Yearly Archives: 2007

to proclaim … the unsearchable riches of Christ. Ephesians 3:8 Recently four teenagers, three of whom were entering their last year at high school, were killed in a car accident. I cannot imagine the grief and heartache of the parents of these young people, knowing that their children’s lives were snuffed out at such a […]

By far the best spiritual biography of David that I have read, Walter J. Chantry’s David: Man of Prayer, Man of War1 is an exemplar of biblical depth, pastoral insight, and contemporary relevance. It will no doubt find a welcome home in the hands of busy pastors looking for fresh material on the life of […]

Some years ago I made the decision to work a little on Truth’s Victory over Error, David Dickson’s early commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. I had a copy of the Robert Wodrow edition, dated 1749, and with that I began. I did this in what time I could spare while minister of the […]

Alexander Whyte, an eminent Scottish minister in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, wrote of Christians who lived as if sanctification were by vinegar. I was reminded of this when preparing recently to preach on Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. As Luke concludes his account of this eunuch’s conversion, he […]

In this the third of three articles1 on the 2007 Annual Conference of the Evangelical Movement of Wales at Aberystwyth, Geoff Thomas summarizes the third and fourth addresses of Edward Donnelly. The Nature of Our Calling (1 Cor. 1:26-31) The world cultivates personality far more than character. Celebrities have replaced heroes in our culture. People […]

‘You’re going to sin. If you didn’t yesterday, you will today or tomorrow.’ Thus one of America’s best-known Evangelical magazines promoted an article. But is it justifiable to suggest that there is anyone, no matter how godly, who did not sin yesterday? Rather the quotation points to the lack of a sense of sin so […]

Horace Bushnell, the 19th-century Congregational minister from Hartford, along with Universalist Hosea Ballou, and Unitarian William Ellery Channing altered the way many people thought about Christ’s atonement. Until that time, the conventional view in the church of Christ was God-centred and objective. That is, the sovereign Triune God who created man requires obedience from mankind. […]

This is the second of three articles1 reporting on the 2007 Annual Conference of the Evangelical Movement of Wales held in Aberystwyth in August. Edward Donnelly gave the four morning addresses on the opening two chapters of the First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. It was the third time he had spoken at the […]

This article is Chapter 2 of the author’s Pentecost – Today?: The Biblical Basis for Understanding Revival. ‘For a long time it was supposed by the Church that a revival was a miracle, an interposition of Divine power. It is only within a few years that ministers generally have supposed revivals were to be promoted […]

This is the first of three articles1 reporting on the 2007 Annual Conference of the Evangelical Movement of Wales held in Aberystwyth 11-18 August, which Guy Davies attended with his family. It is an edited version of the post on his blog (exiledpreacher.blogspot.com) on 20 August 2007, and is used with permission. The Evangelical Movement […]

On Monday July 2nd Iola and I drove out east from Grand Rapids twenty miles to a lovely house in the woods overlooking Murray Lake on Red Oak Drive, Lowell to visit Bob den Dulk. Bob and I had begun our studies at Westminster Seminary together in 1961 and we graduated three years later (along […]

Sunday, March 4, 1739 – Age 24 Rose much refreshed in spirit and gave my early attendants a warm exhortation as usual. Went to Newgate and preached with power to an exceedingly thronged congregation. Then hastened to Hanham Mount, three miles from the city, where the miners live altogether. God favoured us in the weather. […]

…by revelation there was made known to me the mystery. (Ephesians 3:3) Pearl S. Buck, the great novelist, who won the Pulitzer prize in 1932 and the Nobel prize for literature in 1938, grew up on the mission field. In her memoirs, she took up the question, ‘Do we need missionaries to go to foreign […]

John Frame’s new book, Salvation Belongs to the Lord, (P&R, 2006) is very fine. In 25 chapters he takes the reader through a crash-course in systematics. The chapters contain many wise judgments, much sound teaching, and good emphases. When caution is needed, Frame is cautious; when boldness is called for, he is bold. Though the […]

One by one the men who influenced the Scottish church’s history from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth are remembered in detail, inevitably drawing into the story many others who worked and worshipped with the main characters. From John Knox to William Roberson Smith, the story is one of strong beliefs and those opposing them: […]

This is how world-famous triple jumper and high profile ‘Christian’ Jonathan Edwards has described his (now abandoned) belief in God. In a tragic interview in the The Times on 27th June 2007, Edwards speaks openly and candidly of his renunciation of the Christian faith, and of his apparent naivety in following Christ for 37 years […]

I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 3:1) Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, military and naval hero of 16th century France, who had converted to the Protestant faith during the awakening in France in the 1550s, was in Paris in August, 1572 for the wedding of Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, to Marguerite de Valois, […]

Audubon Press is an associate ministry of the Audubon Drive Bible Church in Laurel, South Mississippi. Its pastor and one of the directors of this press is Jerry Marcellino, one of the driving forces behind a network of Calvinistic churches in the USA, the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals (FIRE). A number of the recent […]

Be sober in all things. (2 Timothy 4:5) Paul, in his last epistle, written shortly before his martyrdom in Rome, gives several exhortations to his son in the faith, Timothy; and this one in particular needs our attention today. Paul’s exhortation to be sober is a present imperative, not referring to freedom from drunkenness but […]

All of us know the experience of reality not matching expectations. Sometimes the problem is with the reality. We buy a cruise on the internet. But, when we take the cruise we find that it falls far short of what was advertised. Other times the problem is with expectations. We get married expecting we are […]

Acts chapter 9 recounts two miracles performed by the Apostle Peter in regard to Aeneas and Dorcas of Joppa – Aeneas, a man who was paralyzed for eight years, and lay on a mat; the other Dorcas, who was very much alive, until she died suddenly in the midst of her labours. I thought of […]

‘Woe unto them! For they have gone in the way of Cain.’ (Jude 11) The deceitfulness of the human heart is a truth recorded in Scripture and borne out in daily life. Believers discover it increasingly in their own lives as well as around them. One of the ways this deceitfulness shows itself is the […]

Christ is our sufficiency. This statement is true on the highest and most vital level of our lives. Only Christ has regarded us in all of our unworthiness and unloveliness and has loved us to the uttermost, giving His life as a ransom for us. Only Christ can cleanse us of the guilt, heal us […]

Whatever we read in the Scriptures is there for our learning, both the warning beacons and the godly examples. ‘Don’t live like this,’ is the message flashed by those hazard lights; ‘Look at the patterns of these people’s lives,’ the examples declare. The man named Achan is set out for us in the Bible as […]

As a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ one of my chief concerns is the efficacy of the Gospel message. In fact, I am more and more convinced that the potency of the word is bound up with the character of the preacher. Keeping this in mind, it becomes needful for the Christian minister […]