Sin

H aving laid down the foundations of who God is and the rule of faith (Scripture is the final authority, supported by the creeds), the Thirty-Nine Articles continue with specific questions of salvation from article 9 to article 14—with article 11 on the justification of man at its center. There is...

Old stories about our theological heroes are as heartwarming as they are encouraging. I especially love the story about one time professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, John Murray, who was apparently in the habit of driving theological students to and from church. It...

Part 1 Specific Directions for Mortification Identify the Symptoms that Accompany a Lust If the symptoms are deadly, the sin must be killed by special measures lest our lives end in hellish tragedy. A sin is deadly if it has become an established habit. When sin becomes rooted in our daily routines...

I n 1656 Puritan Pastor John Owen felt concerned that professing Christians were too “at peace in the world” (vii). He also believed that much of the teaching against sin in his day produced “superstition, self-righteousness and anxiety of conscience” in the hearers (viii). So, Owen wrote a little...

Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination of events to deliver a wonderful—even...

Think about the job of the Old Testament priest. As if he didn't have enough to do he had to do the occasional skin inspection. We read about it in Leviticus 13. The first thing that the priest had to do was figure out what he was dealing with, had the hair on the skin turned white and how deep was...

I mean it when I say that I would love my church to be filled Sunday after Sunday with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (or questioning) individuals. And I mean it when I say that I would love to have those very same individuals over for lunch after church, and then invite them back...