Perseverance

God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). We study God’s decree—his eternal plan—to grapple with his sovereign foreknowledge. We reflect on God’s providence —his working all things—to appreciate his present involvement in our world. God has not left us to fend for...

If anything gives us the opportunity to be unfaithful to God it is trials. In the midst of suffering we are often tempted to doubt God’s faithfulness and friendship, goodness and grace, and power and promises. We sometimes wonder if we will make it, how we will make it, or why God is doing this to...

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” – Romans 8:20-21 In John Milton’s classic epic, Paradise...

A man loses his fortune in a fire. Shortly after, all four of his young children die in a tragic shipwreck. A young woman’s husband is brutally murdered. Her second husband dies of cancer, and she herself passes away after a decade-long battle with dementia. A promising teenager becomes a...

The Women Who Helped Chrysostom Some time ago, I wrote about Olympias, a widow of noble birth who became one of John Chrysostom’s greatest supporters. But she was not alone. She lived in a community of women near the Great Church in Constantinople – in fact, only a wall separated their home from...

As my wife and I anticipate our seventh covenant child (and third daughter) joining us early next year, I told our other children that it is their fault that we’re having another baby! Because they are all so amazing—so wonderful and so precious, and so we wanted to love another of them in our...

Sarah Lanman Huntington Smith – Missionary to Mohegans and Syrians The idea that many of the Mohegans who lived in her region had never heard the gospel bothered Sarah Huntington (1802-1836) so much that it turned into a source of anxiety. Few people shared her sentiments. She could just imagine...

That Psalm 126 bears the heading “A Song of Ascents,” and is within the grouping of the Psalms of Ascent is a providential grace of God. Likely penned later than most other Psalms, it offers a great degree of hope and comfort to those weary saints who, like the Israelites of the Babylonian exile,...

Melito of Sardis – Pastor, Theologian, and Poet Melito is not a familiar name today. Until the last century, we could only find a mention of him in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History , mostly in connection with the controversy over the day in which the feast of Pascha (Easter) was to be celebrated...

As we come to the conclusion of our study on the beatitudes it will be good to ask, how we should respond? What are we expected to do about this set of familiar blessings? Certainly these blessings are part of a larger sermon and so should be viewed in that light. For example, just as the sermon...