Topic Archives: Encouragement

The Apostle Paul exhorts the congregation in Rome in Romans 12:11 ‘Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord.’ This text is easily understood; there are no complicated words; the structure is obvious. First of all the exhortation is stated in a negative form telling us we’re never to lack […]

It is a constant surprise to me that many Christians are worried about guidance. Please don’t misunderstand me. I do not mean that Christians should not be concerned about doing God’s will. But why is it that many (and I think ‘many’ is the appropriate word) Christians get worried, confused and at times even spiritually […]

When I began to consider what I should say in these pages, I found myself pulled in two directions. My first impulse was to lament the spiritual decay that people of my generation have observed at close range and to urge the next generation to carry on the struggle against it with unremitting faithfulness and […]

Resting in the Redeemer Do you think that the Christian life is hard? If so, what makes it hard, and if not, why does it seem so hard for so many professing Christians? We can begin to consider this matter in terms of the context of the question and in terms of our defining what […]

He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. (Luke 1:32) Is it really possible to be filled with joy at this time of year, especially in light of our economic uncertainty and the constant threat of […]

Even in the midst of temporal troubles, there is always something to be thankful for. Thanks-giving isn’t easy. Two things make it difficult. (1) Our sinful natures act like a ship’s anchor let down at sea. When we try to stir ourselves to give thanks, we find our souls are ‘dragging anchor.’ In the Bible, […]

The Christian life is to be a life of constant, unhindered joy – or at least, so says the apostle Paul: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!’ According to Paul, joy is not to be an occasional feature in the believer’s life, it is to be a constant reality, a […]

John the Baptist, incarcerated in the prison of Machaerus east of the Dead Sea, sent some of his disciples to Jesus with a question, which Luke reports twice. So it must be a question to which Luke wants to draw our attention. It is the most momentous question that should exercise minds now as it […]

ChristianHistory.net recently published this little article of J. I. Packer. God’s Chemo for My Cancered Soul They called it the Victorious Spirit-filled life. You got into it, they said, by total surrender to Jesus Christ (they assumed no one does this at conversion), and then looking to him whenever you felt sinful impulses stirring. He […]

I have heard Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees Thee; Therefore I retract, I repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:5, 6) On July 23, 2007 Dr. William Pettit of Cheshire, Connecticut experienced a man’s worst nightmare. On that evening two convicted felons, released two days earlier on parole, […]

The life of faith is not immune from the disappointments and heartaches of what Paul calls ‘the sufferings of this present age’ (Romans 8:18). God does not exempt his children from unexpected, sorely wounding providences. In 2 Corinthians 1:8, Paul tells us that the hardships and pressures he and his friends were experiencing were so […]

. . . the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion, and your wife by covenant. [Malachi 2:14] Every Christian man knows pornography is sinful and that it will rob his soul of vitality, destroying his marriage and […]

The Apostle Paul writes, “But to each one of us grace was given, according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Ephesians 4:7). William Farel became a true follower of Christ in the early 1520s, during the time the Reformation, under the leadership of Martin Luther, was raging like a wild-fire throughout Europe. Farel had a […]

John Owen’s classic work ‘On Temptation’ has recently been published by Banner of Truth in an updated edition as Temptation Resisted and Repulsed.1 The church which I serve used this newer version as the basis for a series of adult Sunday School classes over a course of months. It became quickly apparent that the material […]

‘Stand firm in the faith’ 1 Corinthians 16:13. Ann Douglas, the feminist Harvard professor, in her book, The Feminization of the American Culture has observed that by the late 18th century America was jettisoning her God-centred, strong, objective Calvinism for a man-centred, emotional, subjective Arminianism which paved the way for feminism in our culture. In […]

The Bible is essentially a practical book. Its principles and teachings are never merely academic, philosophical, or speculative, but are always anchored in and aimed at the living God and the daily living of his people. That is one reason why there is so little in the Bible about heaven. The focus of the Word […]

Paul described himself to Titus as ‘a servant of God’. And that was how he imagined himself in his pre-conversion days. He was, so he thought, blameless as ‘touching the righteousness which is in the law’ (Phil. 3:6); he was, in his own eyes, a marvellously-faithful servant of God. But when he met the risen […]

David Brainerd,1 the great missionary to the American Indians, was born in April, 1718 at Haddam, Connecticut. His father, a legislator in Connecticut, died when David was nine years old and his mother died when he was fourteen. He lived with a godly aunt and uncle until he was eighteen and then tried farming for […]

Therefore I ask you not to lose heart at my tribulations on your behalf, for they are your glory. Ephesians 3:13. My wife Wini was recently engaged in a service project where she was asked what was our church’s position on homosexuality. Wini responded by saying that we have had an extensive ministry with HIV […]

Pastor Conrad Murrell of Louisiana helped one man who came to him in this unusual manner. This is how he reported it. A few years ago a pastor brought a troubled man to me for counselling. When I asked him about his problem, he replied, ‘I want to serve the Lord but I am having […]

We live in a world where sorrow repeatedly enters. Indeed, at any given moment, multitudes all over the world are experiencing sadness for all sorts of reasons. Death follows illness, accidents and disasters into families and leaves sorrow behind. And death, however unexpected – however unwelcome – is irreversible; no one returns from the eternal […]

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 […]

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. […]

…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 […]

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, […]