Faith, Feelings, and Facts
Do you believe God or Satan?
“It is the grand design of Satan to lessen our opinion of God’s goodness… He seeks to hide God’s goodness, and to represent him as a God that delights in our destruction and damnation, rather than in our salvation.” God is slandered daily. Satan, who is a liar and the father of lies, makes... Continue Reading
Undergoing the Powerful Scalpel of God’s Truth
God’s truth will always be to our benefit and spiritual health.
We regularly seek the truth of God’s word each and every Lord’s Day as we go to church and draw near to Christ through the means of grace—word, sacrament, and prayer. We walk away from a worship service and give thanks to God when one of his faithful ministers heralds the truth and preaches the... Continue Reading
Repentance – What Does it Look Like?
God does not forsake the work His hand has begun.
The effect of sin is devastating. As children of God, unconfessed sin has a way of getting inside our hearts so that we feel guilty – thankfully. But not every child of God immediately admits their sin in repentance. Then it becomes difficult to pray, and the desire to open the Bible evaporates, and they... Continue Reading
Lord’s Day Mediation: “O Lord, Thou Hast Pleaded the Causes of My Soul” by C.H. Spurgeon
O children of God, seek after a vital experience of the Lord’s lovingkindness.
A grateful spirit should ever be cultivated by the Christian; and especially after deliverances we should prepare a song for our God. Earth should be a temple filled with the songs of grateful saints, and every day should be a censor smoking with the sweet incense of thanksgiving. How joyful Jeremiah seems to be while... Continue Reading
Help! I Keep Losing My Temper
We aren’t doomed to endlessly lose our tempers! God promises to work in the hearts of those who love him.
Whenever you or I lose our tempers, it means we’ve gone from wanting some good thing, to demanding that we must have it or else. Sinful anger is so convinced of its own moral high ground that it feels perfectly justified visiting its wrath upon whatever, or whomever, has dared to transgress absolute justice (i.e.,... Continue Reading
Be Sad During COVID-19… but Be Sad Differently
Christian grief is a transformed kind of grief.
It is comforting to know that the Christian does not need to repent of his or her tears; the Christian has no need to apologize for their feelings of loss. The Christian, whose bonds with others in Christ should be the strongest of all, should grieve even more deeply at the loss of someone else. Grief... Continue Reading
The Reality of a Virtual Funeral
We have hope in Christ and we must remember that he has gone before us—passing through death—and now ruling from heaven’s throne.
As we sit in empty rooms for virtual funeral services, we must look to our real hope that we have in Christ Jesus. In a strange providential season when friends, family, and our church body is kept at a distance—we must cling to the hope we have in Jesus Christ. We must remember the words... Continue Reading
10 Words Every Christian Should Know (and Be Able to Explain)
Without understanding how they are justified in Christ, Christians may wrongly think their own works, good or bad, could keep them in or out of God’s kingdom.
Believers will never have to face God’s just sentence for their sins and spend eternity in hell separated from God. Think of someone in a courtroom who is guilty of a horrible crime and deserving of the severest punishment, but is instead declared innocent because someone else paid the penalty for them—and even made them... Continue Reading
Grumbling: A Family Tradition
Alone on the cross, instead of grumbling, Jesus took our grumblings upon himself as the representative Grumbler.
To complain is to ask God why he’s not giving water in the desert and plead for him to provide; to grumble is to say there’s not water because God doesn’t care. The first seeks to obtain something. The other seeks only to destroy. In Philippians 2:14, Paul commands the people not to grumble but... Continue Reading
Saved from the Deep
When you remember the Lord and pray, it is only because God is with you to uphold your spirit in order to pray.
Why would God be so ready to hear our prayers, especially if we have been like Jonah, who had hardly been a paragon of faith? He answers that his prayer came “into your holy temple” (Jon. 2:7). The temple was the place where the atoning sacrifices were offered. To leap forward from Jonah to the... Continue Reading