God the Redeemer
God created the first Adam in His own image, and appointed him to rule over the works of His hands. He also gave him a commandment. Gen. 2:16, 17: “Of all the trees of the garden you may freely eat.…
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Studying the Confession: The Doctrine of Assurance
The Westminster Confession of Faith … What is it? Is it a document that presents cold intellectual faith? Dead Orthodoxy as it seems to some… Is it a historical artifact that has no relevancy to the pastor or the people…
Ministerial Joy and Glory
Employment in the secular sphere is usually evaluated in terms of job satisfaction and job prospects. But what are their equivalents for those who work in the church – notably as Christian ministers? Although some embark in the ministry with…
Studying the Confession: Make Disciples Old
It is possible to make disciples that are just too new. Case in point. In his book, The Creedal Imperative (Crossway, 2012), Carl Trueman relays the story of a pastor who regularly declared his devotion to Scripture by dismissing creeds…
A Reason to be Thankful
I was in a store just a couple of days ago when a smiling clerk asked if she could help my wife and me with some pictures we were admiring. However, talk about beautiful pictures gave way to a less…
Studying the Confession: The Proof Texts
When it comes to the Westminster Confession of the Faith, we often do not think very much about how we might be able to study the Confession’s use of Scripture. In fact, most of us probably do not get very…
Girolamo Zanchi – a Theologian of Peace and Comfort
On November 19, 1590, the Italian Reformer Girolamo Zanchi died while visiting the University of Heidelberg where he had once been professor of theology. He was buried with honors. His epitaph read, “Here lie the bones of the Italian Zanchi,…
Assurance and Preaching the Word
On any given Sunday there are, sitting in the pews of church, myriad kinds of different people. There are, of course, the faithful who have battled well against unbelief throughout the previous week and are hungering and thirsting for the…
Assurance: a Pastoral Conversation
The best doctors are diagnosticians. Those who have hidden the taxonomy of pathogens in their cerebral cortex and are able to ply their knowledge to the often distorted complex of a patient’s woes – that, is a doctor indeed. The…
Assurance and the Westminster Confession of Faith
“The greatest of all Protestant heresies is assurance.” Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621)[1] Can we know that we’re saved? That question was at the heart of the Reformation. Rome taught that professing believers could never be certain of their salvation. For…