If I hope in anything or anyone less than One who has power over suffering and, ultimately, death, I am doomed to final disappointment. Suffering will drive me to hopelessness. What character I have w...
I once gave a lecture in which I publicly denied the existence of God. I said: I want to emphatically affirm today that God does not exist. In fact, if He did exist, I would stop believing in Him. If...
I know inwardly that I do not love Christ totally. But at the same time I do know that I love him. I rejoice inwardly at the thought of his triumph. I rejoice inwardly at the thought of his coming. I...
Far from God seeking to destroy the self as many distortions of Christianity would claim, God redeems the self. He heals the self so that it may be useful and fulfilled in the mission to which the per...
Everyone has the right to do his own thing. This slogan is as crass as it is silly. If it were followed by everyone resolutely, society itself would be an impossibility. No one would have any true rig...
Death often frightens us. When we see another person die, we are reminded that we are also mortal, that someday death will come to us. It is a thought we try to push from our minds. We are uncomfortab...
But, someone will say, does God not know, even without being reminded, both in what respect we are troubled and what is expedient for us, so that it may seem in a sense superfluous that he should be s...
But when the Holy Spirit does His mysterious work of regeneration, the first thing that changes in a person is the disposition of his or her soul. Now he cares for the things of God and desires to see...
As the psalmist prayed so many centuries ago, If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? (Ps. 130:3). The answer is obvious: no one. The bad news is that the Lord does mark iniqu...
The true power, the power that will change your life, is the power, the dunamis, of God the Holy Spirit, and God promises to attend the preaching of His Word with that power. Preaching has no power un...
The love, concern, and compassion that we have one for another should be so atypical of the world that they serve as definitive proof thatJesus was not merely a great moral teacher but the second pers...
So many of us are practical atheists. We may be theoretical theists, but our lives betray a practical kind of atheism in that we don't live in order to please God. If we don't live in order to please...
Protestants are particularly vulnerable to this distortion. We seek refuge in our precious doctrine of justification by faith alone, forgetting that the very doctrine is to be a catalyst for the pursu...
Paul declared, There is none who seeks after God (Rom. 3:11). The unbeliever never seeks God. The unbeliever is a fugitive from God. The natural pattern for humanity is to run from Him, to hide from H...
One of the most comforting verses of Scripture is Romans 8:28: And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose. Only a God...
It’s dangerous to assume that because a person is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. There is irony here. I am sure that the reason I have a deep hunger to learn of the holi...
It is the task of the pastor and of the church to feed the sheep. If someone who is not a sheep comes in, that's fine, but we're not going to change the menu and give the sheep goats' food. Worship is...
If you don’t believe that God ordains everything that comes to pass, you don’t believe in God. I
If anyone says that a man once justified cannot lose grace and therefore that he who falls and sins never was truly justified, let him be accursed (Council of Trent: 6/23).
I hear people say that the miracles of the New Testament prove the existence of God, but they do not. God demonstrates His existence long before a single miracle is ever performed by anyone. The funct...