Why was Jesus Christ made flesh?

Wednesdays with Watson is a weekly reading taken from my favorite Puritan writer, Thomas Watson. This week’s selection is taken from A Body of Divinity, Part IV: “The Covenant of Grace and Its Mediator.” (1.) The causa prima, and impulsive cause, was free grace. It was love in God the Father to send Christ, and love […]

Read your Bible in 2015

The goal of every follower of Jesus Christ is to become like Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:28-29; Col. 1:18, 28). And one of the primary means God uses to transform the believer is the Word of God (Ps. 1; 1 Pt. 2:1-3; 2 Pt. 1:3; 2 Tim. 3:16-17). The believer will not grow spiritually if he […]

But it tastes good

In 1960, Dr. Stanley Garn, working for the Fels Research Institute, whose objective was to study the physical growth and maturation of children, made this not-so-stunning conclusion: “[Milk shakes], fat-meat hamburgers, bacon and mayonnaise sandwiches may be good for the undertaker and bad for the populace.” In other words, there are some things that, while […]

What is godliness?

Wednesdays with Watson is a weekly reading taken from my favorite Puritan writer, Thomas Watson. This week’s selection is taken from The Godly Man’ Picture, chapter 2: “Expounding the Nature of Godliness.” It will first be enquired, “What is godliness?” I answer in general, “Godliness is the sacred impression and workmanship of God in a […]

Sermon: The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown

The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: A Short History of Jesus 1 Timothy 1:15-17 December 14, 2014 If you didn’t know better, it would be pretty easy to be confused about what Christmas is about. When you listen to Christmas music you might think that the heroes of Christmas are: Frosty the snowman Rudolph […]

The glory of the incarnation

“The glory of the incarnation is that it presents to our adoring gaze not a humanized God or a deified man; but a true God-man — one who is all that God is and at the same time all that man is [yet without sin]; one on whose almighty arm we can rest, and to […]

Rest in the wisdom of God

Wednesdays with Watson is a weekly reading taken from my favorite Puritan writer, Thomas Watson. This week’s selection is taken from A Body of Divinity, chapter 7: “The Wisdom of God.” Adore the wisdom of God. It is an infinite deep; the angels cannot search into it. ‘His ways are past finding out’ (Rom. 11:33). As […]

One thing God does in our suffering

Suffering is not embraced by most believers. The flesh compels us to avoid suffering, to call suffering “bad,” and to assume, like Job’s friends, that something has gone terribly wrong spiritually if we or our friends suffer or are persecuted. But the consistent testimony of Scripture is that suffering is normal and to be expected […]

Sermon: What Believers Do When Suffering

What Believers Do When Suffering 1 Peter 4:12-19 December 7, 2014 Over the past couple of months Keith and I have been preaching about some basics of church ministry — church membership, corrective discipleship (church discipline), the roles of elders, deacons, and members, and then last Sunday the nature of marriage and gender. There are […]

What God looks like

When I was in high school, I worked for a grocery store where an impressively large man used to shop with some regularity. One day someone asked me, “You know who that is, don’t you?” “No.” “That’s Keith Fahnhorst; he’s an offensive tackle for the San Francisco 49ers!” From then on, this football fan was […]

That’s not repentance

Wednesdays with Watson is a weekly reading taken from my favorite Puritan writer, Thomas Watson. This week’s selection is taken from The Doctrine of Repentance, chapter 2: “Counterfeit Repentance.” To discover what true repentance is, I shall first show what it is not. There are several counterfeits of repentance, which might occasion that saying of […]

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” – a good version

I have never cared for the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” However, here is a version even I could enjoy: HT: Kevin DeYoung.

Stop letting sin reign

The father had been busy all week and made a plan to have a special time with his son. So Saturday morning, off they went. First stop? The donut shop. A few minutes later they were headed down the road. “Dad, can I hold the donut holes?” An interesting proposition that was fraught with possibilities! […]

Thanks be to God for freedom

While on vacation a number of years ago, we turned on the hotel television to watch the morning news and were greeted with images from France. President Clinton was honoring fallen veterans on Omaha Beach. Crosses — lots of crosses (some without names) — marking a sea of graves of men who never made it […]

When you look at the church…

In an essay on the life of Dwight Eisenhower, historian Stephen Ambrose recounts the following story: In 1963, when he was filming with Walter Cronkite a television special entitled ‘D-Day Plus 20 Years,’ Cronkite asked [Eisenhower] what he thought about when he returned to Normandy. In reply, Eisenhower spoke not of the tanks, the guns, […]