Topic Archives: History & Biography

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Scottish Reformer, John Knox. God not only calls men to particular tasks in his kingdom; he also equips the men he calls with the personality, gifts, and strength to do the work. So it was with John Knox, the Reformer of Scotland. John […]

I’ve just come to the end of a Sunday morning series on ‘The Five Points’. I have preached several series going through all the great doctrines of the Bible. But I’ve never wanted to pick out the five points particularly. Partly, that’s because I’m aware that some folk have emphasised them in an unhelpful way. […]

Although they have allies and are numerous, they will be destroyed and pass away. Although I have afflicted you, Judah, I will afflict you no more. Now I will break their yoke from your neck and tear your shackles away (Nahum 1:12-13). In July, 1755 as British General Braddock, along with young, twenty-three year old […]

I met Patience, a young black woman from Zambia, on my recent trip to Cape Town, South Africa. She is attending the Maranatha Family Church in Masephumalele, pastored by my friend Ronni Cronje. Patience, a year or so ago, was riding with her mother on a small taxi van from Zimbabwe to South Africa when […]

Imagine an ideal setting for spiritual revival. Odds are good that the razor wire and guard towers of Angola prison, Louisiana’s infamous maximum-security penitentiary, don’t fit the bill. Yet spiritual revival is precisely what is taking place among the prison’s inmate population, most of whom are incarcerated for life. ‘Dr. John Robson [who heads the […]

It ranks as one of the wickedest acts of a Jewish king, it has had many parallels, and the end result of them all is a failure to destroy the Word of God. Here’s the story. King Jehoiakim of Judah was listening as the words of a scroll were read to him – a scroll […]

It is recorded of John Newton that he said: ‘I read the newspaper that I may see how my heavenly Father governs the world.’ Spurgeon said that he read the newspaper to find illustrations for his sermons. In our 21st century it is very revealing to read God’s Word side by side with the newspaper. […]

In 1993 Vladimir Radzihovski was living in southern Ukraine when he was invited to join the third of the river ‘Missions to Siberia’. Passenger ships were hired to visit cities, towns and small settlements along the banks of the rivers Ob and Irtish, to preach the gospel to those who had never heard it before. […]

What do we make of Alexander Whyte? His books, unlike those of many of his liberal contemporaries, are still in print and are popular with Christians all over the world. Christian Focus publish his famous Bible Characters. Other books of his in print include: Lord Teach Us to Pray, Samuel Rutherford and some of his […]

Although Robert Murray M’Cheyne did not take his place among the founders of the Free Church of Scotland (he was taken to glory just before the Disruption) he fully sympathised with their rejection of state control of the Church of Christ in Scotland, and would have been among them when their Deed of Separation terminated […]

David Cameron will almost certainly get his Syrian war. Who will fight it, let alone who will win it, remains unclear. But who will lose it is already known – the Christians. The relentless persecution of Christ’s followers is foretold in the Gospels. Suffering is portrayed as the pathway to triumph. The global position today […]

Born in June of the year of the French Revolution, in the then village of Basildon, Essex, Allen Gardiner longed to go to sea, to fight the French, and to follow Mungo Park in exploring the interior of Africa. By 1810 he was at sea and engaged in fighting in the Pacific in the Phoebe […]

Having been vacant since June 2010 with the emeritization of Dr. L. W. Bilkes, the Free Reformed Church of Grand Rapids was privileged and blessed to install Dr. David Murray as a Free Reformed minister labouring in our congregation. Synod 2013 of the Free Reformed churches unanimously approved Dr. Murray to be called as Free […]

Lately many new church buildings have or are still being built by congregations of our denomination. Some of these are the congregations’ second buildings since their founding. What a contrast this is to the situation in Israel. During the entire history of Israel as a modern state, not a single building was erected and dedicated […]

On 30th August 2013 the news broke that Seamus Heaney had died in a Dublin hospital, following a short illness. A measure of the legacy left by the poet’s life and work was given by the widespread sense of sadness across cultures and continents that a man of greatness and forceful intellect had passed away. […]