Hello again Pastor Jackson,
First and foremost, I hope you enjoyed your Christmas and New Year's. I hope your family is doing well.
Now...onto the meat and potatoes:
Sometimes I think you take the name Lutheran truly to heart, modeling yourself after the great reformer in both his efforts to go back to God's Word and in his crash, often times tongue in cheek, humor. It's at times refreshing.
That said, I know many people criticize perhaps too much for your style. I have been mildly offended at times, true, but that shouldn't stop anyone from reading the context and content of the blog, not just individual remarks. So if anyone thinks you to be nothing but a crass, bitter old man, this latest post reveals your desire to truly be Lutheran. Others may not like your style of calling people out. And perhaps at times it does go too far or goes on for too long. Yet the reason behind your blog is to make people think, push them to be like Luther and find out what does the Word really say.
This paragraph says it all:
"I would like to leave Lutheran pastors and laity with this thought, that they still have what the false teachers can never take away—the Word of God. No weapon fashioned by man can defeat the work of the Holy Spirit. No matter how weak and flawed we may be, God’s Word remains powerful, effective, active, and filled with eternal-life-giving energy. We should not and cannot judge how successful we are, since God alone is glorified in the ministry of the Word. Who would have guessed that a widowed housemother at a tiny college was raising four sons who would be pastors, three serving as professors at three different Lutheran seminaries, two of them respected authors to this day, one of them a seminary president? Mrs. Pieper lived in the humblest circumstances and probably never imagined she would be mentioned in various books as an example of how God works. Martin Luther expressed this faithfully in his thoughts on Matthew 7, where Jesus compared sound doctrine to false doctrine."
We are but jars of clay. Cracked, broken, sinful. And yet we have the greatest weapon, the greatest defense - the Word of God.
So thank you for your work. If nothing else, it has spurred me on to digging deeper into matters I thought I had down. Let my faith never grow complacent.
Someone
***
GJ - My only goal is to have people familiar with Luther and the Book of Concord...and to have a little fun with my opponents who love Sweet, Stetzer, Driscoll, C. Peter Wagner, and Knapp.
