Ministry

Every pastor has encountered them. Every member of the congregation has wondered after reading the title of the sermon and the accompanying text, "I wonder what he is going to say about this text?" Let's face it some texts are difficult and when a preacher preaches through a book, well, he has no...

Sixteenth-century Reformers were not the first to advocate the translation of the Bible and church liturgy in the language of the people. Nor were they the first to suffer opposition. Two 9 th -century brothers from Thessalonica faced a similar struggle as they worked together to bring the...

Benjamin B. Warfield wrote a little article for the Homiletic Review in 1897 titled, "The Indispensableness of Systematic Theology to the Preacher." As anything written by Warfield, it is a thoughtful and edifying piece with a clear aim. According to the Lion of Old Princeton, it is through Gospel...

What comes to mind when you hear the words “systematic theology”? For many Christians, they think of the halls of academia and the debating of obscure and minor details related to God. But for most of the history of the church, systematic theology was a discipline done for the church and by...

If all your paperwork rolled like a sea over your desk, you’d struggle to navigate and prepare your tax returns. If you blanketed your computer’s desktop with all your digital files, you’d smother the writing of a departmental report. So is any unorganized library a maze of confusion. This is why...

As an earlier post from Jeff Stivason made clear, this current installment of “Theology for Everyone” was inspired by Martin Luther’s fantastic little book on prayer entitled A Simple Way to Pray. In the spirit of truly offering theology to everyone, let me also recommend R.C. Sproul’s magnificent...

On January 1 1519, Ulrich Zwingli became the pastor of the principal church of Zurich, Switzerland. When he preached through the New Testament from the Greek, the Reformation began in that city. Zwingli taught salvation by grace and justification by faith; he also compared what he saw in his church...

William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, first published in 1526, was met with sharp disapproval in England – not only because it was common knowledge that Scriptures should not be placed in the hands of the uneducated masses, but also because of the translation itself...

On December 22, 1898 the New York Observer wished its readers a “Merry Merry Christmas to All.” Following that wish was a wonderful gift. On every page of the Observer was something to direct the reader’s thoughts to the reason for the season. And on page 818 there is a poem called, “Young Luther’s...