“One of my favorite hymns today is Holy, Holy, Holy, but when I waas a boy I hated that song. In the church where I grew up, the hymn was sung like dirge at God’s funeral. When I first encountered contemporary worship music, it was like a spring day after a long winter. But simple …
Becoming What We Eat
“We partake of Him by means of faith, which means that we do as we are told. We take and eat by faith. We take and drink by faith. As we do this, we are becoming what we eat. And since what we are eating is a new humanity, resurrected and alive, never to die …
Sermons and Sacraments, Not Lectures and Mnemonic Devices
“What does this ministry do? It causes the whole body to be fitly joined together. And faithful pastors do not have the authority to dispense with instruments thought by the apostles to be essential to this process. Simply put, we do not have the authority to turn sermons into lectures and sacraments into options” (A …
And Nobody Take This Out of Context and Start Another Blog War
“Most of us are familiar with Christopher Marlowe’s line that Helen’s was the ‘face that launched a thousand ships.’ Perhaps this might provide a modern scientific scale for measuring feminine attractiveness or beauty — .001 helen being a sufficient magnitude of beauty to launch one ship” (5 Cities, p. 50).
Communing With Eyes Open
“We are to discern the Lord’s body in one another. When the Lord’s Supper is being served, we should sit up straight, and look around the congregation, eyes open, up and down our row. It is true that we are to examine ourselves, but we are to do so in relation to one another. We …
The Magic is Elsewhere
“Nothing happens magically to the bread or in the wine, just as gold being slipped on a finger in a wedding ceremony has the same molecular make-up as gold anywhere else. But equally rejected is the rationalistic superstition which maintains that in the Supper of the Lord nothing happens apart from our rolling certain sentences …
Or So I Maintain
“But the fact that it is a commonplace does not keep it from being true. Many truisms are true” (5 Cities, p. 45).
How the Bride Entered the World
“We forget where we came from. We forget our birthplace. We were created when the Lord Jesus died on a beam of wood, and another shaft of wood drove a spearhead into Him. That spearhead was the culminiation of a grotesque judicial murder. But the folly of man is wisdom to God, and so when …
A Knife for the Right Hand
“Abraham is the father of all who believe because of what he did on Mount Moriah when he took the knife in his hand to show how firmly he believed the promise of God. And since that time, every son of Abraham has come to faith with a knife in his right hand” (5 Cities, …
Deep Meaning, Right on the Surface
“Any preacher who uses commentaries when preaching through Old Testament books can testify how rare it is for the apostolic interpretation to be taken into any kind of account by the commentator as he seeks to find the meaning of the text before him. Surely this should be a cause for astonishment. Sometimes commentators do …