INTRODUCTION: We are nearing the conclusion of the historic season of Lent, the preparation season for the celebration of Easter. This is Palm Sunday, the day in which we mark and celebrate the Lord’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. As we are trying to orient ourselves by and with a Christian year, instead of the secularized …
If It Be Truth
“Be sure you have the truth, and then be sure you hold it. Be ready for fresh truth, if it be truth, but be very chary how you subscribe to the belief that a better light has been found than that of the sun” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 208).
To Whom Much Is Given
“Be masters of your Bibles, brethren . . . When grace abounds, learning will not puff you up, or injure your simplicity in the gospel. Serve God with such education as you have, and thank Him for blowing through you if you are a ram’s horn, but if there be a possibility of your becoming …
No Countermeasures
When we gather to worship the Lord, when the call to worship is uttered, the Holy Spirit gathers us up, and ushers us all into the heavenly places where we then worship God in the name of Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. We have not come to a mountain that can be …
What Ritual Can Do
Baptism in water can be a complicated subject—and yet the author of Hebrews treats it as one of the Christian “basics.” This should make us wary because the evangelical Christian world doesn’t have this sorted out yet, and yet it should also make us eager to sort it out—to grow up into maturity as our …
A Minister’s Family
“We ought to be such husbands that every husband in the parish may safely be such as we are. Is it so? We ought to be the best of fathers. Alas! some ministers, to my knowledge, are far from this, for as to their families, they have kept the vineyards of others, but their own …
When God Drops the Rope
If we hear a word enough, we think we know what it means. We live in a Christ sub-culture that has strongly emphasized the need to be “born again.” Without denying this need for regeneration at all, we still have to place the reality in a biblical context, lest we turn it into something entirely …
Take It Easy
“Little learning and much pride comes of hasty reading. Books may be piled on the brain till it cannot work” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 177).
By Faith, Not By Sight
Greeen Baggins has picked up the thread again, and so shall I. There is not a lot to talk about here, but rather just a few questions to answer. Lane gives three basic ways to take the “I am righteous” language of the psalter. One is say that the psalmist is not claiming a perfect …
This Will Happen to Us Too
I was reading this morning in Luther’s Table Talk, and came across an insight that is more than a little relevant to some of our confessional and dogmatic controversies. When someone had proposed the collected works of Luther, he said this (the emphasis is mine): “I’d like all my books to be destroyed so that …