Are You Tired?
Let’s not get tired of doing what is good.
Your purpose in life isn’t to be comfortable. The world has lied to you. Your purpose in life isn’t to store up treasures on earth. The world has lied to you. Your purpose in life isn’t to do what makes you happy. The world has lied to you. Your purpose in life is to please... Continue Reading
8 Elements Common to Answered Prayers
When God keeps a promise it provides validation for your faith. God loves to validate your faith in him.
One of the prayers God loves to answer is when you ask him simply to be true to his promises. We see Moses frequently praying to God simply that he keeps his covenant with Israel. Joshua based his confidence in the conquest of Canaan on the promises of God to grant victory. That’s why he... Continue Reading
Why Pastors Should Engage Thomas Cranmer
Cranmer’s labours to get the English Bible into every church and understood by every person in England is an outworking of his conviction on the doctrine of sola Scriptura.
Cranmer wrote a “how to read the Bible” guide for the second edition of The Great Bible. Entitled Preface to the Bible (1540) it drew on the theology of John Chrysostom (d.407) and Gregory of Nazianzus (d.390) regarding how the Bible should be read. Cranmer, as well as the other reformers, were at pains to... Continue Reading
A Letter to a Reader About the Battle Against Sin
You have to keep fighting, employing the means of grace supplied to us in the gospel.
I often tell people if they are struggling and fighting against sin, that’s a good sign of the Spirit’s work within them. Whereas the sinner is at home in his sin, the believer knows his only true home is in Christ. So ultimately what separates the Christian struggling with sin to the unbeliever in sin is... Continue Reading
God Takes Salvation Into His Own Hands
Come, you multitude of impenitent men, and contemplate the only chance which remains for your salvation.
God has taken the work of delivering his people into his own hands, is the only foundation of human hope. This doctrine of divine agency and human dependence, though it is opposed by all that is proud in man, by all his love of independence, by all his hatred of divine government, is yet one... Continue Reading
Should we try to preach like Jesus?
Just as the work of redemption belonged to Jesus alone, so elements of his preaching can only be reflected in ours.
It would be extremely dangerous—even blasphemous—to indiscriminately model one’s preaching after Jesus. He just has too much on us. He’s God after all, and has a few more tools in his homiletical utility belt than we are equipped to handle. On the other hand, the need of our day is every bit as acute as... Continue Reading
Is Marriage “Just a Piece of Paper”?
The signing of a marriage certificate is an integral part of what the Bible calls a covenant.
Contracts not only restrain sin, but also protect the innocent in the case of legal and moral violation. With every commitment I make to another human being, there is a sense in which a part of me becomes vulnerable, exposed to the response of the other person. No human enterprise renders a person more vulnerable... Continue Reading
Wear Down Worship
If these fools cannot be kept away from gathering, they can surely be led to worship half-heartedly.
We have had great success in the last few decades in corrupting some church leaders in their otherwise good motivations to make their assemblies more accessible, exciting, and entertaining. In this way, the worshipers have been made to think that they are there to be an audience rather than to worship the Enemy. There... Continue Reading
Sage Counsel On Growing Useful As You Grow Older
Archibald Alexander’s motto for the elderly: “Endeavor of to be useful, as long as you are continued upon earth.”
What you need is a purpose to help you instead of petrifying your soul. Alexander’s motto for the elderly was “Endeavor of to be useful, as long as you are continued upon earth.” Sounding almost like a twenty-first century counselor, he suggests “imbecility and dotage are also prevented or postponed, or mitigated, by constant exercise... Continue Reading
God Does Not Need You…and That’s Good News!
What good news it is, then, that the gospel depends on a God who does not depend on us.
God is incommensurable, incapable of being measured by the same standards of our human existence. Unlike everything in this world, his existence is not grounded in, derived from, or contingent on something or someone else. No one brought him into being, nor is he dependent on something or someone else to continue being. What... Continue Reading