Topic Archives: Encouragement

Clear and concise, encouraging and exhilarating, reliable and readable are six words that quickly come to mind. They help explain why the writings of J C Ryle have such an enduring value. But they are not the main reason why I, and so many others, find his books so beneficial. Ryle tackles controversial issues in some of articles and tracts. He […]

2015 marked the two-hundredth anniversary of a change of pastorate for the Rev. Thomas Chalmers. On Sunday 9th July 1815, after a ministry of twelve years, Chalmers preached a farewell sermon to his congregation in Kilmany (Kilmany is a village in the Fife region of Scotland). Later that month he was inducted to the pastorate […]

‘I am His’. Every believer in Jesus may say it. And with full assurance. ‘I am the Lord’s’. Humblingly and astonishingly we may also say that he is ours. To the Christian, God is not just the Lord but my Lord. But it is of the bond by which we have become his of which […]

Do you remember the resolutions you made at this time last year? I would guess that many of us resolved at the beginning of 2015 that every day we would have a ‘quiet time’. We told ourselves that this would be the year when we at last would establish a pattern of daily Bible-reading and […]

A man had two sons (Luke 15:11). Some of our leading preachers today regularly equate the ‘middle America church’ with Pharisees and the elder brother in Luke 15. They say that we in conservative, traditional churches are self-righteous, legalistic, and consequently unwelcoming to the younger brother types -atheists, agnostics, homosexuals, the ‘broken people’ in our […]

For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands (2 Timothy 1:6). Paul begins his second letter to Timothy by reminding Timothy of the blessings that are his in Christ. Timothy is reading a personal letter to him from […]

God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not proper (Romans 1:28). Atheist Julian Huxley once wrote, Evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness in the arms of a divinized father figure whom he himself created, nor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering […]

The Bible is full of remarkable statements. One of the most remarkable is 1 Peter 2:17. Peter is instructing Christians how to live in an essentially Godless, anti-Christian society. He writes, ‘Honour everyone. Love the brothers. Fear God. Honour the emperor’. This is surely remarkable. Love the brothers and fear God we can readily understand; […]

Percy John Henry Topping: Born 26 March 2015; died 4 April 2015. Aged 9 days An address given at Bethel Chapel, Luton by Mr. Ben A. Ramsbottom, on Wednesday, 22 April 2015 at the funeral service. Readings: Mark 10:14; Job 19:25-27; Job 1:21; Psalm 23; Jeremiah 31:15-17; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 5l-57. Hymns: ‘Sovereign Ruler of […]

Rosaria’s Message to the Church Dr. Rosaria Butterfield said it was difficult to describe her unlikely conversion to Christianity, but settled on defining it as a mix of an alien abduction and a train wreck. ‘I lost everything but the dog,’ she said. Butterfield was speaking September 3, 2015 at Central Avenue CRC in Holland, […]

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they shall both be alike good (Ecclesiastes 11:5). My wife Margaret and I have been running Bible stalls in open-air markets since 1999, with a very small start […]

For their sakes I sanctify Myself (John 17:19). In a country where the evangelical church has been declining for years, where only seven to eight percent of the population are evangelicals (twenty-two to twenty-six million people); in a nation where evangelicals are alarmingly and increasingly called more dangerous and divisive than Muslims; it is high […]

It was something Caleb said about himself (Josh. 14:8). He had fully followed the Lord. Nor was it an idle boast. His words are merely an echo of the Lord’s: ‘my servant Caleb…has followed me fully’ (Num. 14:24). How may we do the same? We need faith. When Caleb and Joshua and the other ten […]

John Murray, the great 20th-century theologian, once spoke to the children in his Sunday School on the surpassing value of The Shorter Catechsim,1, 2, 3 saying, Now everyone of you children should know The Shorter Catechism from the beginning to the end without a mistake by this age. Now that’s without joking at all. At […]

Be faithful until death (Revelation 2:10). We know next to nothing of persecution in the western church. This may be changing. Might we learn steadfastness from the church at Smyrna? Smyrna was one of the great cities of Asia Minor. It enjoyed westward winds which brought gentle breezes from the Mediterranean Sea and it was […]