Topic Archives: Church Life

This is the text of an address delivered at the Leicester Ministers’ Conference, 28 April, 2012. It is included, along with four other addresses, in Iain H. Murray’s Evangelical Holiness and Other Addresses. J. Gresham Machen once wrote: ‘If we are going to avoid controversy, we might as well close our Bibles; for the New […]

In the last few months, the church I serve has been working through ‌the updated version of Eshcol, John Owen’s little treatment on church life now entitled Duties of Christian Fellowship: A Manual for Church Members. The volume is divided into two main sections. The first contains seven ‘Rules for walking in fellowship with respect […]

It is rather audacious to claim that we are reformed. It can also be misleading when we call ourselves Reformed Churches. For this might imply that we believe that our denominations are truly reformed; or, even worse, that at some point in the past we were or became reformed and that the task of reform […]

To help us in the dealings of our lives we should have such a conception of God as not to limit him in our thoughts. When we are in extremity we must not tie him to this thing or to that thing. He can make matter out of nothing. Why should we limit the unlimited […]

Why bother coming to the prayer meeting? In the pecking order of many congregations, it is somewhere below the much-lamented evening service. In the priorities of too many Christians, it seems to have little value. It’s the one we can afford to miss. It’s the one to which we don’t, or maybe wouldn’t, take our […]

How would you answer these questions: How can we most glorify God on the earth? How can we experience most of his presence? How can we see him most clearly revealed? How can we get the maximum possible spiritual benefits from the Lord? How can we do the most good to our fellow believers? What […]

The purpose of this article is not to provide answers, but to raise certain questions, in the hope that readers will themselves give sustained thought to these things. Having been in the ministry only a few years it is possible to recall vividly one impression that was mine as I entered my first pastorate. Deep […]

The Bible teaches that the church is the company of those who are committed to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. The Master said ‘Upon this rock I will build my church’ and the foundation to which he referred was expressed in the glorious testimony of Peter ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’ […]

I was at the opening of a new church building in London on Saturday November 17. Its opening is at a time when Britain is currently experiencing Ash Dieback, a disease of ash trees caused by a fungus. It was first identified in the UK in 2012 and is now widespread. Over the next few […]

Instead of lifting my soul to gaze upon the Lord’s beauty while in a church service or reading my Bible at home, my mind drifts to my plans for later in the day, my favorite sports team, or to what is stressing me — and Satan loves it. When our minds are somewhere else, they […]

As we long for the spiritual recovery that is so much needed in the Church and in the nation, it seems at times that we are living in two parallel worlds. In the one world there is a great output of zeal and energy and some advances are being made; in the other world there […]

Our dear friends and supporters of our ministry in this Northern Siberian city of Nizhnivartovsk, After six years of slow and painstaking labour, because we had to do most of the work ourselves, we completed our wooden church in 2014. We came here in 1991 on the first evangelistic mission to Siberia within living memory, […]

‘Why do you go to church twice on a Sunday? Isn’t once enough?’ In many churches the Sunday evening service is disappearing. There are two main reasons for this. First, demands from employers have increased enormously over the last 30 years. Weekends have become precious. Two Sunday services are seen as taking up too much […]

This question can be embarrassing, can’t it? Why do you worship on Sunday? Doesn’t the Bible say that the seventh day is the time God consecrated for his people? Where does the Bible say that Christians should sanctify the first day of the week, rather than the seventh day? It’s a good question, you will […]

It came as a bit of a shock, although not a great surprise, to hear a leading Reformed minister say recently that he did not have a proper doctrine of the church for most of his ministry. We have witnessed a recovery of the doctrines of grace over the last sixty years in the United […]