Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Gracious Father of all salvation, we magnify Your great works of deliverance through the ages, as You have always shown kindness to Your people. You brought Abraham out of the idolatry of Ur of the Chaldees. You delivered Moses when he was …
Absolutely Uninterested
Although we are a Christian people, we still have a tendency to hide from the sheer goodness of the gospel. One of the ways we have of doing this is to turn the word sinner into a technical theological one, meaning that no one is perfect, and despite this, any one can call on God …
Ceasing From Strife
We learn from Proverbs that it is an honor for a man to cease from strife (Prov. 20:3). This is one of many examples in Scripture that show how the wisdom of God is 180 degrees out from the wisdom of man. In how many fruitless quarrels have participants refused to back down from the …
Jumping to Conclusions
We all understand what the phrase “jumping to conclusions” means. But we sometimes do not appreciate what the alternative–reserving judgment–actually means. As we live together in covenant community, it is essential that we master the art of “not jumping,” even if the conclusion looks to us like a safe landing place. This is particularly the …
Renewing Covenant
We are here in a service of covenant renewal. We know that this covenant contains blessings for obedience and chastisements for disobedience. We also know that all of us stumble and are disobedient at times, and so we wonder what is the good of renewing a covenant that we constantly break. The glorious news is …
Marriage As Manifest Glory XXX
INTRODUCTION: Having looked at what headship is not, and what it really is according to Scripture, we now need to take a look at what submission is not. In this fallen world, glorious things are slandered and caricatured first, and sometimes the defenders of such things find themselves defending the caricature, and not the reality. …
Faithfulness Covers
As we labor to learn how to speak as Christians, we have to take care to learn our lessons from Scripture. This is because sin is always defined by God, and not by our own instincts. We must always define sins of the tongue according to the Word. Scripture says that a “talebearer revealeth secrets: …
Proverbial Generalizations
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 58 The book of Proverbs is filled with a number of divinely inspired generalizations. This means that it contains true statements that describe how God generally governs the world. For example, laziness is generally rewarded with lean times, and industry …
Vanities and Mist
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Father of all glory, we come now to exalt and praise Your name. We ask that You would strengthen and feed us, and nourish us, but not because the focus of this service of worship is on us. We ask You to …
Confessing the Other Guy’s Sins
Living in community as we do, and living in the kind of community we live in, it is necessary that offenses will come. We provoke them, we commit them, we endure them, and frequently we will do one of these, thinking that we are doing another. We provoke offenses while thinking that we are enduring …