Perseverance

Have there been times in your life when you wanted to sing of the love of the Lord, but you felt paralyzed by pain, or choked by chaos? This has certainly been the case for me. Thankfully, when my peace is in jeopardy and pain threatens my joy, the psalms point me again to Christ. This is...

Many people suppose that “true believers are able to fall through their own fault into shameful and atrocious deeds, to persevere and to die in them; and therefore finally to fall and to perish.” [i] This opinion seems to be supported by Scriptural warnings against falling away, and examples in the...

God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). We study God’s decree—his eternal plan—to grapple with his sovereign foreknowledge. We reflect on God’s providence —his working all things—to appreciate his present involvement in our world. God has not left us to fend for...

If anything gives us the opportunity to be unfaithful to God it is trials. In the midst of suffering we are often tempted to doubt God’s faithfulness and friendship, goodness and grace, and power and promises. We sometimes wonder if we will make it, how we will make it, or why God is doing this to...

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” – Romans 8:20-21 In John Milton’s classic epic, Paradise...

A man loses his fortune in a fire. Shortly after, all four of his young children die in a tragic shipwreck. A young woman’s husband is brutally murdered. Her second husband dies of cancer, and she herself passes away after a decade-long battle with dementia. A promising teenager becomes a...

The Women Who Helped Chrysostom Some time ago, I wrote about Olympias, a widow of noble birth who became one of John Chrysostom’s greatest supporters. But she was not alone. She lived in a community of women near the Great Church in Constantinople – in fact, only a wall separated their home from...

As my wife and I anticipate our seventh covenant child (and third daughter) joining us early next year, I told our other children that it is their fault that we’re having another baby! Because they are all so amazing—so wonderful and so precious, and so we wanted to love another of them in our...

Sarah Lanman Huntington Smith – Missionary to Mohegans and Syrians The idea that many of the Mohegans who lived in her region had never heard the gospel bothered Sarah Huntington (1802-1836) so much that it turned into a source of anxiety. Few people shared her sentiments. She could just imagine...

That Psalm 126 bears the heading “A Song of Ascents,” and is within the grouping of the Psalms of Ascent is a providential grace of God. Likely penned later than most other Psalms, it offers a great degree of hope and comfort to those weary saints who, like the Israelites of the Babylonian exile,...