Yearly Archives: 2008

The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World By David F. Wells Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008 267 pp, clothbound ISBN: 978 0 80284 007 3 David Wells is an evangelical, and he is concerned with the state of evangelicalism. This is nothing new; he has written […]

Abraham was brought up in the city of Ur, not far from the River Euphrates, in what is now southern Iraq. It was presumably very much a heathen environment. Yet even there the Lord appeared to him and called him ‘to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance’ (Heb. […]

The Banner of Truth has published Love Rules: The Ten Commandments for the 21st Century1. Originally published in 2004 by the Church and Nation Committee of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, Australia, this volume was written by Australian Presbyterian ministers and professors. The Introduction explains that this book on the law of God was written […]

John Calvin was not a man who would readily draw attention to himself. When he gave some details of his early life in the preface to his Commentary on the Psalms, his purpose was to draw attention to God’s activity. His father had intended him for the priesthood but, says Calvin, God, by the secret […]

Be filled with the Holy Spirit. (Ephesians 5:18) In July, 1997 my wife and I had the privilege of taking tea with Lord and Lady Catherwood in Cambridge, England. Lady Catherwood is the daughter of my favourite preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who so ably preached the doctrines of grace, beginning in Aberavon, Wales in 1927 and […]

VOLUME 1 This is a fascinating book which we found hard to put down. Really it tells the wonderful story of the Evangelical Revival in Wales in the eighteenth century. What amazing gatherings there were and what blessing! Originally written in Welsh in 1895 by John Morgan Jones, assisted by William Morgan, this is the […]

For the past year or so I have been making my way slowly through the reading of a series of sermons preached on Hebrews 11 by the Puritan, Thomas Manton. The book containing these sermons is titled By Faith and it is published by The Banner of Truth Trust1. Most recently I have been reading […]

A member of our congregation put to me a question in the light of some teaching on Luke 8:21, where Jesus dealt with a messenger who had come from his own relatives. These relatives wanted to speak to Jesus. ‘But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of […]

It is sometimes profitable to trace the use of one word in the Bible – there is much to learn from this method of study, it often brings new thoughts to light. Let us consider the word ‘Exceeding’. When one begins to trace the word in Scripture we soon realise that there is nothing sparing […]

Until the age of twenty-six I knew nothing of vital religion, although I lived an outwardly religious, moral and respectable life . . . Brought up under sacramental teaching, I was totally in the dark concerning the grace of God, although . . . I realize that he was leading me all the time. To […]

‘The book is valuable because it is honest about the agony of losing a child . . . And yet this book also powerfully testifies to the comfort of God, of his redemption in Christ, of victory over the grave, of sufficient promises to sustain his people in their sorrows.’ [Martin Downes on James W […]

I just don’t get it! Perhaps someone can explain it to me: how can we act so contrary to what we believe? How can there be such a yawning gap between what we know is true and what we do in the name of the truth we know? You don’t get it either, do you? […]

Christianity is the religion of the Gospel. The Gospel was defined by William Tyndale, the Bible translator, as ‘good merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him to dance and sing and leap for joy’. ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, evermore his praises sing’, we might add. But as time […]

Be imitators of God . . . walk in love. (Ephesians 5:1) Forty-five per cent of people living in America claim to have had a born again experience, but the born again people have virtually the same levels of divorce, adultery, fornication and use of pornography as the rest of the population. Evangelicals are those […]

Even in the midst of temporal troubles, there is always something to be thankful for. Thanks-giving isn’t easy. Two things make it difficult. (1) Our sinful natures act like a ship’s anchor let down at sea. When we try to stir ourselves to give thanks, we find our souls are ‘dragging anchor.’ In the Bible, […]