A man who confesses his sins is doing something like this. In prayer to God, he names the sin he has committed, and he takes care to use the same name that the Bible uses. He does this because he is repentant and has turned away from that sin, rejecting it entirely. He thanks God …
All Things Under His Feet
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) The Basket Case Chronicles #184 “For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall …
Herein Is Love
Foreigner famously sang “I want to know what love is.” There are different ways to address such a foundational question from Scripture, and I just noticed another one of them this morning. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we …
Invocation Lincoln Day Dinner 2015
Though I am not a Republican, I was asked to deliver the invocation at the annual Lincoln Day dinner. This is what I said. As we turn to God in prayer, as we call upon Him in this invocation, we should be doing so in the full and complete confidence of three things. First, we …
Surveying the Text: Romans
Introduction: The book of Romans is the Magna Carta of the human soul. The book of Romans contains as thorough a statement of genuine liberty as can be found anywhere in all of human literature. The book of Romans is a book of life, a tree of life. The book of Romans is a three-foot-thick …
Right Handed Mercy
As we gather here, we are partaking of Christ. This is presented to us under the forms of bread and wine, representing His passion on our behalf. But we are not being presented with a momentary Christ, a Christ limited to those few days at the end of His life. No, we are presented with …
Hope Deferred and the Tree of Life
The gospel gathers us, and our subsequent worship consists of what we say and what we enact. We say, we confess, that Jesus is Lord and we believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead. But Jesus said that if we love Him we will do what He said, and the very …
The Last Enemy
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) The Basket Case Chronicles #183 “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26). In the verse just prior to this one we are told that Christ must reign as He progressively puts down all opposition to His rule. All …
Surveying the Text: Song of Songs
Introduction: As we consider the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, there is much of spiritual value that we can gather from it, even though we might not grasp the overall narrative thread. This intensely emotional and very erotic love poem is very much like the way of a man with a maid—everybody knows …
The Politics of Sodomy 3: Has It Come to That?
NB: This is the outline for the first service at Christ Church Introduction Often we confront problems in our individual lives, or in our families, and after we have exhausted all the possibilities in our hunt for a solution, we ask others to pray for us. “Oh,” some might be tempted to think. “Has it …