“God’s truth is searching: leave it to search the hearts of men without offensive additions from yourself. He is a mere bungler in portrait painting who nees to write the name under the picture when it is hung up in the family parlour where the person himself is sitting. Compel your hearers to perceive that …
The Just Shall Live By Faith
Okay. Faith and works. We will have to roll up our sleeves on this one. In this chapter Piper interacts with Wright’s assertion that our final justification is on the basis of the “complete life lived.” Wright says, and Piper agrees, that “the attempt to shore up justification by faith by saying that the life …
Declaration and Doing
Chapter Six of Piper’s book is about whether or not justification determines our standing with God, or whether, as Wright argues, it is God’s formal declaration that this standing has already been established. According to Wright, the declaration of the gospel of Christ’s kingship is “very much the means” that God uses to transform individuals, …
Push Back
One evening a father was sitting in front of the television, watching the evening news. His teenage son happened to walk through, and stopped for a moment. A commercial came on, and so the son said, “Dad, how can you bear to watch that stuff?” His father looked up. “Well, otherwise I would not know …
Humility Reigns
Recall that the last section of Zechariah consists of two great prophetic oracles. The first is found in chapters 9-11, and the second is 12-14. We come now to a glorious prophecy of the coming Christ. “The burden of the word of the Lord against the land of Hadrach . . .”(Zech. 9:1-10). The human …
Sermons Should Be Tailor-Made, Not Fetched Off the Rack
“Consider what sins appear to be most rife in the church and congregation — worldliness, covetousness, prayerlessness, wrath, pride, want of brotherly love, slander, and such like evils. Take into account, affectionately, the trials of your people, and seek for a balm for their wounds” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 87).
Good News, Lord Caiphas!
N.T. Wright sometimes overstates his case. By this I mean that he says things like “X is not Y” when it would perhaps be more helpful to say “in addition to Y we must also be careful to say X.” For example, he maintains that the gospel is not about how to get saved, but …
Pre-Selected Texts
“It must be burdensome to some, and very easy to others, I should imagine, to find their subject, as they do whose lot is cast in the Episcopal establishment, where the preacher usually refers to the gospel or the epistle, or the lesson for the day, and feels himself bound — not by any law, …
Divine and Human Righteousness
In chapter four of Piper’s book, I suspect there is a little bit of Piper and Wright talking past one another. In this chapter, Piper is arguing for the “necessity of real moral righteousness” in justification. “Wright stresses that for the defendant, righteousness is not a character quality (i.e. not a moral righteousness) but a …
State of the Church 2008
INTRODUCTION: One of our customs is to have an annual “state of the church” message around the first of the year. These messages vary—sometimes they address the state of the evangelical church generally, and other times they are more geared to the circumstances surrounding our particular congregation. This message falls into the latter category, but …