Throughout the book of 1 John, we see detailed treatments of three basic tests of genuine Christianity. They are the moral and ethical (keeping God’s commands), the familial (loving one another), and doctrinal (believing the truth). In this passage of his letter, we find John addressing the first two of these. Now by this we …
Turns Out He Was Holding Back
“We turn now to another point in this list of the various things one has to consider in a sermon whether written or extemporary, namely the place of humour in preaching . . . What makes all these things difficult is that they are natural gifts, or the place of the natural gifts, in this …
Filling Up the Outline
“Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that great preacher, did not write out his sermons in full; he just prepared and used a skeleton” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 214).
Evil “Sinlessness”
From the prologue we might have expected John to begin his “argument proper” with a discourse on the incarnation of Christ. But although his preamble begins with a strong assertion of the Incarnation, when he begins to interact with the teaching of antichrist, he begins at another place entirely. He begins with the moral issue. …
Talk to Your Text
“One of the first things a preacher has to learn is to talk to his texts. They talk to you, and you must talk to them” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 202).
De Regno Christi
I am happy to refer you all over to De Regno Christi, which is hosting a discussion of the Federal Vision, starting today. Many thanks to them for the privilege of participating in that discussion.
It Only Encourages Them
This Lord’s Day begins a series of exhortations on the subject of our civic responsibilities. We are about a month and a half away from a local election, and I have come to believe that there is no little confusion on the part of many of us as Christians about what our responsibilities actually are. …
Bellwether Worship
A friend once commented to me, echoing Wolterstorff, that there are three currents in the Reformed river. First, there are the pietists, to whom personal conversion and resultant personal devotion is everything. And then there are the doctrinalists, to whom precise doctrinal conformity to the Canons of Whatsitburg are everything. The third group is the Kuyperian, …
A Constant God
This post does not need to be an extended response to Green Baggins. He largely agreed with the chapter in RINE on assurance of salvation, and had just a couple questions or concerns. The first was his response to my statement that we should not try to “peer into the secret counsels of God, or …
No Covenant Children
Just a brief comment here, building off the discussion of my Frank Turk post. Frank said this: “But Dr. Clark baptizes babies for the sake of adding them to the church. Just because he doesn’t add them to the church in practice doesn’t mean he’s not doing it in theory, does it?” There is a …