Lead us not into Temptation
It is all too easy to be so focused on the individual components of the Lord’s Prayer – the ‘petitions’ of which it is comprised – that we lose sight of its overall topography, or landscape. Even though the details…
Tag Holy Spirit
If I Could Preach Only One Sermon: Luke 18
If I could preach only one sermon, I would preach my one allotted message to the visible church. I would preach with the weighty concern that the baptized are on an irreversible course toward eternity. And the baptized, those well-ordered…
How to Manage Quarrelers and Heretics: Notes on 2 Timothy 2:22-26
Theological error and heresy constantly plagued the church during the life of the Apostle Paul, so it is no surprise that his final instructions to Timothy contain essential counsel on the right way to address error and heresy …
Daily Bread and Daily Pardon
The Lord’s Prayer is, without question, the best-known prayer of all time. Embedded at the very heart of the prayer life of God’s family, but also shared and treasured by those nations and empires through the ages that have espoused…
Five Crucial Things for Sunday Morning
I love to see families walking through the doors of the auditorium on Lord’s Day morning. I see each of them as a living stone coming together to form a living temple in order to worship the living God. They…
Children & Church Membership
A few weeks ago the session on which I serve was interviewing some young teenage girls for communicant membership in the church. When a child in the congregation I serve approaches me about making their profession of faith before the…
Seven Letters Seven Dangers: Christ-less Christianity
Dear Theophilus, I find that the greatest danger facing the church today is Christ-less Christianity. I realize that this expression will raise your eyebrows and well it should for what is Christianity if not Christ? But if I leave it…
Call for Conversion
At the time of his death, Puritan Richard Baxter (1615–1691) had published approximately 150 treatises, not including countless other letters and papers.[1] The following passage comes from A Call to the Unconvered to Turn and Live, which begins with a quote…
Seven Letters Seven Dangers
Several weeks ago I sent my cadre of writers a question. I asked them, “If you could identify and warn your fellow believers about the greatest spiritual danger that they may face in life what would it be?” I was…
Into the Abyss
Like nearly all the Christian Festivals (however many or few our particular churches may celebrate) the events marked by Easter can easily loom large on our horizons momentarily, only to be forgotten until the following year. If we allow ourselves…