Confessions and Worship
When Christians publicly confess the truths that the church has always confessed, God is distinguishing between the church and the world...
Keep Reading Confessions and Worship
When Christians publicly confess the truths that the church has always confessed, God is distinguishing between the church and the world...
Confessional Discipleship (Part 2)
Christian service will also flow out of Christian discipleship. If we merely program service in the local church, we will end up creating a church full of Martha’s (Luke 10:38...
Confessional Discipleship (Part 1)
The Westminster Standards address many of the significant theological and practical matters for Christian discipleship better than we could on our own. If we are to equip congregants to be sound in the faith, fruitful in every good word and work, and to be prepared for potentially difficult days ahead, we should consider using the Westminster Standards as a guide in Christian discipleship. ...
The Practice of Rest
Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28). He is the one who rested in the grave on the old covenant Sabbath...
Why We Need a Priest
The entirety of the believer’s life can only be lived in light of the priesthood of Christ. As the Mediator of the new covenant, Jesus preeminently functions as the Great High Priest over the house of God. In the words of James Henley Thornwell, “Priesthood is the perfection of mediation,” and we have such a perfect Mediator in Jesus...
The First-fruits of the Resurrection
the resurrection on the last day is built on the resurrection of Jesus Himself. Just as all mankind is originally in Adam, so believers have been brought into union with the last Adam, Jesus Christ (1Corinthians 15:21...
More Than a Shibboleth
May we not fall into ritualistic, Christless, and imbalanced approaches to the means of grace in our churches. How we minister the means of grace in the context of public worship is more important than simply professing to be “an ordinary means of grace church.” May the ordinary means of grace be more than a Shibboleth to us....
What is a Means of Grace?
A brief survey of the top fifty best-selling Christian books reveals what subjects are of the greatest and least interest to the majority of professing Christians. Books on purpose, finances, personality, self-esteem, love languages, and relational boundaries dominate the list. Books on the triune God, Christ, sin, the gospel, Scripture, preaching, the sacraments, prayer, church discipline, and the local church are woefully wanting. ...
We Are Not Home Yet
In his book "The Problem of Pain," C.S. Lewis wrote, “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. . . . Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”...
Self-Awareness, Love, and Overreaction
we need to learn to react to error in a way commensurate with the truth...
What is Evangelical Repentance?
Evangelical repentance is not a one-time experience in the life of those who come to Jesus Christ in faith. Rather, as those trusting in Christ, we will spend the rest of our lives repenting of indwelling sin (Rom. 7:15...
What Must I Do to Be Saved?
Richard Sibbes, one of the most beloved English Puritan pastors and theologians, once wrote, “God knows we have nothing of ourselves, therefore in the covenant of grace He requires no more than He gives, but gives what He requires, and accepts what He gives.”1 With this statement, Sibbes conveyed the essence of the grace of God in the gospel. However, we still must answer the questions: What is it that God requires of us? And what is it that God accepts upon the fulfillment of what He requires?...
The True Vine
Most of the types in the Fourth Gospel are rooted in Israel’s exodus and wilderness experience. Whether it was the incarnation of the Son of God typified in the tabernacle in the wilderness (John 1:14), Jesus’ miracle of turning water to wine (John 2:1...
Love and Anger at the Cross
t is right for us to both affirm that the Father never stopped loving the Son when he hung on the cross and that the Father was justly angry with the Son "because of the sins themselves which he took upon him, and because of the persons of sinners whom he sustained." It would be unorthodox to insist that within the Godhead, the love of the Father for the Son was ever diminished or ceased. That would be a denial of the doctrine of Divine simplicity. It would be equally unorthodox to insist that--insomuch as Jesus was the representative of a people who are, by nature, under the wrath and curse of God and rightly the objects of his just anger and displeasure--the Son was not the object of the Father's just wrath. ...
The Role of the Spirit in Current Trinitarian Controversies
The defense of historic doctrinal formulations regarding the Triune God, the Person of Christ, inner-Trinitarian relations and the implications of those relations for gender roles are among the more substantial issues at stake in the debate. The interconnectedness of the matters involved in the controversy makes just about any attempt to distill the essence of the debate into a summary form an extremely daunting task. However, there is one supremely important component of the debate that has been largely neglected...
Closely Connected Care
With each cultural crisis or natural disaster, our minds are freshly flooded with a litany of images and calls to come to the aid of our neighbors who have been the victims of an injustice or who have suffered loss. One of the downsides of living in a media-connected age is that we can't escape the constant barrage of information about all of the miseries of this life. Additionally, we have an overwhelming number of para-church ministries that, by virtue of the fact that they are specialty ministry organizations, often give the sense that their thing is the thing in which all should be invested...
Laying R.I.P. to Rest
I've noticed something of a concerning trend over the past several years. It is the way in which believers speak about culture-impacting individuals at their deaths. Instead of simply expressing appreciation for their life and achievements, it has become commonplace for Christians to use the shorthand R.I.P. ("rest in peace") on social media when speaking of individuals--in whose lives there was no evidence of saving grace--at their death. At the risk of sounding ill-tempered, I wish to set out several reasons why I am troubled by this occurrence....