Sin

J. I. Packer's endorsement of John Owen's treatment of sin in an introduction to the 1983, Multnomah Press edition of Owen's writings on sin, Sin and Temptation, contained the following effusive words: He told me how to understand myself as a Christian and live before God in a morally and...

We can now take this point a stage further: in this context, that of the god-like aspirations of leadership, sin becomes incredibly attractive. In the Confessions, Augustine makes it clear in relation to a trivial act of the youthful crime of stealing some pears from a neighbour's tree. It was not...

Imagine a prison with such a positive atmosphere that the guards don't need to carry guns to protect themselves. Imagine a prison where inmates begin each day with Bible reading and prayer, leading some to faith in Christ. Imagine a prison where convicted felons open the door for you, look you...

It is arguable that the last hundred years have witnessed an interesting reversal in Western society, where the great taboo of the Victorian era and the great obsession of the same period have dramatically switched places. The great taboo for Victorians was, of course, sex. Human beings all depend...

The Welsh have not (generally) adopted that legacy of Platonism in post-Renaissance culture, commonly called "the stiff upper-lip." The Welsh, you see, give voice to their complaints with reckless abandonment. Typical here is Wales's most famous twentieth century poet and writer, Dylan Thomas, in...

70s rock behemoth, Led Zeppelin had no greater track than Stairway to Heaven . Indeed, so secure is its position at the apex of rock music that many radio polls on the greatest rock music of all time frequently exclude it from consideration simply because the battle is really for second place. In...

We Christians are caught in a dilemma: it is captured succinctly by Amos: "Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?" ( Amos 3:6). It is simply not an option for us to remove God from the context of evil and then suddenly invoke him when the sun shines. This is true not just for...

Will there be a Starbucks store in heaven? It's a crazy question, I know, but humor me for a second or two. Perhaps we should ask the more theologically precise question: what exactly will heaven be like? It is initially surprising how little information we are given about the exact nature of the...

Genesis 3:15 gives one of the Bible's greatest promises. It is God's curse against the serpent, and his first proclamation of the gospel: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." This curse...

The most fascinating thing about this book is that it is deadly boring. It took me two months to read its 197 pages, mainly because I kept putting it aside since, for sheer excitement, it couldn't compete with Bavinck's Prolegomena to Dogmatics or Kuyper's Principles of Sacred Theology . Yet if...