“To pummel the point (if I may), I have taught (in very clear and divers ways) that the grace given to the decretally elect at the point of the effectual call is grace that is qualitatively different than the common operations of the Spirit enjoyed (for a season) by the unregenerate covenant member. I have heaped this point up in a rumpled pile and have danced around it, gesticulating with enthusiasm. I have made a big building out of this point and put a blinking neon sign on top of it. If this point were an overpass, I have spray-painted my agreement with it in bright green letters at least eighteen inches high. With my white chef’s hat on, I have wheeled this point out of the kitchen on a cart, poured brandy all over it, and set it on fire. If the point were a pudding, I would have added three eggs beyond what the recipe called for. To summarize briefly, this is not something I have somehow neglected to say.”
Let’s You and Him Fight
Introduction: The Scriptures teach us to love our enemies. The evangelical squish interprets this to mean that we aren't supposed to have any enemies—except for those awkward hardliners who ...
Grace Can Give Different Things
“The fact that God is gracious is He makes a gracious covenant with unfilled Adam, which Adam broke, and then another gracious covenant with fallen men in the second Adam, which Christ kept, does not mean these two gracious covenants have to be the same thing.”
Tombs of the Prophets
“Is it okay to read what our Reformed fathers wrote and preached back in the day? And learn from them? Or must we simply invoke their names with pious looks on our faces?”
Letters, You Know, The Kind You Guys Write
Letter to the Editor: "But there is no way for us to return to our senses without returning to our God. That’s it." Pastor, how can we maintain any hope when Christians are praying He grants ...
The Kind of Election We Are Not Going to Have
"With him the love of country meansBlowing it all to smithereens" Robert Frost, A Case for Jefferson And no, the reference is not to Trump. Introduction: I ...
Honoring God in Personal Finances
Introduction: Martin Luther once said that a man needs to be converted twice. The first conversion is that of his heart, and the second one is of his wallet. What we are going to be addressing here ...
Dead Faith Accomplishes Nothing
“To include faithfulness in the very nature of living faith is not to intrude works. Faithful faith justifies. Faithless faith does not.”
We Can See That
Not the Barnacles
“Loving the original ship does not mean loving the barnacles . . . In the grip of Enlightenment individualism, pietism, sentimentalism, and so forth, in our day the meaning of the solas has been turned aside from their original and more glorious meaning. Now they are solo Christus (just me and Jesus), solo gratia (narrow, sectarian grace), solo fide (when ‘I prayed the prayer’), solo Scriptura (just me and my Bible), and solo Deo gloria (God gets all the glory for saving me, and maybe somebody else. Now please realize that the word solo here constitutes a bad macaronic pun, and not a serious attempt to match gender, number, and case. No letters from the Latinists, please.”