Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2:15
When considering God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility, J I Packer wrote: “We shall not oppose them to each other. Nor shall we qualify, or modify, or water down, either of them in terms of the other, for this is not what the Bible does either. What the Bible does is to assert both truths side by side in the strongest most unambiguous terms as two ultimate facts; this, therefore, is the position
we must take in our thinking.”
This is a good summary of the purpose of this year’s Colin Hart Lectures. We will consider pairs of glorious Christian truths that are often perceived to be held in tension, as if to assert one is to sacrifice the other. But if we are to ‘correctly handle the word of truth’ we cannot engage in any ‘trade-offs’. Rather we do as the Bible does and proclaim both joyfully, fearlessly and without compromise.