The brilliant sun of God’s love rises against the pitch black of His just wrath that engulfs us as sinners. It is that wrath of which John speaks when he uses the term “propitiation.” For Jesus to be the propitiation for our sins means that the wrath of God due us fell upon Him, fully, fiercely,... Continue Reading

Holiness also refers to God’s perfect, righteous character. A. W. Pink explains, “The sum of all moral excellency is found in him.”1 No other purity comes close to the purity of God. He holds the full measure of all that is good and right. Every act, thought, and intent of God is completely righteous and perfect.... Continue Reading

This craving for uniqueness is a race to escape the reality of our human nature. You were made to mirror God’s glory as a free creature of a Sovereign God. To despise this truth is to despise your humanity, and to succumb to beast-hood; descending into the thoughtlessness of a herd creature. Every glory of art, science,... Continue Reading

Faith without works is dead and so is the bread a condemnation to the eater at the table if it is not mixed with existing, real lively belief found in a person previously redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. We miss the glory available to the true Christian if we forget the simple reality... Continue Reading

Those who teach the nice gospel will usually maintain that the gospel is good news but that they don’t want to be mean. This is false thinking. The opposite of the nice gospel is not a mean gospel, it is the true gospel. The true gospel is not mean, nor is it nice. It is the... Continue Reading

No matter where we find ourselves today, whether we’ve had a fresh experience of intimacy with God, we’re struggling in the valleys, or we’re plodding through the plains, let’s never forget: God does not only meet us on the mountaintop. He is with us in the valleys and the plains, too. And God is with us,... Continue Reading

Jesus knows temptation and testing.  Jesus fights to obey his Father’s will.  And so when we’re struggling to obey we can run to him for help in prayer because he knows what it is to fight to obey. Because Jesus knows and overcomes temptation and testing we can let go of our pretended heroism and run to... Continue Reading

Believing that God moves in spontaneous ways is not unbiblical or sinful, but I think it has been overemphasized. The Spirit cannot be manipulated or placed under constraints (John 3:8), but a mark of the Spirit is that He works in an orderly fashion through means. He is the third person of the Godhead, meaning... Continue Reading

How is this faith, which has been gifted to me, strengthened? According to the Divines, I engage the means that God has appointed for its growth, the preaching of the word (the ordinary means by which faith is wrought), the administration of the sacraments, and prayer.  These are the means through which God is pleased... Continue Reading

Plenty of Christians have found deeply satisfying and intellectually sophisticated answers to questions that troubled them. But they always found them because they were walking with God at the time, moving in His direction, obeying what they already knew, while waiting on Him to teach them further. The man refusing to budge until he gets... Continue Reading