Legacy Tree
Tucked away in a draw on our Montana property stands a Douglas fir that a forester estimated to be more than six hundred years old.
Jesus told us to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He pointed to ordinary things that people passed every day and used them to reveal extraordinary truths about His Father’s care. Standing beneath this old fir, I’ve begun to wonder whether that invitation extends farther than flowers and sparrows.... Continue Reading
Lessons About Marriage from the Dance Floor
During my sabbatical my wife and I took ballroom dance lessons. I never expected they would become one of the clearest illustrations of God's beautiful design for marriage.
No one watching an accomplished couple would conclude that the dancers are interchangeable. Their movements are different precisely because they are dancing together. Their differences do not diminish the dance; they create it. Scripture presents marriage in much the same way. Men and women possess equal dignity because both bear God’s image (Genesis 1:27), yet... Continue Reading
What About the Awkward Psalms?
Plead for the revival of the unjust.
We should desire all people to ‘serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling’ lest the Son’s wrath be kindled against them (Psa. 2:11, 12). Therefore, it is right to apply such prayers to the enemies of the church today. Jesus promises that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her (Matt. 16:18).... Continue Reading
Many Members, One Body: Gifts and Love in the Church
Whatever the gift might be—teaching, administration, and so on—all must be exercised to grow the body in mutual love.
The diversity of body parts is not detrimental to the body as a whole—it’s essential to it. What makes a body a body is the unity of the diversity. The same is true in the church: What makes it the church is the part you play. Your feeling like you have a part to play... Continue Reading
2. Why Reformed Pastors May Be More Subject to Depression than Others
Our job is to keep fighting while engaged in the long retreat of life.
We are all in a form of retreat while we are in these earthly frames. Our bodies and minds, and sometimes our resolve, weakens. In Scripture, we see godly men like Moses or David or Peter fall into sin late in life. We should not think that our doctrine of progressive sanctification makes us immune... Continue Reading
Reputation vs Reality: The Church in Sardis
Façades won’t furnish faith.
So many saints in name only hear the Word of Christ through the Spirit of Christ Sunday after Sunday. The way forward is back: Return to those very words, and believe! There’s power in the words. There’s life, real life, not reputation-only life, in those words. By the grace of the Spirit, we have these... Continue Reading
Book Review: A Sight Never to be Forgotten: Eyewitness Accounts from Union Chaplains at Gettysburg
Hale’s book offers an impressive array of primary resources. No student of the battle or chaplains today can reasonably do without it.
Hale makes a valid case that “chaplains perceived and interpreted” the battle of Gettysburg differently from other participants. Unlike the combatants, “whose focus was limited to killing the enemy directly in their front,” chaplains sometimes stood just behind the battle lines of their regiments, granting them “a wide-angle view.” Others stationed further to the rear... Continue Reading
Something Rotten in the Church?
Reflections on a revealing response.
In my church there are people who think that there should be women elders. There are also people who are not Presbyterian and haven’t a clue what an elder is. I am happy to care for and pastor those who disagree with my view on this – it is not a first order issue. As... Continue Reading
God Believes In Rest. Do You?
Rest to establish in your own mind and others’, that you are not infinite, but finite, and that God made you for rest in just the same way he made you for work.
Do we really need to fill our rest full of “holy” activities for it to be meaningful to the Lord? Is a good holiday the one that leaves us practically burnt out after serving the Lord so hard? Is a good Sunday necessarily the most active Sunday? I see no evidence for this in the... Continue Reading
Why Creation Matters, Part 6: Isaiah
If your God has made heaven and earth—and your own Scripture starts with that foundational fact—then why are you afraid of Babylon, your oppressor?
The God who created the cosmos will certainly rule it wisely and well and will accomplish his own purposes throughout its existence. Isaiah 44.23-45.18 This passage, which lies between the first two Servant Songs, focuses on God’s deliverance of Judah from captivity in Babylon and their consequent return to the land. The God who created... Continue Reading
What Does It Mean to “Put Off the Old Self” and “Put On the New Self”?
Ephesians 4:20-24.
Our justification does not come some day in the undetermined future, based on our own works. Every true believer is declared righteous in Christ and has both legal and relational standing as God’s children. All believers are coheirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17). Christians not only have the benefit of being justified in Christ, but they... Continue Reading
Succeeding at Things that Don’t Matter
Think about what is occupying your time and energy. Are there things that you might be a success in that don’t matter?
We have to be careful that what doesn’t matter to us might not be the same for someone else. The best path to follow is to focus on ourselves instead of being preoccupied with how someone else is spending their time and energy. “I’m not afraid of failure, I’m afraid of succeeding at... Continue Reading
The DNA of a Faithful Church
The early church wasn’t defined by buildings, but by transformed people united in Christ, devoted to truth, and marked by love. What would it look like for our churches to recover that vision?
Wherever such people gather in Christ’s name, there is the church. It might be a grand cathedral, a converted warehouse, a school hall, or a living room. The location is incidental. The essence lies in the people themselves: those called out of darkness into God’s marvelous light. If you ask a group of... Continue Reading
Loving the Church in Her Brokenness
To see and experience the brokenness of the church is also to see and experience the redeeming work of Christ as He makes all things new.
The entirety of Scripture tells the story of God redeeming His people. From Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 to the covenant promises given to Abraham, to Moses leading the people in the wilderness, to Joshua leading them into the promised land, to a nation under the Davidic kingship, and finally to the New Testament... Continue Reading
The Sins of the Father
Isaac’s inheritance of blessing and failure (Gen. 26:1–35).
How does God respond to Isaac’s cowardly, faithless lie? Breathtakingly, God responds with overwhelming, unmerited grace. In a year of severe famine, Isaac plants crops and reaps “a hundredfold.” A hundredfold return is a miraculous, staggering yield. God blesses Isaac so immensely that he becomes a massive economic threat to the Philistines, sparking deep envy.... Continue Reading
The Church as the Pillar of the Truth
"Adorn the doctrine of God our Savior”.
As to how holy lives and pure doctrine enable the church to be a pillar and buttress of the truth, consider that there simply is no true church without the faithful preaching of God’s Word. As Paul says in another place, “If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received,... Continue Reading
Saint and Sinner
The phrase Martin Luther made famous regarding this reality of the Christian experience is that we are simul iustus et peccator. That is, we are simultaneously saints and sinners.
Listen to what he says in his lecture on Paul’s statement in Romans. He says, “The saints in being righteous are at the same time sinners; they are righteous because they believe in Christ whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them, but they are sinners because they do not fulfill the Law and... Continue Reading
Jesus on Focus
“Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” Matthew 4:4.
Quit being concerned about what everyone else is doing, and concentrate on what you are supposed to do. This doesn’t mean we can’t talk to a friend when he or she sins. We can, and they can also talk to us when it’s our turn to be corrected (Luke 17:3,4; Matthew 18:15ff). But for our... Continue Reading
When Helping Hurts in Pastoral Counseling
With tips on how to avoid it.
What are the signs that counseling might be hurting more than helping? I suspect this problematic dynamic whenever someone insists on meeting but doesn’t do the homework I assign, whenever someone wants to continue meeting beyond the specified endpoint, or whenever meetings continue with no discernible progress in spiritual fruit. In any of these scenarios,... Continue Reading
PCA Adopts Danvers Statement Endorsing Complementarianism
The Danvers Statement’s three sections outline its rationale, purposes and affirmations. Purposes outlined in the document include setting a biblical view of the relationship between men and women, at home and church, as well as continued study among all to apply Scripture’s teachings on manhood and womanhood.
“The Presbyterian Church in America is a pace-setting denomination within evangelicalism,” said CBMW President and Boyce College Professor Denny Burk. “I am grateful that they declared the Danvers Statement a faithful declaration of biblical conviction. This kind of clarity will serve their churches well. I’m also grateful that the PCA voted decisively to maintain its... Continue Reading
You Never Retire from Your Calling
Is retirement the finish line?
Perhaps Christians should stop thinking about retirement as simply leaving something behind. Instead, retirement should be viewed as the opporunity to be useful in new ways. Imagine entering retirement with decades of experience, financial stability, and newfound flexibility. Now, you don’t treat retirment as a season of vacation, but a time where your usefulness expands! ... Continue Reading
Tend Your Garden
The One we are serving sees all.
In an age where anyone can gain a large following online, we tend to look down on those with few followers. In our mega-church era, we can frown upon small churches in rural areas. Such thinking can lead us to despise the small things, even though the vast majority of us will never make the... Continue Reading
When Love Has Limits (Luke 10:25-37)
Loving God means that we cannot place limits on whom one must love as a neighbor.
Whenever someone in real need crosses our path, we should respond with compassion and help as we would hope to be helped, even if that person isn’t someone we would typically choose to love. I know you’re a deeply loving person. I see it week after week in the way you treat others.... Continue Reading
If God Meant Everybody, why did he say Neighbour?
God’s command to love is not just a general principle.
Let’s face it: it’s far easier to love “everybody” than it is to love a specific somebody standing next to you. Everybody won’t require anything from you, or have any expectations. Everybody won’t notice if you don’t feel like helping today, or if you’d rather not make the effort to talk. Everybody won’t mind. The... Continue Reading
Introduction to the Science of Unbelief
Why study unbelief?
If unbelief lies at the center of humanity’s relationship with God, then understanding unbelief becomes essential for understanding the human condition itself. We live in an age of unprecedented knowledge and profound confusion. Never before in human history has information been so abundant, so accessible, and so immediate. Through the internet, social media, digital... Continue Reading
Continue the Christian Life How You Started the Christian Life
The Christian never moves on from the gospel.
The gospel is much more than a ticket to heaven. And if we are to continue in the way we started—if we are to NOT move on from the gospel, it means that the gospel becomes, over time, the driving force behind every part of our lives. The world’s fastest man, for the moment,... Continue Reading
Discipleship is More Than Just Instruction
We’re not just to learn all that Christ commanded, but to obey it as well.
As people who were formerly alienated from God and hostile in mind (Colossians 1:21-22), we need obedience and faith modeled to us. Those we’re discipling need that as well. They don’t just need us to tell them about Christ; they need us to show them Christ from the Word and from our lives. Read:... Continue Reading
I’m a ‘Pile of Dirt’
…and so are you, but even in this low estate, God gives us Meaning and Purpose. Don't let pride make you blind to the goodness of being human.
We reject our humanness (with its limits and weaknesses), but Jesus embraces it. He not only calls it “very good” in the beginning but shows us how it is good through taking on a body of His own. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. John 1:14 Admittedly, I’ve not spent... Continue Reading
Five Myths That Keep You from Reading the Institutes
Calvin’s “Institutes” have an undeserved reputation for being long, technical, and forbidding.
You will not agree with every line, and Calvin would not have wanted you to take his word over Scripture’s. But you will rarely find a guide this wise and this warm, one so convinced that God is worth knowing. John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509. Five centuries have passed and this... Continue Reading
The Spirit as Seal and Pledge
The indwelling Spirit in us is the earnest and promise of our inheritance and our full redemption.
As we are filled with the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, put sin to death by the Spirit, and show the fruit of the Spirit, we can be assured by God that the Spirit lives savingly within us now and is our seal and pledge of greater things to come. What encouraging truths these are!... Continue Reading