“Consequently, the preacher of the word must not answer to his audience. He answers to the one who commissioned him, that is, Christ. The evaluation of whether a message is right is not to be found primarily in the mortal audience, but rather in the eternal audience. This means that we need men who know …
Thin on the Ground
“A true minister, one who is a genuine angel and a true interpreter is no common or ordinary man. Such men are thin on the ground, one of many — indeed, ‘one of a thousand'” (Perkins, The Art of Prophesying, p. 93).
Warm, Friendly, and Distant
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 …