Your purpose in life isn’t to be comfortable. The world has lied to you. Your purpose in life isn’t to store up treasures on earth. The world has lied to you. Your purpose in life isn’t to do what makes you happy. The world has lied to you. Your purpose in life is to please... Continue Reading

One of the prayers God loves to answer is when you ask him simply to be true to his promises. We see Moses frequently praying to God simply that he keeps his covenant with Israel.  Joshua based his confidence in the conquest of Canaan on the promises of God to grant victory. That’s why he... Continue Reading

Cranmer wrote a “how to read the Bible” guide for the second edition of The Great Bible. Entitled Preface to the Bible (1540) it drew on the theology of John Chrysostom (d.407) and Gregory of Nazianzus (d.390) regarding how the Bible should be read. Cranmer, as well as the other reformers, were at pains to... Continue Reading

I often tell people if they are struggling and fighting against sin, that’s a good sign of the Spirit’s work within them. Whereas the sinner is at home in his sin, the believer knows his only true home is in Christ. So ultimately what separates the Christian struggling with sin to the unbeliever in sin is... Continue Reading

God has taken the work of delivering his people into his own hands, is the only foundation of human hope. This doctrine of divine agency and human dependence, though it is opposed by all that is proud in man, by all his love of independence, by all his hatred of divine government, is yet one... Continue Reading

It would be extremely dangerous—even blasphemous—to indiscriminately model one’s preaching after Jesus. He just has too much on us. He’s God after all, and has a few more tools in his homiletical utility belt than we are equipped to handle. On the other hand, the need of our day is every bit as acute as... Continue Reading

Contracts not only restrain sin, but also protect the innocent in the case of legal and moral violation. With every commitment I make to another human being, there is a sense in which a part of me becomes vulnerable, exposed to the response of the other person. No human enterprise renders a person more vulnerable... Continue Reading

God has always worked through the preaching of his Word in the power of the Spirit. The book of Acts should be enough to convince me. Take the connection that Luke makes between the focus of the apostles on the Word and prayer, and the results: “‘But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to... Continue Reading

The New York Times, from any proper and true understanding of history as well as of racism, has just presented us with de facto racist history, a history based solely on race and racism. Additionally, The New York Times claiming any originality in this observation is simply ridiculous; racism has been the cry of the Left since the... Continue Reading

Among the Seven Deadly Sins as formulated by medieval Christians, the deadly sin of Gluttony was always linked closely with the deadly sin of Lust and sexual immorality (Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian, 133). The fourth-century desert monk Evagrius of Pontus famously called gluttony the “mother of lust.” Even after the Reformation, the Westminster Larger Catechism includes gluttony... Continue Reading