In the resurrection account in Luke 24, we are told several times about the joy of the disciples. In v. 41 it says that they did not believe for joy, and after Christ’s ascension, it says that they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. We are also told several times in the account that the …
Forsaking the Right Thing
As we celebrate the Lord’s Supper every week, take note that every exhortation, every confession, every charge is to be heard in this context, and this is how we are to fence the Table. If you are a baptized believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you are not under the lawful discipline of His …
Judicial Suspicion
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 67 “He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it: and he that hateth suretiship is sure” (Prov. 11:15). The book of Proverbs is filled with hard-headed business advice, and here we have a fine sample. A man …
The Trees of the Lord
“In other words, the real dilemma should confront those who would undertake a biblical defense of writing like the author of the Elsie Dinsmore stories. While there are things in the Bible that might even resemble Swift’s Modest Proposal, there is nothing that remotely resembles 19th century sentimentality. So why is it that those who …
Receiving and Retaining
In his article on justification in the New Dictionary of Theology, N.T. Wright says a number of good and indisputable things. The dictionary was edited by David Wright, J.I. Packer, and Sinclair Ferguson, so we know that the Reformed bona fides should be in good order here. And I thought the article was quite good, …
Publishing Is Warfare
Some of you may have noticed that over the weekend the Canon Press images on my bookrack off to the right went blank. This little glitch on my blog was the result of a major renovation, overhaul and upgrade of the Canon Press web site. I would strongly encourage all of you (and your sisters …
Format Housekeeping
For those concerned, the RSS feed should be working again. A double-dash was throwing it off. As my web master put it, “RSS is rather picky to ‘illegal’ characters.” Also, because it appears that we will not have to deal with cyber attacks, we have removed the strict filtering of HTML formatting. So this means …
Getting An Advance
“When Jesus is teaching against anxiety and worry, He uses the striking image of those who run out of worries for the day, and so they have to get an advance. I don’t have enough troubles — and so I have borrow some from next week. ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the …
Witticisms from the Congregation
This last Sunday, I started a series of messages through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The previous Lord’s Day I concluded a long series of messages on marriage (39 sermons), which one young wag in the congregation told me should be entitled the “forty stripes save one” series. And this Sunday I had to spend …
An Edible Worldview
We are all familiar with the word worldview. It is a commonplace among us, and in danger of becoming a buzzword. The Reformed usually mean that a Christian worldview is something like having a biblically-based intellectual framework. This is part of it, but it is only a part. A worldview is characterized by four basic …