Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Come down and judge, O God and king! Plead my cause, Plead my case Before an ungodly nation. Deliver me from liars, And from the unjust man. You are the God of my strength . . . Why do You cast me …
Meeting At the Appointed Place
When God feeds His people He uses means. These means are called means of grace. They do not bring grace to you the way a bucket carries water, but they are means of grace. So what does this mean? The biblical formula is that God saves and sanctifies us by grace through faith. Different wings …
Thirty Years of No Other Way to Go
Today is December 31, 2005, New Year’s Eve. It is also my thirtieth anniversary. Nancy and I were married New Year’s Eve, 1975. It took us a few years to figure out why the restaurants were always so crowded when we went out to celebrate. I met Nancy the year before we married, but I …
Gotta Serve Somebody
David Wells marks a difference between postmodernism and postmodernity. “As we try to understand our contemporary world, it is necessary, I believe, to distinguish between postmodernism and postmodernity. The former is the intellectual formulation of postmodern ideas on the high end of culture. It is their expression in architecture, in literary theory, philosophy, and so …
Pursuit Up the Chesapeake
Capt. Monroe stood near the bow of the Susquehanna, and looked anxiously northwards. The winds were contrary, and he was not making the headway that he needed. They were now near the mouth of the Chesapeake, but he wanted to make it as far up the bay as they could before he sent a messenger …
State of the Church 2006
Introduction One of our customs in Christ Church is to have a “state of the church“ message sometime around the first of the year. There are two slight changes this year. First, this year it is right at the first of the year, and the second difference is that this year we are going to …
Yesterday’s Avant-Garde
“It was a sign of the times that nobody bothered to correct him, simply because it didn’t seem to matter anymore: an era was dying with bewildering speed, and not all the righteous incantations in the English-speaking world could restore the patient to health. By 1980, even the most persistent apologists for the old regime-the …
Who Cares?
“But the problem is that we are regularly told to care about all the wrong things. ‘If we continue to maintain that God created the world in six days, we will not be granted academic respectability.’ To which we must reply, well, who cares? Why should we care that the guardians of the academy believe …
My Favorite Papist
A friend took the trouble to write me privately with some encouraging quotes from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. One of the most exasperating things about McLaren’s book was his attempt to appropriate Chesterton for himself, and so I thought I would just pass those citations on to you. I believe they are all from from chapter 3, …
Covenant Tokens
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and amen. Our God has brought us together here this evening to witness the joyful exchange of vows between Alex and Lynnessa. We know that we live in a sinful world because Scripture tells us that men make vows like this in order …