Dustin Messer
@dustinwmesser
I'm the vicar @ASDAnglican & I teach @RTS_Dallas, formerly @TheKingsCollege. I serve as an Envoy @LanghamPartners
Fear God and you’ll preach to transform people, fear people and you’ll preach to transform God.
Denominations in the minority tend to be more fervent in a region. Anglicans in London are more likely to be there for "image" reasons than the Baptists down the street, but the converse is true in Waco. Deducing which trad is true from this sociological phenomena is a dead end.
“Apologetics isn’t about making the gospel easier to believe. It’s about clarifying the offense of the gospel so non-Christians confront Jesus’s words and not just our frail imitation.”
thegospelcoalition.org/article/we-nee…
New six-episode Podcast Series: The Psalms and the Recovery of Leisure (episodes drop on Mondays) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.”
The harsh, hubristic tenor of our civil discourse is birthed out of a deep societal insecurity. As the confidence we have in our premises ebbs, our insistence upon our conclusions flows. As the public square has secularized, so has it dogmatized.
Alistair Begg: “There is a kind of life that leads to death. There is a kind of death that leads to life.”
In taking God flippantly we’ve come to take ourselves far too seriously.
Hbd Thomas Cranmer! After the Pope raised taxes Anglicans threw tea in the Canterbury River & delegates from the Communion ratified their very own formularies. Someone asked Cranmer what had been produced & he famously replied, “A book of common prayer, if you can keep it.” 🎂 🙏
Something every church leader either knows or will learn. Aim for spiritual, emotional, and relational growth and numerical growth usually follows. Aim for numerical growth and spiritual, emotional, and relational growth usually gets stunted.
Grace doesn’t “transcend” nature, it restores it.
Good grief this is wild.
Stale sermons are a thing. In trying to fix this, preachers will often just end up saying novel things in trite ways. That's the worst of both worlds. The goal is to say old things in new ways.
I tuned into the PCA GA for a minute and the caught what was surely the most presbyterian moment of the week.
In his project to harm us, the only tools at Satan's disposal are inherently good (1 Tim 4:4). In his project to sanctify us, the only tools at God's disposal are touched by sin (Rom 8:22). Satan uses good for bad, God uses bad for good.
Do not conform to FOX or MSNBC, X or Facebook, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Dispensationalism isn’t hip right now—in my experience the people who hold to it do so because they really believe it. I disagree with their theology, but find their commitment admirable.
Expository preaching shouldn't come at the expense of catechesis. Getting the “right doctrine from the wrong text” is a problem, but as far as problems go, it’s not the worst to have. The solution is better exegesis, not less doctrine. We can't take the rule of faith for granted.
Pastors, how will you address the Iranian bombing tomorrow?