Have you ever asked God to stop loving you so much?  I’m sure that sounds like a strange thing to ask, but C. S. Lewis, in his book The Problem of Pain , explains to us, that if we are complaining or resisting uncomfortable or painful things in our lives - which his providence has allowed - we may be doing just that very thing.  Why?  How?  We are forgetting that God’s love for us is an inexorable love.  If someone is being inexorable, they are insisting on their own way about things, regardless of how much someone may be complaining about it and petitioning against it.  God has an inexorable love for us, and that means he is going to insist on giving us what is best for us, even when we don’t like how he’s doing it. Here's an example of God's inexorable love: Jesus comes riding into Jerusalem in a fashion which he knows is a fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the way the king of Israel would come home to his capital city.  The peopl...

[Paul on the Road to Damascus by Rubens] Years ago, there was a lot of debate in evangelical circles about "easy grace" and "Lordship salvation."  The concern was over people who were being told that they could become a Christian without submitting to Jesus's call to discipleship, as if discipleship was an optional add-on for people going to heaven.  The answer was that "Jesus must be Lord of all or he is not Lord at all."  "The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch" (Acts 11:26).  In other words, a Christian is a disciple; discipleship is not an option. We can understand that some evangelicals were so afraid of Pelagianism (salvation by works) that they could reduce the call to "repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ" [Acts 20:21] to just "believe in Jesus," and even minimize that belief to mere intellectual assent to the claims of Christ.  But that is surely a classic example of throwing out...

Douglas Murray and Dennis Prager hit on issues important for Christians who seek the redemption and healing of our culture for God's glory and the good of our neighbours.  

In Chapter 4 of The Problem of Pain , when Lewis affirms that we ought to experience the emotion of guilt or shame related to our sinfulness, he does not do so because he thinks we should be a gloomy people.  He sees those emotions as alerts to the fact of our sinfulness, which we need to honestly and concretely acknowledge and not forget.  But as for the climate of our souls, he recommends - as a "layman," of course: "My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else." (p. 61, 2001 ed.) He speaks of our refusing to rejoice as "needless."  It is needless because there is so much to rejoice about, and because we are not commanded to be ...

"...pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror." (The Problem of Pain) People that want to tyrannize will cultivate the idea of "oppressed" or "victim" classes in the society they want to rule.

Doug Wilson comments on the issue of the violation of the social contract.