If Jesus Christ is not the Lord of all nations, then He is not the Lord of any nation. If He is not the Lord of any nation, then He is not the Lord of any individual. If He is no one’s Lord, then you are still in your sins. But you are not in …
Egg the Pudding, But Don’t Overegg the Pudding
“It is well that there should be a goodly number of illustrations in our discourses. We have the example of our Lord for that: and most of the greatest preachers have abounded in similies, metaphors, allegories, and anecdotes. But beware of overdoing this business” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 136).
Friendship Evangelism
INTRODUCTION: For various reasons, evangelism is a difficult subject for many Reformed Christians. Some die-hard Calvinists may have glanced at the title of this message—friendship evangelism—and asked, “What’s evangelism?” Or, if they are really die-hard Calvinists, perhaps they asked, “What’s friendship?” But this attitude is not what the Bible teaches, not what the tradition of …
Christ the Lord of the Covenant
The Word of God teaches us how we are to understand the relationship between the Old and New Testament, which relates to the relationship between the Jews and Gentiles. If we let go of certain preconceived ideas, that relationship is not difficult to grasp. “For if the first fruit be holy, the lump is also …
Not Taxing Their Patience
“In order to maintain attention, avoid being too long. An old preacher used to say to a young man who preached an hour, — ‘My dear friend, I do not care what else you preach about, but I wish you would always preach about forty minutes.’ We ought seldom to go much beyond that — …
Restitution: The Forgotten Duty
This last Lord’s Day, I preached on the forgotten duty of restitution. You can take a listen here. “Forgiveness of sin is forgiveness of sin, not redefinition of sin (Rom. 13:8-10). ‘Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven’ contains a glorious truth. But, misapplied as it frequently is, it also represents a travesty of biblical living.”
Christ the Lord of Redemption
The gospel is not fragile. In it, the wisdom of God in Christ overthrows kingdoms, powers, principalities, egos, and various cherished doctrines. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. …
A Large Bible
“Yet further, do not repeat the same idea over and over again in other words. Let there be something fresh in each sentence. Be not forever hammering away at the same nail: yours is a large Bible; permit people to enjoy its length and breadth” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 134).
God’s Palimpsest
Let’s begin with the basic reason why it is so important to understand what the ground of our justification is — the early Reformers insisted on this (rightly) in the Pauline spirit of preventing any man from boasting about his salvation, which sinful men always want to do. The point was not that we had …
Christ the Lord of Creation
We are Christians, and this means that Christ must be central to our understanding of the created order. We cannot understand anything apart from Him, and this understanding must be bounded and guided by Scripture. Central to the Reformed faith is a right understanding of the created order, and our place in it. “Wherefore God …