Old stories about our theological heroes are as heartwarming as they are encouraging. I especially love the story about one time professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, John Murray, who was apparently in the habit of driving theological…
Part 1 Specific Directions for Mortification Identify the Symptoms that Accompany a Lust If the symptoms are deadly, the sin must be killed by special measures lest our lives end in hellish tragedy. A sin is deadly if it…
In 1656 Puritan Pastor John Owen felt concerned that professing Christians were too “at peace in the world” (vii). He also believed that much of the teaching against sin in his day produced “superstition, self-righteousness and anxiety of conscience” in…
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…
Think about the job of the Old Testament priest. As if he didn’t have enough to do he had to do the occasional skin inspection. We read about it in Leviticus 13. The first thing that the priest had to…
I mean it when I say that I would love my church to be filled Sunday after Sunday with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (or questioning) individuals. And I mean it when I say that I would love to…
When I was younger I used to think it would have been nice to be born into a family full of riches. Perhaps you did—or do—as well. Now that I am more mature I am thankful I wasn’t, though. Why?…
Quick; what’s the first thing you think of when I say the word “estate?” Got it? Now let me take a wild guess and say that you probably thought of the word sale, as in estate sale, right? To us…
Writing now from the Sea of Galilee only a short distance from where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, I am reminded how earthy the gospel is. Just as Jesus walked the real turf of Nazareth, he healed really…
“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all” (The New-England Primer: A Reprint of the Earliest Known Edition, with Many Facsimiles and Reproductions, and an Historical Introduction, ed. Paul Leicester Ford [NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899], 14). This famous line of Benjamin’s…
