Freedom Comes (02/02/09 - 11 Comments)
At my church last night I preached a message that was part of a series we are doing on various points of theology. The topic I had to address was biblical manhood and womanhood. It's something of an uncomfortable topic to have to preach and one we, as Christians, are too often intimidated by. I sought in this message to emphasize the freedom and the delight in God that come to us when we understand...
On Being Weak (01/28/09 - 14 Comments)
It seems that life is filled, at almost every turn, with trials and difficulties. Some of these times of trail are light while others are terrible and weighty. Strangely, some of these trials are caused by times of great joy while others are caused by great pain. The birth of a child can prove to be almost as great a trial, despite being brought about by such joy, as the loss of a job or...
Prayer as Duty and Delight (01/26/09 - 30 Comments)
At Grace Fellowship Church we've been praying for something big and we've been praying it for quite some time. We want a meeting place of our own. It's not that there is anything inherently wrong with the school we meet in now, but more that we can foresee how our own building would be beneficial to the church and to the community. Oh, and we want the building to be free. We're quite a small...
Searching for the Spiritual Gifts (01/16/09 - 14 Comments)
In recent days I have received several emails dealing with spiritual gifts. Unfortunately, due to constraints on my time, I've been unable to spend a lot of time answering these. Today I want to spend just a few moments at least sharing some basic biblical teaching on the spiritual gifts. Much of this is drawn from my book The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment where I have an entire chapter dealing with gifts in general and...
Don't Let Me Lose the Wonder (01/12/09 - 26 Comments)
I kind of feel like I should be screaming in joy and wonder right now. Like I should just scream out "I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M DOING THIS! THIS IS AMAZING! THIS IS AWESOME! CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!"Just a few short hours ago I was in my home town of Toronto, on the shores of Lake Ontario. And now I am 1,000 miles to the south, rapidly approaching the Gulf of Mexico. Just moments ago I...
The Greatest Hindrance to the Gospel Today (01/09/09 - 31 Comments)
Some time ago I mentioned that I had been asked by a magazine to submit an answer to this question: "What is the greatest hindrance to the gospel today?" Since the magazine has now been published, I can print the answer at my site. So here goes... You know the oft-told story, I am sure. G.K. Chesterton, along with other prominent authors of his day, was asked by The Times to answer this question: "What's...
The Best Measure (12/30/08 - 13 Comments)
Continued from yesterday... Every now and again my son decides the time is right to build a paper airplane air force. He raids my printer to get the stacks of paper he'll need and then opens up The Dangerous Book for Boys to try out some of the designs printed in that book. But after building a few of these he inevitably wants to try some new planes--some bombers or fighters, perhaps. So he and...
The Right Measure (12/29/08 - 7 Comments)
On July 23, 1983, Flight 143, an Air Canada Boeing 767, lifted off from Montreal's Montreal-Dorval International Airport on its way to Edmonton, Alberta. On board were 69 passengers and crew. Sometime around the flight's halfway mark, while over the tiny community of Red Lake, Ontario, near the border of Manitoba, an alarm sounded in the cockpit, indicating that there was a problem with the fuel pressure on one side of the aircraft. The pilots,...
The Public Nuisance (12/17/08 - 15 Comments)
You'll have to excuse me for re-posting today. It was a tough night dealing with a sick kid and then this morning I had to take the kids to school and then shovel out after a pretty good snowfall. As I was shoveling this morning I thought of a post from last winter and thought I'd post it again. I hope you don't mind. Elizabeth is a public nuisance. Her status is not official yet,...
Doubt as Virtue, Assurance as Arrogance (12/03/08 - 21 Comments)
I have written often about the issues of doubt and assurance. They are, I think, issues that are well worth spending time on. Many fine Christians spend much of their lives doubting their salvation while other nominal Christians live in reckless assurance of their right standing before God. Meanwhile, many people today teach that doubt itself is a virtue while assurance is a mark of arrogance. John Frame offers some valuable perspective on this in...
A Great Servant; An Evil Master (12/01/08 - 19 Comments)
It's a question you've probably asked. Why is it that when you are looking for a house, driving slowly down a darkened street straining to see the numbers on the fronts of the homes or on the mailboxes at the end of the driveways, you automatically turn down the car radio? Why do you need silence when focusing, concentrating? You do so, I suppose, because you instinctively know that music and voices are a distraction....
Memorizing Scripture Together (11/21/08 - 33 Comments)
The "Reading Classics Together" effort has taught me that blogs (even this blog) can offer a kind of excitement and accountability by community that helps me do things I wouldn't otherwise have the discipline to do. And from what I hear, it works for some of you, too. Many of us would never have read Owens or Edwards or Pink if we had not had the crowd accountability we've found here. This has been...
Overlooking an Offense (11/19/08 - 19 Comments)
Last week I solicited questions from the readers of this site, looking for good ideas for future blog posts. I received almost 100 responses, many of which asked really good questions. In the coming weeks and months I will attempt to answer many of them. I begin today with this one: "How do you discern when to take something up with a person and when is it something to just let go (is it ever...
The First and Primary Object (11/14/08 - 18 Comments)
It was a couple of years ago now that I read George Marsden's great biography of Jonathan Edwards. As I read it I was often stopped short by Edwards' wisdom. Constantly surrounded by conflict, and often facing people who sought to undermine his ministry, Edwards had every opportunity to reflect on the task of a minister. One of these conflicts involved the question of whether sermons should primarily enlighten the mind or whether they should...
A Righteous Man (11/11/08 - 13 Comments)
Every believer carries a measure of the guilt for Jesus' death. Was it not for our willful disobedience to God's perfect Law, we would have no need of a Savior. We acknowledge in song that it was our hands that drove the spikes into His and sometimes speak about driving the nails into Jesus' hands every time we sin. We speak figuratively, of course, knowing that although we were not present at the time of...
I Love You This Much (10/29/08 - 60 Comments)
Last week I spent an evening reading Rick Warren's soon-to-be-published book The Purpose of Christmas. It is a mostly-original work that, while it draws heavily from The Purpose Driven Life is at least not entirely derived from it. An evangelistic gift book, it is meant to be given as a Christmas gift. I have written a review of it that I will post a little closer to the release date. For now, though, I wanted...
The Badder the Bad... (10/27/08 - 20 Comments)
Over the weekend I read Michael Horton's new book Christless Christianity. I greatly enjoyed reading it (despite chapters that were slightly longer than my attention span) and found that it gave me a lot to think about. A few days earlier I had read a new book by Rick Warren, The Purpose of Christmas. What a contrast there was between the two of them. Throughout his book, Horton emphasizes the importance and transcendence of the...
The Best Defense (10/01/08 - 2 Comments)
The best defense is a good offense. You’ve probably heard that phrase before. As far as I can tell, it was coined by the Prussian military historian, theorist and tactician Carl von Clausewitz (a name I’m quite sure I haven’t written since military history classes way back in my college days). Since then it has been applied to all kinds of situations far beyond the military. It has also been turned around so occasionally you...
Living on Borrowed Grace (09/24/08 - 15 Comments)
I woke up early this morning, a long time before my alarm was set to start buzzing. I woke up with a phrase bouncing through my mind--a phrase I've been thinking about for a long time. Some time ago I was thinking about children who have the privilege of growing up in Christian homes but was drawn to the many I know who have fallen away from the faith. Despite the great honor given them...
How is the Christian to Love God? (09/19/08 - 30 Comments)
There is a profound truth that every Christian must face: the Bible is an inexhaustible treasure. Talk to a pastor who has spent a lifetime reading, studying and explaining the Bible and he will tell you, I'm sure, that the more he comes to understand, the more he realizes he does not understand. I have heard John Piper compare this to climbing a mountain. As he scales a sheer cliff and comes to the top...
