Once there was young lady in college who flew home for Christmas vacation. Her mother picked her up at the airport, and so they had a very good talk on the drive back to her home, which was a couple hours away. The thing that the young lady really wanted to unburden her soul about …
Delayed Judgment Is Not Mercy
God has promised blessings to Israel, but we have seen that His blessings are always covenantal. This means that we may never walk away from our obligation to live in the way that God commands, knowing always that He gives His beloved what He commands. Grace enables us to walk rightly; it does not waive …
A Woman in the Garden
The narrative of the resurrection in this book is brief, but it is truly powerful. As we consider the appearances of the Lord, and His current enthronement, our prayer should be that we continue to spread the word. He is risen indeed. “And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of …
Moral Imagination
“If that is the imagination, what is the moral imagination? The eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke first coined the term in his great work Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . The moral imagination is the distinctively human power to conceive of men and women as moral beings . . . Modern …
Grace or Law?
“A vision of the good has far greater power to move men and women to do the right thing than all the horrible images we may conjure up to terrify them into doing it” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 10).
Guilt or Gratitude?
“So the last principle is to have richness of wealth be matched by a richness of good works. We are not to give to others because we have been infected with wealth, and we, the guilty, want to pass on the cooties. We are to give from a sense of enjoyment and gratitude. A man …
What God Has Joined
We now come to the beginning of the Lord’s ministry in Judea (v. 1). As in Galilee, it is characterized by teaching the people. The first subject to be addressed in this section is the much-troubled question of divorce and remarriage. We see here, as elsewhere, the close connection between the two great commandments. “And …
Concrete Secularism
The last chapter of Darryl’s book is obviously the one in which he steps up, wraps up, and sums up, and of course it is also the place where some of our more obvious disagreements come to the fore. Darryl’s basic assumption is that the coming of Christ ushered in a new relationship between church …
Blake and Peggy
We worship and serve the triune God of Scripture, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Our triune God is one God, and everlastingly the same. Our God is three Persons and constantly, surprisingly, different. God is without shadow or variation due to change. But at the same time, the Father is not the Son, and the …
Liturgical Dualism
INTRODUCTION: There are great dangers facing a congregation engaged in trying to restore a more honestly liturgical and reformed pattern of worship, problems that arise because of good old-fashioned sin. Call it the human factor. THE TEXTS: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I …