“My friend Ray once told me we have the choice of being impressive or being known, but we can’t be both. I’m not sure I agree (especially since I’m impressed by people who aren’t trying to impress!), but I get his basic point. What we try to do with our efforts to impress is subterfuge. We put up a façade …
“Communion presupposes union. By nature we are strangers, yea, enemies to God; but we are reconciled, brought nigh, and become his children, by faith in Christ Jesus. We can have no true knowledge of God, desire towards him, access unto him, or gracious communications from him, but in and through the Son of his love. He is the medium of …
“We cannot read God’s favor or disfavor by assessing how troubled a person’s life is… Suffering reveals the genuineness of faith in Christ. And suffering produces genuine faith. For example, when you struggle under affliction, the Psalms become real. True faith deepens, brightens, and grows wise. You grow up in knowing God… Suffering is both the acid test and the …
“Regardless of their moral standing among other men and women, every human being in their natural condition is hostile and inimical toward God. We follow the devil and the sinful inclinations of our hearts. We are corrupted and unbelieving, and to us nothing is pure; both our minds and consciences are defiled (Titus 1:15). And yet, in our salvation we …
“What effect should the gospel have on us, though? “He must in-crease, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). For in the gospel is revealed the glory of the living, triune God, and in his light we creatures and sinners are exposed for the little wretches we are. The more we see of the gospel, the more the three persons of …
“To obey God, is not so much our duty as our privilege; his commands carry meat in the mouth of them. He bids us repent; and why? That our sins may be blotted out. He commands us to believe: and why? That we may be saved. There is love in every command: as if a king should bid one of …
“We know what God has said to the Satan, what the Satan has said to God, and what God has decreed for Job. We know that Job’s sufferings are not because he is an impenitent sinner but precisely because he is a real and faithful believer. We know that Job is not the story of everyman but the story of …
Matthew and John in particular develop a picture of Jesus as the fulfillment of everything that the temple stood for and the focus of worship under the new covenant. The temple, like its predecessor the tabernacle, was regarded as a meeting-point between heaven and earth, the place where the transcendent Lord of all was pleased to manifest his glory in …
God never commands us to do what he does not enable us to do. And through Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi, in modern-day northeastern Greece, God both tells us to rejoice and also gives us great reason to rejoice–whatever we are facing in life. Joy is a spiritual grace that we all need to experience in our Christian …
“Mark it, the soul that once hears the call of God to bring it into the ways of life will evermore depend upon God’s call in all other things. If God has called me out of the ways of death into the ways of life, in obedience to that call that my soul has yielded to, I shall evermore be …
