The GBA VI

Time for the Gospel Blogger Award again, my little "pet project" aimed at highlighting the blogposts that best represent, in my sometimes less than humble opinion, the Gospel of Christ. I've made a few changes in the procedure. For the first time I've asked for nominations, and in fact I received a couple. Cool! I've also decided to issue the award bi-weekly, rather than weekly. It just seems like a good idea.

Here's the thing: amid all the Christian palaver out there, relatively few posts are truly cross-centered, which is the elusive ideal I'm looking for. Posts that forthrightly confess, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "that Christ died for our sins." Now, I understand that for many Christian bloggers this confession underlies all that they write. But what I'm looking for are posts that make it plain. No blogger can do this sort of thing every day, of course, and I'm not suggesting anyone should. I simply want to recognize those posts that do.

Well, all that having been said, we have several nominees this time around. First, the runner-ups:

Nominated by Milton at Transforming Sermons, is one of the Terri Shiavo posts from Wittenburg Gate. This is really representative of the many posts from many bloggers in support of Terri. Jesus said, "Take care of the weakest among you." The terrible fact here is that there are people who stand ready to do just that, to take care of Terri for the rest of her life, but the state of Florida may not see fit to allow it.

One blogger whom I expect to be nominating frequently for this award is John at Scotwise. John's whole blog is cross-centered, start to finish. He recently featured a sermon by Geroge H. Morrisson called The Offense of the Cross.

It were better to empty a church and preach the cross, than to fill it by keeping silent like a coward. It were better to fail as Paul failed with the Jews, than to succeed by being a traitor to the cross.

You can't get much more cross-centered than that.

Rebecca Writes recently featured a poem by Welsh poet Ann Griffith, called There's an Open Door Before Us. Not to be quoted, it must be read in full. The more poetry in the world, by the way, the better the world.

Maybe it's a mite unfair to include the blog of a renowned scholar among these others. Peter Leithart writes with both polish and passion. A recent post uses a relatively obscure OT moment to point us onward to the cross. I like that a lot.

Now for the winner: there was one post that, while it did not speak the Gospel message outright (see, I can be flexible) represented a living out of the reality of the Gospel. That is, the reality of forgiveness, bought and paid for at the cross. This came from the justly famous Michael at To Be Least. Michael has already won the 1st Annual Evangelical Blog Award for best teen blog, which is a pretty darn high honor in my book. But what I like most about his recent post, Transparency, was that Michael "lived" the truth of the Gospel in that blogpost. It's a short and simple and heartfelt posting of his own spiritual condition, and at its heart is the mercy of God. Michael is the winner of GBA VI.