God has called us to be holy and blameless before Him, and so we need to understand that call. As Christians we know that holiness and blamelessness are good things, but we cannot just accept that the words refer to good things. We have to know how God defines these things—and this is what Scripture …
Waiting for the Rat to Die
As we live with one another in our families and in community, we receive all the blessings that come to us from other people. We also receive all the temptations that arise from living in community. These temptations can be filed under grudges, hurts, offenses, bitterness, resentment, peeves, exasperations, and more. But in the name …
Hot Joy From Heaven
Jesus came to save a dark and sinful world, but it was a world that thought itself glorious. And, to a certain extent, that glory was not a sham. The Lord Himself was tempted by it, when the glory of all the world’s kingdoms was paraded before Him by the devil. The world was grimy …
You’re Both Right
Nonbelievers spend all their time in a life of death (Eph. 2: 1-2). They are dead in their trespasses and sins in which they live. Believers are privileged to be given a dying life, while the unbeliever has nothing but a living death. We are privileged to die that we might live, while they live …
Who Desperately Needs It
We are going to hear a message this morning on the nature and reality of personal holiness. This is a perilous kind of message, because we constantly want to give the edification found in such messages to somebody else, who desperately needs it. Ambrose Bierce once defined a Christian as one who believes the New …
You Didn’t Have To . . .
C.S. Lewis once commented on our tendency to guard against the error we are least likely to fall into. Faced with a flood, he says, we break out the fire extinguishers. And so we guard against what we think are the pressing temptations of our day, and over time we come to think that the …
Give It Up or Give It Away
God has been kind enough to give us yet another Advent season, and so we should be resolved to live in it as true Christians. This means standing against the spirit of this age. This means learning what Scripture intends when it says that there is a way that seems right unto a man, and …
Not Showered From a Distance
We often read the words of God, we see the words of grace, and we read and repeat them often. But what is happening when we mouth the words of grace, but a gracious spirit is far from us? We read the words, but we fail to understand what kind of paper the words are …
Bones and Silicon
In this congregation, you have heard much about the grace of God. But when you hear much of anything, it is easy for that word to become a theological buzz word—the grace of God is just one of those Bible phrases, right? And since we all think we know what the Bible is about, we …
In Him
The fear of God is the foundation of every form of righteous fearlessness. The refusal to fear God opens you up to every kind of timorousness. Jesus tells us explicitly that we are not to fear man, but rather to fear God. He sets this forth as a basic alternative. If you fear God, you …