The Bible does not teach us that the Table must be protected from unfaithful people. Rather, the Bible teaches us that unfaithful people must be protected from the Table. This Table is a winnowing fan, a fan that separates the wheat from the chaff. This Table deals with us as we come to it. To …
The Temptation Starts Early
This exhortation is directed to the young people in our midst, to those who have grown up in the covenant. Here is the charge. Our unbelieving culture around us likes to pretend that hypocrisy, particularly religious hypocrisy, is the special province of elderly and crotchety Christians. But as one who has spent my entire life …
Looking for a City
The Word and the sacrament go together. Without the sacrament, the Word by turns gradually evolves into mere lecturing, or, if it is excited, a hectoring of God’s people. On the other hand, the sacrament without the Word gradually turns to superstitious and blind observance, at the end indistinguishable from rank paganism. The two go …
Church Membership and Disloyalty
One of the things that modern Christians have a hard time doing right is loyalty. We don’t know how loyalty is supposed to work. We don’t understand the spiritual requirement of personal allegiance to your church and its leadership, and in addition we have a very poor understanding of what disloyalty actually smells like. Not …
The Apostles Creed 9: He Suffered Under Pontius Pilate
Introduction: This portion of the Creed points to something that is absolutely unique about the Christian faith. Our God is the God of all things, which means that He is the God of history. History matters, which means that historicity matters, which means the name of a Roman prefect, governing the small Roman province of …
About the Grain Silos . . .
Earlier this week a number of you may have noticed that our local paper carried a story, with an above-the-fold headline, in which they said that a Christ Church elder was in the process of buying the old grain silos downtown. Now it wouldn’t be our local paper if they hadn’t gotten some things wrong, …
Partaking
Remember there is no such thing as a nature/grace dichotomy. Nature is grace, and grace, rooted as it is in the very nature of God, is entirely natural. When we come to this table, we are certainly partaking of Christ. But we are not doing this because the table is a different kind of event, …
Real Reform
“That minister . . . whose preaching results in the actual conversion of human beings, contributes far more, in the long run, to the progress of society, literature, art, science, and civilization, than he does, who, neglecting these themes of sin and grace, makes a direct effort from the pulpit to ‘elevate society’” (Shedd, Homiletics …
A Cavalcade of Mummery
John Calvin famously said that the human heart is a factory of idols. What this means is that there is a yearning, a lust, to place some object, any object, in the position that only God Himself should occupy. “Because they despised my judgments, and walked not in my statutes, but polluted my sabbaths: for …
The Apostles Creed 8: Conceived, Born
Introduction: We have been working through the Apostles’ Creed phrase by phrase, but this week I thought it important to take two phrases at once. We are talking about that most remarkable of women, Mary. If some have erred through excessive devotion to her, we are not going to fix anything by withholding from her …