"Love Your Enemies" and the Importance of Minority Reports for the Health of the PCA
Weekend Newsletter: August 20, 2022
This Week’s Sermon
This week, my sermon was “Love Your Enemies,” from Matthew 5:43–48. This was a challenging text, since the final verse, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), summarizes all of Jesus’ teaching on the Law (Matt. 5:17–48).
Here is the introduction to the sermon notes:
In Jesus’ final section in his exposition on the law, our Lord touches on perhaps the most difficult demand of the law: to love our enemies. No longer are we talking about our relationships with those closest to us—our brothers, our sisters, our spouses, and our friends. Now, Jesus says that we must even love our enemies, since our heavenly Father loves his enemies. Here, Jesus draws all of his teaching on the law into one imperative that not only summarizes this section, but the whole of his exposition on the law: be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Read More)
And here is the full sermon:
Recent Writing
Last week, I published a technical article on the parliamentary rules dealing with minority reports from the PCA’s Committee on Constitutional Business.
This week, I published another article detailing why this procedure is so important for the peace, purity, and unity of our denomination:
This process is important, because it gives the Assembly its full freedom to oversee the procedural accuracy of the Standing Judicial Commission’s (SJC) business. If the final CCB report — whether the original committee report, or a substituted minority report — discovers procedural errors in the operations of the SJC, our Book of Church Order (BCO) enables the Assembly to redress any errors by directing the SJC to retry a case if the Assembly judges such a step to be necessary for justice to be realized in the proceedings of church courts.
In this article, I lay out three reasons for why it is important for the PCA’s General Assembly to protect this procedure within the Church’s polity. (Read More)
Have a blessed Lord’s Day tomorrow!