all that Strawy?

I have had an uneasy relationship with the way application is typically communicated in evangelical preaching ever since the days I was drowning in depression and suicidal thoughts in the midst of the wreckage of my life and I had a notebook full of helpful steps and action points from years of Sunday sermons that when they mattered most helped the least.

So there’s that.

And out of the angst of the attractional church model and its heavy emphasis on “making the Bible relevant” and its promotion of a pragmatic Christianity, some in the “gospel-centered movement” have sometimes veered too much the other way, forgetting that to be gospel-centered does not mean to be law-avoiding. We are a people of polarization – we are on the pendulum swing. To avoid the attractional church’s cool legalism we end up unwittingly embracing a soft antinomianism. Read More