The fear of God is the foundation of every form of righteous fearlessness. The refusal to fear God opens you up to every kind of timorousness. Jesus tells us explicitly that we are not to fear man, but rather to fear God. He sets this forth as a basic alternative. If you fear God, you …
The City That Cannot Fall
In Daniel 1:8-16, Belshazzar holds a great feast, on the night when the great city of Babylon fell. There was eating and drinking, and there were even sacred vessels from the Temple in use there—but not for blessing. That was the night when a hand appeared and wrote on the wall that “you have been …
Fearing Phantoms
Father, we confess our fear to You. As a nation, our courage has turned to bluster, our confidence into a calculated pose. We are afraid of real threats, like economic hard times or terrorism, and we are afraid of phantoms of our imagination, like global warming. Father, as a people it often appears that we …
Principalities and Porkers
Here are some quick takeaways from the election. 1. Now the Republicans are on the hot seat. We move from campaign rhetoric, which always gets the juices flowing, to the actual business of governance. Two test cases for you to watch. The first is that certain Republican principalities and porkers are in line (seniority-wise) for …
Spiraling Toward Silence
In 1 Cor. 12, Paul mentiones that back in the day when they were pagans, they served mute or dumb idols (v. 2). Their bondage was that they served gods that could not speak. But Paul’s immediate application is quite interesting. Because of this, Paul wants them to understand that it is not possible to …
Which It Does
“The boundaries of Scripture are an infallible truth confessed by a fallible church. The triune nature of God is an infallible truth confessed by a fallible church, and so on. At this point, the advocate of Rome might want to chime in and say that we can have no confidence in the infallibility of the …
A Cardinal Function
“All too often one assumes that the taproot of Christian preaching goes back to the ministry of the prophets; preaching is thought of as the religious concern of the prophets, over against the liturgical concerns of the priesthood. There may have been circles in which this was true, but those who gave us the book …
Not the Clerk of Session
I am currently teaching an elective on Jonathan Edwards at New St. Andrews, and something we recently covered made me realize the ways in which historic evangelicals need to speak and be heard, and need at the same time to listen carefully. The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching …
The Truth is Right, As It Turns Out
“The church is always fallible. The truth she confesses is always infallible. The error she stumbles over is always false” (“Sola Scriptura, Creeds, and Ecclesiastical Authority,” in When Shall These Things Be? p. 269).
Are We There Yet?
“As any experienced pastor knows, the secret of leading a congregation is interpreting to the people where one is going and what one is doing and why it is necessary and important to do it” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p. 27).