Church Life

Christiana Tsai and Her Persistence in Trials One day, Christiana Tsai woke up to find the room spinning around her. Her body grew stiff while the light stabbed her eyes as with daggers. This was the beginning of a long, intermittent illness that doctors could not explain. Her inability to move...

Paulus Orosius – A Forgotten Augustinian Historian “In the next little light smiles that pleader of Christian times, of whose Latin work Augustine availed himself.” [1] This is how Dante described his brief encounter, in Paradise, with an ancient historian whose name apparently needed no mention...

None of us need to be convinced of how difficult it is to tame the tongue. It is likely that you have already failed today. But in the midst of knowing how hard it is to tame the tongue, we need to be reminded of why it’s so difficult and where to go for help. James 3:1-12 points us in the right...

I was recently struck anew by reading Genesis 26. It’s the story of Isaac dwelling in Gerar. The story is familiar. We might read it in “like father, like son” fashion. As Abraham told Abimelech that Sarah was his sister, Isaac did the same. Yes, we sometimes learn from our parents. Even the...

It is a sad fact: liberated Christians aren’t always good at practicing Christian liberty. We struggle to break free from the hold of besetting sins. Sometimes we even justify sin on the basis of our freedom in Christ. And we are tempted to hold others to the same standards as us even on matters in...

If we fail to see to see the glory of Christ predicted in the Old Testament and then unveiled in the New Testament, we have failed to truly understand God’s Word. The Bible is replete with proclamations of the glory of Jesus Christ, and even the minor prophetic books declare the majesty of this...

For the previous post in this four-part series, part 1 , part 2 , part 3 . Perhaps the most general Puritan principle on habits was their effects in promoting Christlikeness. The Puritans appealed to this in both a positive and a negative sense: the working of duties as being Christlike, and...

At our once-rural (now-suburban) church, we have two weekly prayer meetings. On Wednesday nights, we gather to pray for an hour, structuring our time around praise, confession of sin, and supplication. On Lord’s Day afternoons, we gather for just twenty minutes to pray for the extension of Christ’s...

As we survey the twelve so-called Minor Prophets, Micah seems to be the prophet most obviously oriented on Christ the coming Messiah. More clearly and directly than the other eleven books that make up this canonical collection, the book of Micah predicts the advent of Christ Jesus. But thou,...

Justitia Sengers – a Forgotten Sixteenth-Century Exegete Blindness was common in ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe, due to the frequency of infections, malnutrition, accidents, and acts of violence, as well as to the lack of effective treatments. Some men, such as Jan Žižka, a commander of...