When God’s Sovereign Will Seems Inscrutable: Elisabeth Elliot
Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015), a prominent American missionary, writer and speaker, as well as one of the most influential Christian women in the second half of the twentieth century, experienced God’s imponderable sovereign will more than once in her life and ministry.
Elisabeth reached a number of solid conclusions about such incomprehensible developments: (1) Sometimes God’s sovereign will is inscrutable and defies easy explanation. Our “why?” questions may not be satisfactorily answered for a very long time, or perhaps not ever in this life, although they doubtless will be in eternity. (2) Such situations provide Christians with... Continue Reading
Moved
As soon as they drop the Bible as the authoritative Word of God then all sorts of heresies creep in.
The Bible is full, complete revelation of God. Inspiration is the activity of God by which He superintended the reception and communication of His message, even in the specific words used, while still allowing for the style and personality of each writer, with the result being the Word of God. For the prophecy came... Continue Reading
How to Keep Praying
Four Lessons from the Master
Just because our prayers begin with “Our Father” and end with “in Jesus’s name” doesn’t mean all the words in the middle flow easily. Sometimes, even those awake to the wonder of prayer face discouraging difficulties: internal struggle, outward resistance, perhaps even a sense of divine silence. And while such difficulties can reflect something wrong within —... Continue Reading
Gird Your Mind
The Christian life is an intentional life.
We must remain sober-minded, serious and focused in the conduct of our lives. Peter lifts our eyes to the horizon of our lives, calling us to focus on the return of our Lord Jesus. There we see a sure hope and an end to our struggles and suffering. The grace that’s brought us safe thus... Continue Reading
Sleeping on Rocks Right Now? Jesus is Right There
We cannot reach up to God, but he can reach down to us.
As a church struggles—and every true church must struggle—heaven’s stairway joins her to heaven and all heaven’s mercy and safety. The stairway is not built by our faithfulness, but God’s promise. The stairway is not our obedience and steadfastness, but the person of Christ come down to rescue us from our sin and rebellion. ... Continue Reading
Caring for Widows and Orphans
When we give our time and our hearts to others, we grow in our capacity to love and share with others.
The call to visit widows and orphans in their affliction, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the prisoner—in other words, the call to care for the weakest and most helpless among us—these are not optional duties for the Christian life. They are the calling of every Christian, and... Continue Reading
Why do Two People See the Same Evidence Differently?
As it turns out, every case is dependent on the lack of presuppositional bias.
When most people think of bias, they tend to think of it as something evil and menacing. We also tend to think of it as something obvious and easily detected. That may be true for prejudice (like the kind of prejudice we recognize in racism), but it isn’t always the case for the subtle presuppositions that guide our everyday... Continue Reading
Finish Well
Throughout Paul’s life as a minister of the gospel, the Lord was sovereignly directing his path every step of the way.
Transitions in pastoral ministry are sometimes outside of our control. Regardless of the specific details, we must always remember to rest in the reality that God is sovereign. We may not be able to dictate the duration or our direction, but we can determine our actions. As we consider the example of Paul, whose life... Continue Reading
Memorial Church Pastoral Staff Released From Missouri Presbytery At Their Request
The Presbytery voted to release Dr. Greg Johnson, Lead Pastor, Associate Pastor Keith Robinson, and Youth and Family Pastor Sam Dolby from the Presbyterian Church in America.
At a called meeting on Tuesday, December 6, 2022, the PCA Missouri Presbytery voted to release the three ministerial staff members of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri. The Presbytery voted to release Dr. Greg Johnson, Lead Pastor, Associate Pastor Keith Robinson, and Youth and Family Pastor Sam Dolby from the Presbyterian Church in... Continue Reading
Christianity and Equality: Why Bother?
Not every kind of equality casts doubts on Christianity’s core doctrines, but some do.
There are certain ways of thinking about justice and equality that undermine historic Christian doctrines. People embrace a new kind of equality and then champion a different kind of Christianity, too. What causes people to leave the church: evolution, the sexual revolution, or something else? Perhaps all of the above. But let me offer... Continue Reading
The Nail in Timidity’s Coffin
We pray “Thy Kingdom come”, and we are certain that near and far, in our heart and in our homes, from shore to shore, Christ is King and shall be exalted in all the earth..
God’s commandment is to believe in Jesus, and love the brethren. Once again it is made abundantly clear for even the feeblest saint, our confidence towards God is on the basis of faith in Christ alone. ”Faith alone” should be the key signature of our prayers. And this is His commandment, That we should... Continue Reading
How the Gospel Enables and Empowers Sexual Purity
The answer to sexual struggles is not in ourselves, but in Someone else.
We need constant reminders of our new status before God—sainthood—and exhortations to live in light of this gospel reality. We are not called to try harder, to be something we are not. We don’t become saints by our actions. Rather, we are called to become more and more who we already are in Christ because... Continue Reading
A Complete Divorce of Medicine from Healthcare
Will the government force doctors to do bodily harm to transgender patients?
Often maligned as anti-body and otherworldly, it is Christians who are now most willing to fight for the integrity and goodness of the human body as something well-designed for the world it inhabits. In a world gone mad, the remaining voices of sanity offer a refreshing blast of reality—but only if we are relentless in... Continue Reading
Grief and Joy
Only those who know redemptive, joyful, magnifying grace can understand that you can grieve, but that will be turned to joy.
There is hope and comfort in the coming of the Lord—there is hope and comfort in being with the Lord even before His coming. The Word of God only provides comfort. In trials, sufferings, death and despair, it’s the Word of God that is the foundation for our hope. Grief is a part of... Continue Reading
Chipping Away Our Confidence in Christ
It is usually the pleasant times, when self-confidence becomes exaggerated, that we tend to chip away at the rock upon which we stand.
When the good times come it is easy to lose sight of the importance of our foundation. The winds are not trying to knock us over, and the rains are not there to cause us to seek shelter, so we do not feel the need for solid footing. Often during these times when we do... Continue Reading
Desiring Contentment
Although we will always long for heaven, God calls us to be content in whatever situation we find ourselves by His sovereign providence.
In essence, contentment is wanting what God wants for us, and what He wants for us is Him. This is why the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever (WSC 1). We most glorify God when we most enjoy what He has created us to desire—Himself. God has put... Continue Reading
The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism
Book Review: "The Case for Christian Nationalism," by Stephen Wolfe
Biblical instincts are better than nationalist ones, and the ethos of the Christian Nationalism project fails the biblical smell test. Will the person who goes all in on this book—the person who says “yes” to every rant, the person who feels drawn to the vision of ethnic separation, the person who is just biding his... Continue Reading
The Compass Christ Sails By
Our salvation depends on the steadfastness of Christ and not our unsteady hearts.
Remember, Christian: Your heart is not the compass that directs Christ. His love, Word, and promises are His compass—and so they must be ours. Your salvation in Him is secure because His covenant is sure. “Follow your heart.” We hear this time and again, the world’s mantra to find assurance in emotion and intuition. Yet... Continue Reading
Church Shopping and Serial Dating…?
Exploring the similarities of the hookup culture and church hopping.
Find a faithful, Biblical, and local church to be a part of. Interview it well, understand their doctrine, treat that process with sobriety and wisdom, and when you have found the place you can be committed to, commit to the glory of Christ! Be active, faithful in worship, and engaged in the life of the... Continue Reading
A Review of “Against the Great Reset,” Edited by Michael Walsh
To understand the diabolical nature of the Davos deities, read this book.
The revolutionaries always want to create a new world order, but always end up destroying man and civilisation in the process. Nothing new here. But the Davos elites have no interest in history. We should, however. If we will not learn from history, the prospect looks very bleak indeed. Hopefully a volume like this will wake... Continue Reading
When Christian Leaders Capitulate on Marriage, Innocent Children Suffer
What French never acknowledges and Dalrymple barely considers is what happens after weddings. But that is when the harm becomes most evident.
There is no need to rehearse the litany of evidence that children raised apart from their married, biological mothers and fathers fare worse on all manner of social, educational, and developmental outcomes. But it might be necessary to start speaking forthrightly about the more specific emerging evidence that children conceived via donorship suffer from “profound struggles with their origins and identities”... Continue Reading
Simple Solution to Same-Sex Civil “Marriage”
Civil unions should be completely desexualized and open to any two adults who desire to enter into a type of contractual relationship known as a mutual beneficiary contract.
As a society, we should question why we’re extending social and government benefits to a group based on sexual behavior while excluding other, nonsexual unions that are more worthy. Why allow civil unions for the lesbian couple down the street but not for the widowed daughter and mother-in-law who live next door? David French... Continue Reading
Who Was John Lafayette Girardeau?
He preached with the goal of raising the entire congregation to higher levels of knowledge and Christian devotion.
Next to Girardeau’s exemplary ministry to enslaved men and women, perhaps his most enduring legacy was his literary contribution to the office of deacon. Writing almost two hundred pages for The Southern Presbyterian Review, he established the office as one of spiritual necessity in the church and crafted the wording for American Presbyterianism’s ecclesiology on... Continue Reading
God’s Relationship to the World
To say God must be the father of all people, you’ll need something stronger than the idea of fatherhood to get there.
If God is a father, then preferential, faithful, and self-sacrificial love becomes appropriate, and even expected. Justice will then be God’s faithful commitment to his children — if God relates to the world as a father. To say God must be the father of all people, you’ll need something stronger than the idea of... Continue Reading
Training in Godliness
The point of the Christian witness is to be trained in “godliness.” Therefore, pastors should be concerned with preaching such things that “accord with godliness.”
The Christian life is not about cultural relevancy, morality, or making it through the day. I did not say that Christians need not be examples of morality or of living according to their calling. I mean that the Christian life is about the life of Christ, which is moral, but that is not the heart... Continue Reading
There Go the Churches
The floodgates are opening, and congregations are leaving the United Methodist Church.
By the end of next year (the deadline for exiting with church property) at least 3,000 and possibly 5,000 churches are expected to exit. United Methodism has 30,000 U.S. churches. Denominational agencies are preparing for a 38 percent drop in funding for 2025-2028, which implies an approximate expected membership loss of 2.3 million members from... Continue Reading
The Current State of Complementarity
Five Years after Nashville
Complementarity, as it is unfolded in the Danvers Statement and Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, is still as urgent as ever. The Nashville Statement may feel more urgent because it addresses the current tragedies of so-called same-sex “marriage” and so-called “transgenderism.” In 1987, I wrote the first draft of the Danvers Statement. Thirty years later, I... Continue Reading
God Can Handle Chaos—Including Yours
Whatever we might think about God’s formless, empty, lifeless, black, and watery creation, the Spirit of God loved it and sustained and upheld it.
Whoever you are, and whatever the depths and agony of your trials, God is hovering over you: he loves you, he is near to you, and he can rescue you. We see a living picture of his rescue unfold in the subsequent six days of creation. God does not stand aloof from the world in all... Continue Reading
We Have Answers
Apologetics is one of the tasks of the church, and whenever God directs His people to a task, He supplies whatever is needed to fulfill that task.
The Bible not only assures us that God will provide sufficient answers to the most pressing objections to the Christian faith but also explains why we do not have an answer to every question we might want answered, at least while we “see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). After exhorting his readers... Continue Reading
What Our Land Needs: The Glory of Sacrificial Strength
Men were created to shine through the use of their physical, emotional, and spiritual strength.
There is no glory apart from sacrifice. That is what your strength is for. That is what you were made for. You were made for the glory of sacrifice, and when that sacrifice is obedient to the King, you can be sure that you are following your King into the very same grave He once... Continue Reading
