Posts by Grant Van Leuven

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Word, Sacrament, and Discipline: Discipline, a Means & Sign of True Body Life

Grant Van Leuven
Dec 24, 2018
Discussing the three marks of a true church during a seminary class (preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, and disciplining members), our professor emphasized the third by rhetorically asking, “How many true churches are there today?” His implication was, where are authentic churches to...

Insuppressible Truth: The Design for Life

Grant Van Leuven
Jun 28, 2018
A fashion designer goes about creating clothes for people with a keen sense of how the parts and the whole will best fit together. The designer does not just throw fabric, thread, and needles into the wind but carefully draws patterns and then every stitch brings the pieces together. So ... God is...

Teach Me To Pray!: Ask to be Kept from Doing Evil

Grant Van Leuven
Jan 18, 2018
We often pray the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer after sinning. We should learn to pray the sixth petition before similarly sinning again, remembering, ye have not because ye ask not (James 4:2). The essence of the sixth petition, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (...

Why Study Theology: The Blessed Truth of Being Theologically Organized

Grant Van Leuven
Jan 17, 2018
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...

Sexual Identity: The Way We Were and Who We Are: Our Identity Crisis is Re-railed into Christ

Grant Van Leuven
Jan 10, 2018
In her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert , [1] Dr. Rosaria Butterfield compares her Christian conversion experience to "an alien abduction or a train wreck." As she shares about her very public Christian "coming out" while a tenured university English professor specializing in "Queer...

Meditating on the Word: Prepare To Be Preached To

Grant Van Leuven
Mar 24, 2017
To guide God’s saints in readying themselves for the reception of His preached Word each Lord’s Day, this earthen vessel shares his own weekly preparation to proclaim it to them as a model to modify and use. Prepare through Prayer With an intense sense of the responsibility of the task and a desire...

No Little Women: Know What We’ve Got Before She’s Gone

Grant Van Leuven
Feb 3, 2017
Jennifer Marie, my dear wife, died on the fourteenth of September last year. [1] She was thirty-eight. We had barely made it to our eighteenth wedding celebration the month before. Our four young covenant children prepared and served us a special meal that she could eat. We dined together beneath...

Systematic Theology: The Blessed Truth of Being Theologically Organized

Grant Van Leuven
Jan 13, 2017
If all your paperwork rolled like a sea upon 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...

Have More Heaven on Earth with Jesus to Prepare to Leave Earth for Jesus

Grant Van Leuven
Sep 15, 2016
Let us meditate on what Jesus said to the thief next to Him on the cross, as recorded in Luke 23:43: “Verily … Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”. [1] In union with Christ by faith, we will go immediately to a blissful place upon our death. We will leave this world of sin and misery behind us...

Sexual Identity: The Way We Were and Who We Are: Our Identity Crisis is Re-railed into Christ

Grant Van Leuven
Aug 31, 2016
In her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert , [1] Dr. Rosaria Butterfield compares her Christian conversion experience to "an alien abduction or a train wreck." As she shares about her very public Christian "coming out" while a tenured university English professor specializing in "Queer...

Confession and Pastoral Theology: An Extraordinary Means of Constant Conversion

Grant Van Leuven
Jun 10, 2016
Several people have told me they were first truly converted Christians upon becoming Calvinists. Finally, the Bible made sense when the Spirit enlightened them to see, caress, and smell TULIP’s five lovely petals of God’s sovereign embrace from regeneration to glorification. [1] Thus, as the...

Confession and Apologetics: Modeling Scripture’s Method to its Message

Grant Van Leuven
May 11, 2016
My seminary professor of missions emphasized what is often glossed over when discussing and doing mission work: the Bible not only presents a message but a method of its delivery. [1] Similarly, the Bible has its own method of apologetics (self-defense) to which we must defer: it presents itself as...

Confession and Orthodoxy: A Purifying, Preserving Distillation Process

Grant Van Leuven
Apr 22, 2016
Just as bottles of distilled water offer drink that is free of poisonous chemicals and clogging minerals, so the Church’s confessions provide boiled-down, condensed, purified orthodoxy for healthy Body life systems. For instance, a seminary student being examined on the floor of Presbytery with...

Old Princeton: Benjamin B. Warfield - a Reminder Not to Reinvent the Wheel

Grant Van Leuven
Mar 14, 2016
It is not uncommon for our church to receive protests for being careful adherents to the historic Westminster Standards; thus, I have developed a confessional apologetic that boils down to these modern proverbs: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”; and, “Don’t try and reinvent the wheel!” B. B...

Old Princeton: Charles Hodge—Don’t Throw Out the Roman Catholic’s Baptism with its Baptism Water

Grant Van Leuven
Mar 4, 2016
In the context of conforming more consistently to the Westminster Confession of Faith , our Session revisited re-baptism while studying sections 27:3 and 28:6-7, especially pondering these closing words: “The sacrament of baptism is but once to be administered unto any person.” This led us to...

Old Princeton: Archibald Alexander's Letters to the Aged

Grant Van Leuven
Feb 3, 2016
I have the privilege of ministering mainly to saints in their golden years. So as I preach through Leviticus 19, I am eager to reach verse 32 and lead my fellow greener brethren in reverencing our senior saints with these words: Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the...

Old Princeton: Revisiting Old Paths Leads to New Life

Grant Van Leuven
Jan 22, 2016
Just as it revives the Body of Christ when schooled in the classic theology and pious character of the good old Puritans, so we may be renewed by “going old school” with The Log College. Considering that the prominent eighteenth century evangelist George Whitfield referred to what would later be...

The New Testament's Use of the Old Testament: Worship Like a Child and With Your Children - Christ's Use of Psalm 8:2 in Matthew 21:16

Grant Van Leuven
Dec 25, 2015
In church, do you swagger with solemnity? Does a heavy countenance fall like a cloud over your pew? Are you so austere in worship that the children and babes in Christ near you know they best keep their mouths shut? In Matthew 21, the chief priests and scribes prove to be God’s enemies by not...

The New Testament's Use of the Old Testament: David Rejoiced in His Son's Resurrection:Peter's Typological Use of Psalm 16 in Acts 2

Grant Van Leuven
Dec 24, 2015
I once saw a sobering reminder of our mortality and need for the Son of David. A missionary shared his video of a dead Jamaican man lying in a simple wooden box in a walk-in freezer. Another man hammered nails into the box’s top as casually as one might prepare freight for shipping. The dead man...

Systematic Theology Safely Frames Christ in Preaching Scripture

Grant Van Leuven
Sep 17, 2015
The subject of a picture is determined by how it is cropped. So Systematic Theology guides the minister’s eye in preaching Christ through the Scriptures. And for a Presbyterian, the Westminster Standards are the thematic writings that aid his thinking through the presentation of the Bible to his...

Beware of Vain Philosophy, But Do Seek and Love True Wisdom

Grant Van Leuven
Sep 3, 2015
In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns Christians to, Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Does this command preclude philosophizing? That is, does God forbid “the love of wisdom”? Hardly! The...

A Biblical Survey of Adam's Significance to the Whole Story

Grant Van Leuven
Jul 26, 2015
When a character keeps popping up from cover to cover, you know that by his recurring presence the author is binding the whole book together. So the Holy Spirit shows Adam’s real historical existence as really important to the true story of sin and salvation by his protagonist role throughout...

What Do You Do with Your Pastor's Preaching?

Grant Van Leuven
Apr 9, 2015
How should you listen to a sermon? First, realize that you are responsible to actively (and thus, actually) listen. Like anything, you get personal benefit out of the preaching by what you put of yourself into the listening. Such self-accountability applies equally to the pastor. I often say to the...