Our duty and privilege

Echoing the thoughts of the privilege of ministry and service from last Sunday are two comments from pastors from other centuries: If anyone, therefore, appears before you who is in need of your kind services, you have no reason to refuse him your help. Suppose he is a stranger; yet the Lord has pressed his […]

Comfort the afflicted

Still mulling over yesterday’s sermon on the privilege of ministering the Word of God to people’s lives. This benediction by Jeremy Taylor was one I intended to include, but simply overlooked in my notes. He is right about the importance of encouragement and what it looks like when he says, Relieve and comfort all the […]

Every man is a missionary

Thinking about the spiritual gift of evangelism as I was preparing for Sunday’s sermon on Eph. 4:11-12, I came across this statement from Thomas Chalmers, who reminds us that spiritual gift or not, obedience to testify to the gospel of Christ or not, every individual is still a missionary: Every man is a missionary, now […]

Study the Bible

Just as we are sometimes reticent to read the Bible, so we are at times also slow to spend labor in the hard discipline of Bible study. To that end, the encouragement of the riches that are derived from that study are worth remembering: There is divinity in Scripture. It contains the marrow and quintessence […]

Read the Bible

Many years ago, one pastor ventured into a land of discovery — his quest was to find how much his people read their Bibles each day. He pastored a godly and effective church, so his expectation was that they read their copies of Scripture more than most believers in most churches. It was a reasonable […]

Whom have I in Heaven?

When offering the gospel, John Piper asks the question, “If you can have all the good things and blessings of Heaven, and God is not there, do you still want Heaven?” The point of the question is to elicit what the desire of the individual is — does he want God, or merely the good […]

Think on these things

It has been said of this generation of Christian believers (in America and the West particularly) that our weakness is that we do not think often enough or deeply enough about God. It’s not that we hate God or are angry with God or confused about God — our problem is that we are too […]

God is a delicious good

While thinking about yesterday’s comment from M’Cheyne about trials and the preciousness of Christ, I came across this extended statement by Thomas Watson in his classic work, A Body of Divinity. It comes near the end of his answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “what is the chief end of man?” […]

The gracious tests of storms

I’ve recently begun reading the biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. And this weekend I came across this statement from him that I’d come across in another source: You will never find Jesus so precious as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then he is like a rose blooming in the midst of desolation, […]

Have enough grace?

How well do you appropriate the grace given to you by Christ. If you are like Samuel Rutherford, probably not sufficiently well — Every man thinketh he is rich enough in grace, till he take out his purse, and… then he findeth it but poor and light in the day of a heavy trial. I […]

Valentine’s Day and the love of God

Today, on the day when the rest of the world celebrates the human love, what better time is there to remember the divine love of God for man. What follow are some reflections of men who have “said it better than me” about God’s love: When Karl Barth, the famed German theologian, visited the Untied […]

Worship and missions

In what may be the best paragraph to begin a book on missions, John Piper writes this: Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the […]

Be provoked to read, part 2

In general, while it is true that the question about our motivation to read Scripture is not so much “how will I provoke myself?” but, “will I provoke myself to delight in God and His declaration to me this day?” yet, there is still instruction about how to stimulate our hearts to read, as Thomas […]

Be provoked to read

Thomas Watson relates our effectiveness in mortifying the flesh to the intake of the Word of God: We must provoke ourselves to reading the Word.…Our Savior bids us “search the Scriptures” (John 5:39). We must not read these holy lines carelessly as if they did not concern us, or run over them hastily, as Israel […]

A motivation for devotions

Do you ever feel unmotivated to open your Bible and read? At times do you feel apathetic about your life of prayer? The problem is not so much a lack of obedience as it is a waning set of motives for carrying out your spiritual disciplines. In his diary, Robert Murray M’Cheyne offers a succinct […]