One of the optical illusions created by the decision to home school or to have your children in a private Christian school is a significant one. It is this. The temptation is to think that in the home school, success or failure is fundamentally a parental matter while in the private school, success or failure …
And It Doesn’t Matter What Kind of Knife You Use
“A brave minister is the kind of man who would be willing to charge Hell with a bucket of water. But all too often, to modify a comment once made by Teddy Roosevelt, when it comes to contemporary ministers, we find ourselves thinking that we could carve more courageous ministers out of a banana” (Why …
The Sermon Prep Meal
“What I am stressing is this: a minister must be a divine interpreter, an interpreter of God’s meaning. And therefore he must not only read the book, but eat it. He must not only have the knowledge of divine things flowing in his brain, but engraved on his heart and printed in his soul by …
Three Reasons Why There Has Been An FV Controversy
A young Reformed believer heading off to college should be able to learn the five solas of the Reformation — yea, even the six ordinary days of creation. But this requires further development. Over the last number of years, since the eruption of the FV controversy, we have of course been involved in the public …
Designer Vestments: Renouncing the World in Style
A worthwhile discussion about vestments is being had over at Baylyblog. If you join that discussion, be sure to behave.
The Commandment of the Everlasting God
INTRODUCTION:We now come to the final blessing, the final benediction. In this letter, Paul has given us a mere synopsis of his gospel, and that synopsis is overwhelming. If the entire gospel were to be laid out for us all at once, we would be crushed by the glory of it. Never forget that God …
Don’t Come Unless You Want Some
There are many complementary contrasts between the old and new covenants, and one of them has to do with the relative potency of sin. In the old covenant, sin is contagious. In the new covenant, holiness is. In the old covenant, God’s people were consistently warned against coming into contact with the unclean—with dead bodies, …
Red for Our Red
We want our sins to be reckoned as tiny for numerous reasons. One is the obvious self-justifying one, but we also want our sins to be small because we want God’s forgiveness to be a reasonable forgiveness. We want God to be a gentleman, the kind of being who would obviously be well-bred enough to …
Close and Far the Wrong Way
Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all. Our Father and great God, we do come before You with …
A Different Kind of Spine
The proposed Ground Zero mosque provides us with a wonderful case study of public square issues, and of the great need for a new Christendom. And since the opportunities in this situation to gain wisdom are enormous, it is not surprising that just about everybody is refusing to do so. The “hallowed ground” meme has, …