We wrestle not against flesh and blood, St. Paul tells us, but rather against principalities and powers. These principalities have an embodiment and manifestation in the worldly power structures that surround us, and it is therefore a central responsibility of ours to assemble in worship of the triune God. This is because worship of Almighty …
Neither Dead Works Nor Dead Faith
Faith is a gift of God, lest any man should boast. With and in this faith, all of life is sacramental, and the two sacraments proper are clear and unobstructed meetings with God in Christ. But without faith, everything becomes blurry, and religion is reduced in principle to shamanism. The faith that God gives is …
An Odd Call to Worship
This may strike you as an odd call to worship, but you are being summoned to worship the God of heaven with understanding. This includes understanding how our worship affects the unbelieving world outside, and this particularly includes unbelieving women in our community taking off their tops. First, know that when God is worshiped rightly …
Marriage Slipping Away
Our nation recently passed two significant milestones. This last week, our population passed the 300 million mark. And also, just recently, the make-up of that population has been significantly changing. Five years ago, 52 percent of all households in America were married households. That number has now dropped below 50 percent. This means that those …
Little Exiles
God created us in order that we would get along with one another. When sin entered the world, our fellowship with God was disrupted, of course, but so was our fellowship with one another. Adam and Eve hid from God after their sin, but they were also estranged from one another, which can be seen …
Spiritual Morning Glory
The saying of the corporate amen is a great covenant privilege, and has the force of a binding oath. We never want to take it lightly, or invoke it to no purpose, or, worst of all, to mumble it. As we sing the psalms, we offer back to God what He gave us to sing …
Tender Mercies
There is no substitute for personal holiness, kindness, and humility. Nothing can be substituted in for it. Nothing adequately takes the place of it. There are many glorious truths in the Christian faith, but there is only one demeanor to adorn them all. The gospel is glorious, but what adorns it? Tender mercies. The covenant …
A Whitewashed Tomb
There is a great divide between piety, which is true godliness, and pietism, which is a lie about the nature of true godliness. You have heard us disparaging pietism many times, and you can count on hearing it many more times. Pietism is the erection of a false standard of holiness, one that is generally …
No Complaining in the Streets
God is pouring out His material blessings on this community of saints. We rejoice in this, we thank Him for it, and yet we must labor to understand these blessings biblically—as we earnestly seek for continued multiplication of them. These blessings necessarily include our businesses, and so how should we pursue His continued kindness here? …
Too Big for One Mouth
We are a large congregation, and this means that we must take great care with our tongues. Many in the modern world have drifted into the view that when an institution gets large enough, the basic patterns of godly speech no longer apply. Within a small group, slander and gossip can readily be identified as …