The sincere person is one who is not conscious of being willfully deceitful. Of course, sincerity can be faked. Entertainers and politicians are perhaps our best examples. But when Scripture tells us we are deceitful because we are sinful, it is not affirming that we are always conscious of our deceit; our sin is expressed... Continue Reading

The NPP developed in the 1990s in light of the shadow of violent acts of ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the Balkans. So, is the NPP shaped by certain ethnic issues or oriented towards certain religious matters? Undoubtedly! Is that a bad thing or does it explain away the NPP’s insights? Certainly not!   Over... Continue Reading

David expresses himself in question form: “How long….Will You forget….will You hide Your face….?” Consider the following two aspects of David’s complaint: “Will You forget me forever?” and “How long will You hide Your face from me?” There are at least two ways to understand these and other statements like them.   True believers may,... Continue Reading

Will you be remembered as a leader who stood courageously to defend the truth or will you be remembered as a sleeping lion who refused to roar? Faithful leaders are willing to defend the truth because they recognize that something far greater than their platform is at risk. The souls of men, women, boys and... Continue Reading

Carl Trueman channels Marx, Freud and others to make the case that there is a tension between the catholicity of the Church, and the way in which seminaries—his immediate audience for the lecture—market themselves. And it struck me that many, if not all, of the points he raises are also applicable to churches, denominations and... Continue Reading

I am not talking about theories of how Christ is present (transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or impanation). Nor do I intend to make the argument for the Supper as an instrument of grace. I am speaking about the general idea that Christ through his Spirit acts through our faith and in the symbols of the bread and... Continue Reading

Neither Jesus nor Paul had a problem with the law. Paul wrote that his gospel of grace upholds and establishes the law (Rom. 3:31)—even God’s laws in their negative form, since the “grace of God . . . teaches us to say ‘No’” (Titus 2:11–12NIV). And remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:17–19? Our attitude to the law is... Continue Reading

“This Synod of Dort in the name of the Lord pleads with all who devoutly call on the name of our Savior Jesus Christ to form their judgment about the faith of the Reformed churches, not on the basis of false accusations gathered from here or there, or even on the basis of the personal... Continue Reading

At the heart of Paul’s argument is the fact that when it comes to the Christian life, God is always antecedent. He comes first. He acts before we act. We only act because he has already acted. God works in us in advance of our working for him. To put it in slightly different terms, God is... Continue Reading

Of course, understanding our pasts can be useful in making sense of the present. But it’s a deterministic myth to think, “I had to turn out this way.” The fact of the matter is, there is no straight line whereby certain experiential inputs invariably lead to the same set of lifetime outputs.   In the social sciences,... Continue Reading