Articles

Who Can Have Effectual Prayers? The righteous are not people who are better than others. Except as God looks on them in favour, they have nothing. It was so with Elijah, Moses, and Paul, as we have seen. Effectual fervent prayer, therefore, is a gift and it always will be a gift – even for […]

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary […]

“Pray, then, in this way,” -Matthew 6:9 Our Lord Jesus makes some amazing promises to us concerning prayer. He says, “And all things you ask in prayer believing, you shall receive,” (Matthew 21:22). He says, “Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened to you,” (Matthew […]

What matters most to us in life? There is a ‘right’ answer to that question, but then again there are many ‘real’ answers that lurk beneath the surface. No serious-minded Christian would argue with the truth of the Shorter Catechism’s assertion that ‘the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever’. […]

‘Pray, then, in this way.’ -Matthew 6:9 My good friend, Archie Parrish, has taught me and many others some very valuable lessons about prayer. He says that we should always pray with a kingdom focus. By this he means that even if you pray for your spouse’s healing from cancer, or for your adult child who […]

What does it mean for you that Jesus Christ is King? While many of us could give a good answer, perhaps not many of us would include the profound and powerful testimony of Scripture to Christ as King in his humiliation. This is the period described in the Apostles’ Creed: he “suffered under Pontius Pilate, […]

The title of this article is the text that Charles Hodge took for a sermon he preached following the death of J W Alexander.1 Alexander (1804-1859) was briefly a professor in Princeton Seminary, but spent most of his ministry as a pastor in New York. The text is part of Acts 9:20: ‘And straightway he […]

Times are a changing. There has been a shaking among some nations of the Western world. Latent forces have been asserting themselves. Some layers of society have found a voice. Leadership has brought change to Europe and to the United States. Is this the beginning of better things for our Western civilisation? One would hope […]

When ministers and elders gather together, it is usual for them share their ministry burdens with each other. The calling of a minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is high and hard; the weightiness of the calling and the sufferings experienced in it give us the need to discreetly share some criticisms […]

It has been on my mind for quite a while to post an article on ‘sinner theologians’, but I hesitated because of its potential for being misconstrued. However, having just received the latest issue of the Westminster Theological Journal and having read a review article by Professor Donald Macleod, I was persuaded to go ahead […]

‘Yes, the Lord will give what is good and our land will yield its produce.’ – Psalm 85:12 George Frideric Handel was born in Germany in 1685 and was a devoted Christian in the Lutheran Church. While living in Italy as a composer of Italian operas, when this form of musical entertainment began to wane in […]

The Great Heresies – 4 Introduction The study of what historians refer to as ‘the Great Heresies’ is no mere intellectual or antiquarian exercise, but shows the main lines of error that have affected the Church over the centuries. In Gnosticism we are confronted with the lure of claimed secret knowledge, and of a matter-spirit […]

“…and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together…” (Gen 3:7) Atheists attempting to work out the worldview implications of their (un)belief-system appear to be on the rise these days (for an excellent handling of one example from a Christian perspective, see here). I recently came across another example in the […]

‘Wilt Thou not Thyself revive us again that Thy people may rejoice in Thee.’ – Psalm 85:6. On January 20 the USA witnessed the swearing in ceremony of Donald J. Trump to become the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. While I am expectant of economic progress for all due to President Trump’s economic […]

Omnipotent is one of the many words which appear in the older versions of the English Bible, but not in the more modern ones. It is also part of the vocabulary of our hymns, but is rarely employed in more modern choruses and Christian songs. It is a word which can only be applied to […]

Few would disagree that there is a lightness in society today. Men of substance are scarce. David Wells, in commenting on the loss of character, says: ‘We have become T  S Eliot’s “hollow men”, without weight, for whom appearance and image must suffice. Image and appearance assume the functions that character and morality once had. […]

Lately I’ve been sleeping less to get more done, and therefore feel drained in the doing; so I sleep more and get less done, but worry that I need to work faster. It’s a vicious cycle I’m sure many reading this have experienced. Reading through some old notes on Calvin’s Institutes made me realize what […]

Last November Pepe Moreno celebrated 25 years as the pastor of the Evangelical Church in Alcázar, central Spain. We caught up with him (this is not easy) and got him to answer a few questions… 1. When did you first think about becoming a pastor? My calling to the ministry is, in many ways, related […]

‘But God,’ -Ephesians 2:4a. God spoke and all things came into being. He gave freedom for man and woman to eat of any tree in the Garden of Eden except one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve was deceived and Adam deliberately disobeyed God. And then death came upon all mankind, […]

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 […]

‘What man is he that feareth the LORD? Him shall he teach in the way that he shall choose. His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth.’ (Psalm 25:12-13) There was a time not too many years ago when a believer was described simply as a ‘God-fearing man.’ That was […]

First Protestant missionary to translate the Bible into Chinese The great English poet and hymn writer William Cowper wrote the following well before Robert Morrison left for China: Great offices will have great talents, and God gives to every man the virtues, temper, understanding and taste that lifts him into life and lets him fall […]

The so-called great heresies are worthy of examination for a number of reasons, one of which is that they represent the main lines of attack against Biblical Christianity. With the exception of Gnosticism, which begins with the claim to secret knowledge apart from the Bible, they depend on a distortion of the Biblical witness. Modalism […]

‘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. […]

It is not so long ago that in almost every church service we would hear the opening words, ‘Let us worship  God’,  or ‘Let us unite in the public worship of God ‘. When it came to the public reading of Scripture, the preacher would say, “Let us hear the Word of God’ . A […]