The Roots of Puritan Worship
Editors Note: This is the first post in a short-run series on Puritan Worship. I’d like to take you on a journey back through time to a Christian worship service in the Middle Ages. The year is 1413; we enter…
Tag Worship
Proto-Puritan William Tyndale (10)
His Sacramental Theology – The Lord’s Supper In our last post, we started on Tyndale’s theology of the sacraments first generally and then specifically with baptism. We will now finish up on Tyndale with his convictions on the Lord’s Supper. …
Walk Over the Vast Ocean (4)
Reformed, experiential Christianity birthed the pioneer missionary efforts of men such as John Eliot (1604–1690), David Brainerd (1718–1747),William Carey (1761–1834), Adoniram Judson(1788–1850), and John G. Paton (1824–1907). This mission effort was small and struggling until it exploded into the modern missionary movement…
Seven Letters Seven Dangers: Sincerity
Dear Theophilus, Since God’s word makes abundantly clear that the human soul is “deceitfully sick, beyond cure”—that is, human cure—and that God alone knows it (Jeremiah 17:9), we are wholly incapable, on our own, of accurately discerning the biblical validity…
Our Daily Bread
Give us this day our daily bread.—Matthew 6:11 In A Body of Divinity, Thomas Watson (1620–1686) presented over 150 sermons on essential Christian teachings, including a series on the Lord’s Prayer. Here is a brief section taken from his treatment of the fourth…
The Apostles’ Creed: The Holy Universal Church
In the late 1990s, my wife and I persuaded a widowed neighbor to join us one Sunday at the faithful Presbyterian church downtown. A standout preacher of the Reformed faith was filling the pulpit. Our neighbor, a serious believer, liked…
Preaching Christ: the Guarantor of the Covenant of Grace
In the two preceding articles on what it means to ‘preach Christ’ we have already noted the connection between God’s promise of salvation and the covenant he made with Abraham in relation to his seed. However, the question arises as…
Preaching Christ: the Hope of Redemption
It can be easy to become atomistic in the way we handle the Bible. By this I mean that we can unwittingly break its message down into its component parts in a way that fails to appreciate its organic unity.…
How to Listen to Sermons
As we approach the Lord’s Day on any given Sunday, let alone one on which many of us will lose an hour of restful preparation due to the resetting of our clocks, how shall we listen to the sermon? Added…
Taking Sermon Notes
One of the joys of gathering with my local church on Sundays is sitting under the ministry of the Word. This is especially dear to me after having been un-churched for many years. I was spiritually malnourished by the time…