Discerning Between Mountains and Molehills
When it comes to a defense of the gospel, two things are necessary—courage and discernment.
We are living in times where confusing doctrines and trendy ideas infiltrate the church on a daily basis. The information superhighway of the Internet runs at light speed. Such a modern reformation is not possible when men remain silent and hunker down in the safety of their own personal castles. We are living in... Continue Reading
Learning from Example
When I read Jeremiah telling the King exactly what to do to keep Jerusalem from being destroyed by the Babylonians, I wanted to yell "Just do it already!"
King Zedekiah defied what God said through Jeremiah and in the end, he lost his family, his eyes, and lived the remainder of his life in prison (Jeremiah 39). As I read this, I thought to myself, “The king had a prophet of God speaking to him and he still did what he wanted to do.... Continue Reading
Is Pornography Your Therapy?
But while porn is always a problem, the problem is not always porn.
Porn, for many, is a comfort sin, a type of therapy. Have a stressful day? Sit down and relax. Angry with your spouse or anxious about an upcoming test? Bring your concerns to the computer screen. Are you lonely? Sad? Bitter, bored, or busy? The door is always open. We bring our problems to porn,... Continue Reading
The Great Irony of Denying Human Depravity
We all know that people do bad things, but sin isn’t the post-modern answer.
One might debate that a serial killer is genetically predisposed to mass murder, while another theorizes that their inclination to do violence is a corollary of childhood trauma. While this is an interesting conversation it fails to get to the deeper reason of why we’re discussing nature and nurture in the first place. The starting... Continue Reading
How One Book Changed My Life
The recently translated prolegomena volume of Petrus van Mastricht's late seventeeth-century Theoretical-Practical Theology has great power to transform the soul.
Jonathan Edwards called this book the best ever written after the Bible, and surely one reason is that it is thoroughly biblical. Consider, for example, the order of Mastricht’s chapters: each begins with an “Exegetical Part,” which carefully examines a particular text of Scripture in order to lay the foundation for the Dogmatic, Elenctic, and... Continue Reading
Ratramnus of Corbie and His Book on the Lord’s Supper
Nearly forgotten for the first 200 years, misattributed for the next 600 and condemned until the 20th century, Ratramnus’s book is today still obscure.
In some ways, Ratramnus is like Augustine: both Roman Catholics and Protestants claim him as their own. In reality, his book stands in church history more as a question mark than a period. It has contributed to raise important inquiries, and has proven that the history of Christian thought is not as black and white... Continue Reading
The Morning Star of the Reformation
Now we see why the medieval Roman Church wanted to make a statement against Wycliffe.
John Wycliffe has often been called “the Morning Star of the Reformation.” Jan Hus, another pre-Reformation reformer, felt obliged to express his supreme debt to Wycliffe. And though he lived long after Wycliffe’s death, Martin Luther, too, felt an obligation to recognize the pioneering reforms of John Wycliffe. Luther stood on the shoulders of Hus,... Continue Reading
Heaven Will Be Better Than Eden
Eden was never intended to be the end. It was always headed somewhere — somewhere even more glorious: new heavens and a new earth.
Rather than thinking of Eden in terms of perfection, we should think of it in terms of potential. Eden was unspoiled, but it was also unfinished; it was unsullied, but it was also incomplete. As Adam and Eve were fruitful and multiplied, more offspring in the image of God would come to glorify God by enjoying him... Continue Reading
The Church that Lives by the State Shall Die by the State
The Orthodox Church continues to suffer from the Czech government’s “pro-Orthodox” policy to this day.
When it came to the Byzantine Catholic Church, the Communists sought “only liquidation,” the then-archbishop said in 2011. “We Orthodox know that such force is never a victory. That the Czechoslovakian party members supposedly helped the Orthodox Church in Czechoslovakia was only their cunning maneuver,” he said. “In fact, the Communists only injured the work... Continue Reading
The Persecution Driven Life
"Beware of beholding too much the happiness or misery of this world; for the consideration and too earnest love or fear of either of them draws us from God."
In 2 Timothy 3:12, Paul states, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” Paul was deeply persuaded that conflict is inevitable between the righteousness lives of the saints and those living ungodly lives in the world. This is nothing less than a tension between light and darkness. John... Continue Reading
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