Resources by Charlie Wingard
Calamitous Freedom
“The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely…
Read MoreI am grateful to Dr. Bill Wymond, Minister of Music and Worship at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, who today in my Theology of Worship class gave his first of three lectures on church music and hymnody. His learning, enthusiasm, and experience make his instruction a valuable resource to men preparing to lead God’s people in worship.
Read MoreCalvin: Waiting on God with Patience and Peseverance
Yesterday I finished reading Bruce Gordon’s masterful biography of John Calvin. The highest praise I can give Calvin is that it compares positively with my two favorite biographies, Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography and George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Calvin was a towering figure of his age. But above all Calvin was a pastor, his heart attuned to the realities of life in God’s persecuted church. Gordon observes that “Resignation to fate and delusions of perfection were equally abhorrent to Calvin. God’s providence is an excuse for neither inaction nor wickedness; it encourages joy among the faithful, and fortifies them to face the hardships of the world, but it is not an inoculation. The Gospel teaches God’s everlasting kindness…
Read MoreA Prayer for the Lord’s Day, February 22 (based on Psalm 25)
GOOD AND GRACIOUS GOD, who desirest nothing but the health and salvation of them that trust in thee, extend thy goodness and infinite mercies upon us thy poor servants, and put away all our iniquities, that we, being governed by thy Holy Spirit, may walk uprightly in thy holy commandments, without any wavering; that in the end we may enjoy the bliss obtained for us by thy Son, Christ Jesus. AMEN. – Prayers on the Psalms from the Scottish Psalter of 1595 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2010), 57.
Read MoreWhen Children are Customers of their Parents
Theodore Dalyrmple on the consequences our culture’s paedo-centrism: “Anyone who has observed a mother in a shop or supermarket solicitously and even anxiously bending over a three- or four year-old child to ask him what he would like for his next meal will understand the sovereignty over choice that is now granted to those who have neither experience nor powers of discrimination enough to exercise it on the basis of anything other than the merest whim, without regard to the consequences. By abdicating their responsibility in this fashion, in the name of not passing on their own prejudices or preconceptions to their children, and not imposing their own view of what is right upon them, they enclose their children within the…
Read MoreThe Holiness of God: The Key to Knowing Life
“Divorced from the holiness of God, sin is merely self-defeating behavior or a breach in etiquette. Divorced from the holiness of God, grace is merely empty rhetoric, pious window dressing for the modern technique by which sinners work out their own salvation. Divorced from the holiness of God, our gospel becomes indistinguishable from any of a host of alternative self-help doctrines. Divorced from the holiness of God, our public morality is reduced to little more than an accumulation of trade-offs between competing private interests. Divorced from the holiness of God, our worship becomes mere entertainment. The holiness of God is the very cornerstone of Christian faith, for it is the foundation of reality. Sin is defiance of God’s holiness, the…
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