Topic Archives: Spiritual Growth

Get up. Let us go from here. (John 14:31) After the Passover meal with his disciples, after washing their feet, after comforting them with the promise that he was going to his Father in order to prepare a mansion for them in glory, after promising the Helper, the Holy Spirit who would bring to their […]

The Christian life is full of extraordinary ‘highs’ and unsettling ‘lows’. This is something young Christians are often unprepared for. And yet God’s Word could not be clearer that our spiritual good requires that the Lord lead us through dark valleys as well as lifting us up to expansive mountain tops. This is why reading […]

. . . trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. (Ephesians 5:10) Every Christian is called to heed and obey the myriad of commands for holiness, for keeping God’s law.2 And we all acknowledge that we fall short of that standard. In a desire to address legalism in the evangelical church the contemporary […]

‘We’ve a story to tell to the nations.’ So how does it go? We need to think about that. Barna has his statistics, and it looks like a lot of us struggle in just knowing what that story is. Is it what you once heard the evangelist say, that you’re a hell-deserving sinner and that […]

It has often been said: if you wish to start reading the Puritans, begin with Sibbes – the point being that he is simple and direct. (Others may suggest Watson or Swinnock.) Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), ‘the heavenly doctor,’ was one of the foremost among Puritan preachers and divines.The Love of Christ was first published under […]

Thy word I have treasured in my heart, that I may not sin against Thee. (Psalm 119:11) If we wish to be blameless (Psa. 119:1), if we hope to be blessed (Psa. 119:2), if we desire to live righteously (Psa. 119:3), if we want a shame free life (Psa. 119:6), if we long for lives […]

Surely some of the most staggering words in the New Testament are found in 2 Corinthians 2:14: ‘But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.’ If you are a Christian, however bad or poor or despondent you […]

Why do you kick at My sacrifice and at My offering which I have commanded in My dwelling, and honor your sons above Me? (1 Samuel 2:29, NASB) Hophni and Phinehas were worthless men who did not know the Lord and who regularly abused the sacrificial system in Israel. They commissioned their workers to go […]

I do not ask thee to take them out of the world but to keep them from the evil one. (John 17:15) You daily face untold danger, opposition, and sorrow. The danger takes many forms. You could be killed on the way to work this morning by a third shift worker on his way home […]

In John 15 the Lord Jesus Christ explains to us that Christians are united to him in a spiritual union. Our Lord uses the illustration of a vine and its branches. The Lord supplies to all believers the grace of his Holy Spirit. This, like the sap, is the source of all the ‘fruit’ which […]

Cursed be the one who does the Lord’s work negligently, and cursed be the one who restrains his sword from blood (Jeremiah 48:10). Jehovah speaks through Jeremiah the prophet to Moab, a wicked idolatrous nation to the east of Israel, which had a long history of causing God’s people trouble. He pronounces woes upon them, […]

Joel Beeke, what three books have been most helpful to you as a Christian and as a minister? The first book that comes to mind is the Letters of Samuel Rutherford, which I kept on my nightstand for decades. Whenever I was discouraged, I would sweeten my mind with a morsel of Rutherford before I […]

Paul must have been an unsettling companion. For Paul, the Christian life could never be lived with half measures. He was an all or nothing man. The gospel of God’s grace in Christ had not only captured him, it had captivated him. He counted everything (yes, everything) as loss ‘because of the surpassing worth of […]

Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? (John 21:15) One of the more glorious promises in Scripture is John 10:28-30, And I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish. No one shall snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater […]

Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John, and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were marvelling, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13) We all know that Peter had been an abject coward. While Peter was standing by the fire, as Jesus was on […]