The Majestic Tenderness of Christ Removes Fear
John manifests weakness but Christ reveals much love, tenderness, and skilfulness in dealing with him (Revelation 1:17-18). Our fears can be real and debilitating, Christ graciously observes this and deals with the excessive fears of His people to remove them.
When souls are fainted and discouraged, Christ is both the cure and the curer. He must lay His hand on us and speak the word. He is the cure that is applied, and the physician that applies it. He touches and speaks, and the cure follows. Believers must receive the word out of Christ’s mouth... Continue Reading
Luther and the Beauty of Christ
Luther believed that the Cross was a wrecking ball to this world’s notion of beauty. He pointed out that the Cross was both beautiful and ugly.
The beauty of the Cross is Christ’s and the ugliness is ours. The eternal Son of God had a beauty that outshone Esther’s like the sun outshines a candle. Yet, it is on the Cross that Christ exchanges that beauty for our sinful ugliness. What is more, in taking our ugliness upon himself, Christ becomes... Continue Reading
Know the Ideal Church. Commit to a Real Church.
If you and I only knew and believed the truths about the local Church as laid out in Scripture, how many of our problems would be solved?
Don’t over complicate the local Church. Understand clearly from Scripture what the local Church is and should be. Then commit to a body in your local area that approximates this ideal Church. And then spend your days seeking to help that local body better reflect what the ideal Church is in Scripture. Being an average... Continue Reading
Good News for the Reformed Churches: Small is in Again
Those confessional Reformed congregations that are warm, welcoming, hospitable, well-ordered, and law-and-gospel-preaching are doing what God has ordained.
Smallish confessional Reformed congregations should not necessarily feel guilty about being small and socially insignificant. That has been the lot of most of the church for most of its history. The Roman empire, whose approval so many craved in the 4th and 5th centuries, no longer exists. The church continues. The Enlightenment did its best... Continue Reading
The Comfort of God’s Sovereignty
Anxiety, fear, and anger can weaken the confidence of many believers in God, especially their trust in God’s sovereignty.
Isaiah the prophet turns us to the sovereignty of God in chapter 40 of his prophecy. In similar circumstances of national disaster, Isaiah prepared God’s people for the imminent national catastrophe of exile by multiplying comforting pictures of God’s sovereignty. Let’s watch as he strengthens the inner world of God’s people with the external world... Continue Reading
Heart Rending
This walk of repentance on a daily basis is actually something we are called to do continually.
Heart -Rending is divinely wrought and solemnly felt. It is a secret grief which is personally experienced, not in mere form, but as a deep, soul-moving work of the Holy Spirit upon the inmost heart of each believer. It is not a matter to be merely talked of and believed in, but keenly and sensitively felt in every... Continue Reading
The Weakness of God
Nietzsche attacked Christianity with all the strength his mind and powerful prose could summon up. His hatred for Christians was sourced in part because he considered the faith to be a religion for the weak and a religion that idolised and encouraged weakness.
Nietzsche understood the faith, and hated it: Christianity does not idolise strength. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that God, supposedly the strongest being in the universe, could ever be weak. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that weakness could ever be good, it’s seen as... Continue Reading
Fiscal Hilarity
How is it that we can give and give and give and still have enough to give more?
The size of our giving is not to be a matter of revelation, but of devotion. In other words, each of us should “do just as he has purposed in his heart; not grudgingly or under compulsion; for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor. 9:7). Now think about that carefully. God likes giving to... Continue Reading
The Wedding at the End of Marriage
Marriage doesn’t exist just to remedy the loneliness of singleness; marriage exists to tell us that we need Jesus.
God gave us marriage so that he might one day give us to Christ. God gave us wives so that we might see something of the beauty he sees in his church. God gave us husbands so that we might see something of the courage, strength, and love in his Son. Have you ever... Continue Reading
How Should We View the Church?
The church is a sin-plagued institution precisely because it is filled with sin-plagued people: people like me.
This is how I want to view the church of Jesus: wicked and compromised, but loved, and purified, and destined for greatness. I think this should be reflected in everything we do for and inside the church: our stand for truth and justice, as well as our newsletters. For those who spend a lot of... Continue Reading
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