Topic Archives: Culture

The following post, reflecting on the value and relevance of Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto, appeared at Christ Over All and is used here with their kind permission. Francis Schaeffer wrote A Christian Manifesto in 1981, three years before he died. It is worth reflecting in general on this work, the cultural moment in which […]

Kevin DeYoung’s recent World news article on evangelical compromise with LGBTQ is immensely helpful. DeYoung points out that such compromise is rarely, if ever, instantaneous. Rather, it manifests gradually, as truth is first omitted, then de-emphasised, and finally deemed to be beyond the pale. ‘Rarely do evangelical leaders and institutions leap all at once from […]

In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah the prophet saw the Lord, high and lifted up. There had been no king like Uzziah since the golden age of Solomon 300 years before. He had reigned for 52 years—the vast majority of the people did not remember any other king. It was a time of […]

‘Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son! … May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth! In his days may the righteous flourish, and peace abound, till the moon be no more!’ (Psalm 72:1, 6-7). As tributes to Queen […]

It would appear that one of the many ways in which God punishes the sins of men and nations is to give them over at times to widespread perplexity and confusion. Life in a perfect world would be ideally simple. We should all instinctively seek first the glory of God and he would unfailingly supply […]

Recently, I bought a copy of John Stott’s brief and famous exposition of the Christian gospel, Basic Christianity, which I intended to give to a friend. The book was first published in 1958 and has sold several million copies. It is at once simple and refined, gentle and uncompromising, and many people in the Anglophone world […]

Europeans should not forget their most pressing moral issue: abortion. , Lord Nicholas Windsor At the close of the last century, as the reckoning was drawn up in Europe for the actions and reactions of the twentieth century, could we not have been forgiven for tending a little toward the view that we had, after […]

Some of us who are advanced in years can lay claim to  remembering life in a God-centred church and, to a certain extent, in a God-centred nation. The influence of  three centuries of the Shorter Catechism being memorized in the home, the church and the school had left its mark. The opening question: ‘What is […]

‘Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.’ – Revelation 2:10 Zakaria Botros, an Egyptian Coptic priest, born in Egypt in 1934, who was declared by the Arabic newspaper al Insan al Jadeed to be Islamic public enemy number one, has a $60 million bounty on his head from Al Qaeda. […]

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, […]

‘If I profess with loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, […]

God gave them over (Romans 1:28). The recent Supreme Court decision in Obergefell vs. Hodges, which redefines 3500 hundred years of legal and biblical precedent, and which mandates that all fifty states must uphold same sex unions, is a shock to the sensibilities of most Christians. Forty-eight percent of Americans now approve of same sex […]

A Response to the Supreme Court Decision on Gay Marriage Peter said in the passage just before this one (i. e. verses 11, 12) that the good lives of believers help to win over the unbelieving world. Then he shows us exactly how this works as we do our duty to the civil government. 1 […]

And we are witnesses of these things; and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey Him (Acts 5:32). At Pentecost when the promised Holy Spirit came, Peter preached with great convicting and converting power, resulting in three thousand people calling on the name of the Lord to be saved […]

I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees (Ecclesiastes 2:5-6). The Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem writes of the futility of living life ‘under the sun’,1 that […]