This seems to me a strangely and fundamentally defective statement of the doctrine of justification, in that three elements that are always to be found in the confessional standards’ statements about justification are not to be found there. First, there is no reference to our Lord, or a clear statement that it is His righteousness... Continue Reading

Humans are born with plenty of desires that we must be taught to suppress or eliminate, like the desire to take whatever we want and have all the toys. Humans have “natural” desires for satisfying all kinds of outrageous lusts of the flesh, sexual and otherwise, and some downright deviant like pedophilia. We are born... Continue Reading

Christians sing not only at sunrise, when rescue has finally rushed over the horizon. They also sing at midnight, when the blackness makes the sun seem burnt out. And often, God uses our midnight songs to keep us till the morning.   Christians are the sort of people who sing at midnight. When Paul and... Continue Reading

Have you ever had a conversation with someone and they weren’t listening to anything you were saying? You can see the exact moment they shut down. They have already figured out what they were going to say, and anything else you might say is not relevant. I think it is a problem for pastors. We... Continue Reading

I am conscious that Calvin’s comments may not be fully appreciated by all of my readers. We typically have a much lower view of the church in the twenty-first century than John Calvin did in the sixteenth. We tend to see the church as optional, salvation as private, and worship as personal and individualistic.  ... Continue Reading

Ironically, there are believers who would die rather than deny the resurrection, yet they actually don’t understand or believe what the doctrine of the resurrection means! Despite the centrality of the resurrection in Scripture and church history, many of them have never been clearly taught its meaning, so they imagine they’ll live forever in a... Continue Reading

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but... Continue Reading

Once, a man told me about a parenting event titled “No Regrets.” I assumed it was an event organized by parents of newborns. The parent with no regrets, after all, probably needs to think a little deeper. If you have no regrets in parenting, just ask your kids.   What would I tell my younger... Continue Reading

Hegel’s immediate successors are typically distinguished into two streams—the Right Hegelians who used his thought to promote forms of conservative social thought, and the Left Hegelians who used his philosophy as the foundation for radical social and religious criticism. When one of the latter—a young man named Karl Marx—turned Hegel’s philosophical idealism on its head... Continue Reading

Today, through the impact of postmodernity, there is a new focus. It’s not as though the intellectual problems have disappeared or that the problems of guilt and sin have gone away. But the focus has shifted, and Christians now sense that they are weak, vulnerable, and powerless. They are being asked to hold on to... Continue Reading