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 …
Read All About It
One of the characteristics of modern assumptions about the Bible is that in the Old Testament God dealt with His people in more physical or earthy ways, and that in the New Testament His promises and deliverances are of a more spiritual (meaning ethereal) nature. Thus, we don’t expect God to actually deliver us from …
The Rest That Works
We are discovering that celebration is hard work. We are in the middle of a great season of personal and corporate celebrations—graduations from high school, from college, weddings, and so forth. This is a time of great joy, and joy naturally calls us to work so that we might give fuller expression to that joy. …
Wipe Your Feet At the Door
During our time of confession, there is a short time in which you are urged to confess Your individual sins. The time there is not short because we are trying to encourage you to trivialize whatever sin you may be confessing. Nor is it because we do not want you to have time to gather …
God is Great, God is Good
One of the great temptations that confronts believers is that of accepting slanderous caricatures about God. We will be considering this in greater detail in the message today, but it is a point that, frankly, needs to be stated again and again. The wicked say that God is going to rip us off, and so …
Learning the Difference
Grace is a river that consistently overflows the banks. The goodness of God is always in flood stage. We, afflicted with various forms of unbelief, are always quick to believe that God is somehow trembling on the threshold of a miserly disposition. If we provoke Him just one more time, He will throw all His …
No Implied Criticism
The new command is that we love one another. Love in the Scriptures is defined as the giving of one’s self through immediate or indirect sacrifice. Paul tells the Thessalonians that they did not need instruction on this point – they were known for their love to all the brethren who were in the region …
Inescapable Imprecation
The message today is on Psalm 35, one of the psalms of imprecation. These psalms have given many Christians many difficulties, and we don’t quite know what to do with them. Let us grant at the outset that they can be abused by people who pretend to embrace them. We can want to “destroy the …