Pastoral Theology

How many people do you know who wear glasses? Perhaps you yourself wear them. Glasses are a wonderful help for people who are near or far sighted. When the lens of our eye fails to bring the image into focus on our retina, our vision is blurred or impaired. Glasses correct the focal distance to our...

Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination of events to deliver a wonderful—even...

Are the Doctrines of Grace practical? Let me be more specific, more practical in my question. Is the doctrine of unconditional election a user-friendly doctrine? Let me put it another way, will this doctrine help form piety, deepen love, and strengthen my faith? Maybe you would respond, "Couldn't...

As a A.C.B.C. certified counselor and ordained pastor, I have the privilege of helping at the Biblical Counseling Institute associated with the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, PA. [1] I value an educated pastorate and stress the importance of systematic theology and...

The doctrine of election should be a most humbling doctrine. It means that God chooses for salvation before the foundations of the world a people unto Himself to receive that salvation. The basis for election is “unconditional”. In other words, God does not look ahead and take into account what...

The word depravity implies the absence of something that used to be abundant. In considering the doctrine of man’s total depravity it’s good to see first that man, Adam, was totally good, righteous, and upright. This is what Solomon taught when he declared that “God made man upright” (Ecclesiastes...

Samuel Sherwood (1730-1783) was a graduate of Yale and Princeton (at the time led by his uncle Aaron Burr), who pastored in Weston (CT) from 1757 to his death in 1783. Next to this sermon, his other published sermon (also of political import) was his sermon, “The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness...

Let's face it, in common parlance pastoral means practical. What is more, people want the practical. I don't blame them. I just had the joy of reacquainting with a young woman who has recently experienced conversion. The next day I gave her Alistair Begg's, Pathway to Freedom: How God's Law Guides...

How do you explain to yourself why you are a Christian? Why do you think your life is a Christian life and not some other kind of life? Do you tell yourself you have a Christian life mostly for social reasons? It’s good for the children. Your parents raised you in a Christian church. Your...

Perhaps the most disturbing sign of the impoverished condition of many professing Christians, Christian congregations and denominations is their inability to recognize and self-consciously live in the practicality of the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the distinguishing...