Happy Thanksgiving! Now don’t insult God and stop feeling guilty
November 23, 2023 § Leave a comment
…be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:15-17)
What is it about thankfulness that we don’t get that made it necessary for the Holy Spirit to inspire Paul to mention it three times in the span three verses?
Giving thanks is a simple enough proposition: God gives to us and we acknowledge from grateful hearts his generosity to us.
« Read the rest of this entry »Ah, the refreshment of Spurgeon!
May 21, 2014 § 4 Comments
In studying for this week’s sermon on John 1:15-18 I discovered this sermon by C.H. Spurgeon. Entitled, “The True Tabernacle, and Its Glory of Grace and Peace,” it was preached on the Lord’s Day morning of September 27th, 1885 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, England. What refreshment the Prince of Preachers still offers!
…if God has come to dwell among men by the Word made flesh let us pitch our tent around this central tabernacle; do not let us live as if God were a long way off. « Read the rest of this entry »
“… and his name shall be called…Everlasting Father…”
December 17, 2012 § 4 Comments
“And they lived happily ever after.”
It’s amazing. No matter how cynical we become as a culture, no matter how jaded, we still flock to movies with happy endings. Some would call it wishful thinking, a simple and childish form of escapism that the more realistic among us (known by the rest as “pessimists”) know better than to embrace.
The Bible has another answer: “[God]…has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). « Read the rest of this entry »
For the joy: A meditation in anticipation of Good Friday
March 23, 2012 § 1 Comment
Generally, Good Friday services are presented as somewhat somber, if not downright morose, memorials of the crucifixion of Jesus. The Gospel accounts of his lonely vigil of prayer in Gethsemane, Judas’ betrayal, the fleeing of the disciples at his arrest, the sham trials, the beating and mocking and the cruelty of the crucifixion—all of these are recounted, often in a “you are there” fashion, woven together from Scripture and interspersed with melancholy music to picture for us the tragic reality of Christ’s suffering for sinners.
Though we cannot deny the tragic reality of the death of Christ, Scripture we never quite broods over it, either as an event of history or with a view toward its theological implications in quite the way we might think it should. I don’t mean this in any way to diminish the central emphasis of the cross in Scripture: the cross is that which shows the wisdom and power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-25) and it is to be our “boast” in this world (Galatians 6:14). What we find, though, is that the Bible never sees Christ’s cross-work as the “end game.” In a sense, one could say that Scripture even looks past the events of the crucifixion. Consider this passage in Hebrews 12: « Read the rest of this entry »
Roblog 