Topic Archives: Theology

Be filled with the Holy Spirit. (Ephesians 5:18) In July, 1997 my wife and I had the privilege of taking tea with Lord and Lady Catherwood in Cambridge, England. Lady Catherwood is the daughter of my favourite preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who so ably preached the doctrines of grace, beginning in Aberavon, Wales in 1927 and […]

John Calvin was not a man who would readily draw attention to himself. When he gave some details of his early life in the preface to his Commentary on the Psalms, his purpose was to draw attention to God’s activity. His father had intended him for the priesthood but, says Calvin, God, by the secret […]

For the past year or so I have been making my way slowly through the reading of a series of sermons preached on Hebrews 11 by the Puritan, Thomas Manton. The book containing these sermons is titled By Faith and it is published by The Banner of Truth Trust1. Most recently I have been reading […]

Until the age of twenty-six I knew nothing of vital religion, although I lived an outwardly religious, moral and respectable life . . . Brought up under sacramental teaching, I was totally in the dark concerning the grace of God, although . . . I realize that he was leading me all the time. To […]

It is sometimes profitable to trace the use of one word in the Bible – there is much to learn from this method of study, it often brings new thoughts to light. Let us consider the word ‘Exceeding’. When one begins to trace the word in Scripture we soon realise that there is nothing sparing […]

Be imitators of God . . . walk in love. (Ephesians 5:1) Forty-five per cent of people living in America claim to have had a born again experience, but the born again people have virtually the same levels of divorce, adultery, fornication and use of pornography as the rest of the population. Evangelicals are those […]

Christianity is the religion of the Gospel. The Gospel was defined by William Tyndale, the Bible translator, as ‘good merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him to dance and sing and leap for joy’. ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, evermore his praises sing’, we might add. But as time […]

‘All have sinned’, Paul reminds us (Rom. 6:23). Because of our fall in Adam, we are all coming short of the glory of God; there is never a moment in our lives when we meet God’s demands for perfect obedience to his law. While we remain in a state of nature, our sin leaves us […]

The author views the Old Testament Book of Jonah ‘not as a book about a great fish’ (seriously, does anybody?), but about God and one man in particular. He sees it as a piece of biography. That poses a stumbling block for this reviewer, who reads Jonah as humorous fiction. Ferguson finally uses the word […]

Behold, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes, so that he will not walk about naked and men will not see his shame. (Revelation 16:15) Midori Ito, the great Japanese figure skater, who was favoured to win the gold medal at the 1992 Winter Olympics […]

When I was a young minister, a man who never attended church (though formally a member) died unexpectedly. Some time later I was visiting with one of his sons and the son’s wife. During our conversation the young man said to me, ‘My Daddy believed that the Second Coming was near and would occur, if […]

So it’s broken and won’t be working until next spring at the earliest. First there was ‘a glitch with one of the 30-tonne transformers which caused an initial delay of a few days’, then ‘a quench leaked a tonne of helium coolant into one of the tunnels, forcing a further shutdown while repairs could be […]

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 […]

The child in the manger in Bethlehem, for whom there was no room in the inn, may have seemed powerless, but he was the Son of God. The angel had told Mary, his mother: ‘That holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God’ (Luke 1:35). Thus, while he […]

From the ‘one flesh’ teaching about marriage (Eph. 5:22-33) Paul draws out the wonder and the glory of Christ’s relationship with the church. In verse 28 Paul is exhorting husbands to love their own wives as they love their own bodies. It would hardly please a wife to hear her husband say that he loves […]

The Westminster Confession of Faith, insisting that Scripture is sufficient in our day, holds that ‘those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people’ have ‘now ceased’ (1.1). We who adhere to that doctrine are thus often called ‘cessationists.’ That label carries a lot of baggage. By itself, it’s negative. In current debates […]

The word reveal means ‘to uncover.’ Suppose there is a plate of cookies on the table covered by a towel. When the towel is removed, then you can see what’s there – a plate and cookies. You see what you could not see before. When we use the word revelation in theology, we are talking […]

David sent messengers and took her, and when she came to him, he lay with her. (2 Samuel 11:4) Recently a former Presidential candidate admitted to an adulterous affair against his wife who has been diagnosed with an incurable cancer. The National Inquirer broke the story last October but the candidate vehemently dismissed the story, […]

It was good to be one of around 150 present at the John Owen Centre, Finchley, to hear this year’s Dr Lloyd-Jones memorial lecture by Philip Eveson on Gospel and Creation – the significance of a theology of creation for preaching. A very full paper, it considered what a theology of creation should include (making […]

The Son of God came into the world to do the will of God. He did nothing but the will of God. He did all the will of God. His life perfectly conformed to God’s will. Those who follow him will want to know the will of God, and they will want to know it […]

The sound of the gospel trumpet was first heard in the Garden of Eden when it fell on the ears of our first parents, who by then had lost that communion with God which they had previously enjoyed. With the entrance of sin into the world, they now were to face up to the reality […]

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 […]

The Church in Corinth had experienced the ‘weighty and strong’ writings of the Apostle Paul, but the Galatians had even more cause to feel the force of his pen. Their actions brought forth the sharpest response from Paul. His language in Galatians 1:6-9 is as strong as anywhere in his writings. Verse 6: ‘I am […]

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, […]

How did awareness of heavenly councils between him and his Father shape Jesus’ sense of earthly mission? Every phase of our Saviour’s life was shaped and styled by his self-conscious sense that he had come from heaven ‘not to do (his) will but to do the will of him who sent (him)’ (John 6:38). Indeed, […]