When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run.

The church is not built on the rock foundation of geniuses and influencers but of apostles and prophets.

Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.

Charleston was where America split apart in 1861. Maybe it's where America comes together in 2015.

I believe that we're all created in the image of God and we're all fallen sinners. And I think we can recognize that as we look backward in history.

Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It's about what it means to be human.

The biblical picture is not one of an upward, linear progress or a precipitous, downward decline. It is a more complicated picture of a fallen world in which there is a gospel of power.