Charlemagne and his successors saw themselves as “sacred kings,” the divinely chosen rulers of a Christian empire, responsible to God for its spiritual as well as secular welfare. The pope was, to them, nothing more than their chief spiritual advisor. So long as church and state were united, and seen as two aspects of a... Continue Reading

A government study shows more than half of Americans are pushed out of a job, one way or another, after age 50. Of those given the heave-ho, only 1 out of 10 regain the annual income they had. That can really mess up those 401(k) calculations, can it not?   I got fired, canned, dismissed,... Continue Reading

What shall we learn from the life of William Cowper? The first lesson is this: We fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of his pessimism.   God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He... Continue Reading

The colonizers of New England have been portrayed for more than 100 years as drab, glum and pleasure-hating. But scholars of that period of American history say the facts tell a different story, not only about the Pilgrims but the Puritans, a similar and larger religious group that settled a few years later in Massachusetts.... Continue Reading

The issues raised by the Christian faith are not (of course) merely academic. They are issues of life and death. But they are intellectual, for they have to do with the truth. And the best academic traits—patience, fairness, orderliness, clarity—are graces that the Church ought to covet.   The idea that the Christian faith is... Continue Reading

Are we not examples to the flock that we feed? Should we not be at the front of the queue in visiting persecuted believers, tending the sick, clothing the naked, welcoming immigrants, supplying hungry Christians, or helping those who struggle while engaged in Kingdom business?   In my personal devotions this morning I was forcibly... Continue Reading

We need daily time with God in his Word and in prayer, as well as time with God’s people (Heb. 10:25). We need time to hear God’s story to teach us about how things really are. We need time to turn off the noise and listen to his goodness again—first, in his Word and second,... Continue Reading

No sooner had God brought His son (Ex. 4:22), Israel, out of Egypt and through the waters that He brought him into the wilderness for forty years—to be tested by Him and tempted by the evil one. In similar fashion, after bringing Jesus up out of Egypt (Matt. 2:15) and through the waters of baptism,... Continue Reading

Recently in my reading I came across this sentence from a theologian and it stopped me in my tracks: “There are no extraordinary means of grace in the Christian life.” I lingered over that line for a while as it delivered a broadside to most of my Christian walk. How many years have I spent... Continue Reading

No one denies that the earliest records of the life of Jesus were based on the testimonies of women and men who had committed themselves to follow Jesus—but a text doesn’t become unhistorical simply because it happens to be a testimony as well. The crucial question isn’t whether testimonies from believers in Jesus were some... Continue Reading