As we embrace the season of questions, before an inexplicable answer comes in God made man, we need to learn to voice our deepest complaints to the Lord himself. The Bible is full of people doing so, it is not impious or ungrateful or insufficiently reverential, tell him how you feel. When you do this you will... Continue Reading

His divine nature still had all the divine attributes of God that he had before the incarnation. But in his humanity, the expression of those attributes was limited. In his humanity, Jesus took on all that means to be a human. That includes being little, weak and helpless.    Christmas continues to provide a rich... Continue Reading

But because Mark’s is one of the four Gospels, this is one of the ways we should think about Jesus’s beginning. He had a royal herald smooth the way before him and let everyone know of his greatness (Mark 1:7). Jesus was anointed for his kingly mission with water and the Spirit, and he was declared the... Continue Reading

We can celebrate the coming of Jesus, because in him alone we find the light that frees us from the darkness of sin. We find the light that breaks into the darkness of our lives and hearts, changing and drawing us out of darkness into a relationship with the Light Giver.    The Christmas season... Continue Reading

The Lord always wanted his people to call the Sabbath a delight and that includes the special privilege of gathering twice on Sunday to enjoy the Lord. Wouldn’t it be great if we could cancel the cancellation of the evening service? If we’re concerned, at all, about the state of Christianity in our day, a... Continue Reading

Success is not wrong, but if our success causes us to lift our heads or puff out our chests, we draw attention toward ourselves and divert attention away from Christ. Because of our pride, it is all too easy to put on a veneer of being all put together and having our lives in order... Continue Reading

Sometimes we short change salvation, by thinking Jesus saves us and pays off our debt to God. We think of it like a massive debt we get into, so someone generously pays it off and we have a bank balance of zero, so we can start again without that debt hanging over us.  Too often that’s how... Continue Reading

John Calvin called the Psalter “the anatomy of all parts of the soul.” Commenting on Calvin’s thoughts, Robert Godfrey said, “In other words, (what Calvin is saying is that) the Psalter shows how Christians are to offer praise and prayer to God amid all the various circumstances of life.” Calvin taught that every fear, every... Continue Reading

Asaph understands that he cannot shape his own narrative arc and that there is a higher court to which he can appeal beyond his own subjectivity. In his despondency, he had only focused on what his retinas were telling him: like the horse with its blinders on, he could only view what was immediately in... Continue Reading

The nineteenth-century British hymn scholar John Mason Neale, whom hymnologist Albert Bailey calls “the prince of translators,” found a particular fascination with old Greek and Latin texts from the earliest days of the Church. In 1851 he translated the versification of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” into English. It soon became attached to a fitting... Continue Reading