ExhortationWhen we worship Jesus Christ, we are coming to the Father. When we come to the Father, we are coming to the source of all things. As we do this, we discover we are not able to come unless His Holy Spirit equips and moves us. The God of Heaven is our fear. Now in …
Drinking Liberty Away
One of our most precious possessions as the people of God is our liberty in Christ. As a glorious thing in the world, this Christian liberty is both assailed by the legalists and undermined by the libertines. Since we have shaken loose of the legalism that many of us grew up with, let us be …
On Blaming the Stuff
Christmas is a celebration of the Incarnation, and the Incarnation is a reality that addresses our confusions in a wonderful way. When God determined to send the Lord Jesus to live a perfect life among us, die on the cross, and rise again from the dead, this intervention excludes certain heretical notions from the outset. …
The Senselessness of It
Sin is senseless. Petty sin is senseless, and high wickedness is senseless. If it made sense, if it lined up with how God made the world, then it wouldn’t be sin. Christians sometimes make the mistake of trying make sense out of sin—whether their own, or the sins of others. This is true all the …
Hello, Old Friend
Affliction can harden us, and affliction can melt us—just as heat hardens clay and melts wax. The same input can cause two completely different results. And you can see this in people. Some people who, when they go through hard times, get hard. Others go through difficulties and it only makes them more tender. Obviously, …
Hoping to Live in Goshen
A few weeks ago, I addressed the fact that we cannot escape our civic responsibilities by saying something like “don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for him.” Corporate responsibility doesn’t work that way. But at the same time, the point needs to be nuanced. If we vote for economic folly, even if only 51% of …
Cheese Whiz and Dryer Lint
For generations, Christian groups calling for “separated living” have been dismissed as legalists. And sometimes, this has been fair—separating from “the world” according to arbitrary standards of some small portion of the ecclesiastical world is legalism. But the fact remains that the Bible does say that we are to not touch the unclean thing, and …
A Way of Escape from Self-Deception
The hardest sin to confess is the sin of self-deception. A few moment’s reflection should show why. The very nature of the sin means that you don’t know what is going on. So how can you repent of a sin you don’t understand? But the fact that it is a sin, needing to be repented, …
It Can’t Be Both
This is our first Lord’s Day worship service after the re-election of Barack Obama to the presidency. We will be considering the spiritual ramifications of this in some detail in the sermon next Lord’s Day, but a few things must be said now. Next Lord’s Day we will be examining how nations are brought to …
Conviction and No Condemnation Together
Our constant temptation as conservative Christians is to take our definition of sin from Scripture, which is appropriate, but then to calibrate our conviction levels for those sins on the basis of our own experience. We know that not all sin is equally serious, and so the levels of a particular sin that we experience …