Therefore, let us celebrate together, even with our secondary and tertiary differences, what God has done to preserve His bride until He returns for her!
Read MoreThe church of Maria Gern in Berchtesgaden, Germany.
Help! I’m Preaching Through Esther.
Rather than a story of how things ought to be, Esther shows us how someone was faithful in the world as it is: painful, fear-filled, and potential hopeless. Only God offers a way out. Perhaps He has us right where He wants us to be a part of His bigger redemption story.
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Safeguard the Hope of Salvation: An Introduction to John Calvin's Pastoral Theology — Part 3
An Introduction to John Calvin’s Pastoral Theology: 7 Key Concepts
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God, Our Fortress in Pandemic and Calamity
“In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion” Tom Junod scribed in his iconic “The Falling Man” reflection on the September 11, 2001 attacks. Junod rightly observed the relentless responsibility of the photographer to record what they see knowing that “history” will formulate around their images later. In the moment, it just happens in chaos and blood. As we weather our own tumultuous season, we must consider how we will distill the lessons of this moment from the snapshots of our experiences.
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The Famous Five: The Abiding Relevance of the Solas of the Reformation
Five. What does that term elicit in your mind’s eye? If you are diet conscious you may think of your five-a-day intake. If you live on the east coast near the Canadian border you may think of the Great Lakes. If you are in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day you may think of the Books of Moses. If you were raised reading Enid Blyton you will undoubtedly think of Julian, Dick, Anne, Georgina (George), and their dog Timmy — The Famous Five. Today, I want to draw your attention to another Famous Five – The Five Solas – and their abiding relevance to contemporary life.
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Martin Luther’s “Table Talks” In Relation to His Theology of Discipleship
At its core, discipleship is one life impacting another for the glory of God. Martin Luther understood this concept well. For Luther, as it should be for all believers, the goal of every relationship was increased Christlikeness. Luther also recognized the critical link between hospitality and discipleship, and lived out his theology daily. He and Katie opened their home to relatives, renowned visitors, and his students.
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Was the Reformation a Success?
This talk was given at Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, OR on Oct. 29, 2017, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.
Was the Reformation a success?
That probably seems like a strange question for us to think about. Here on this historic Reformation Sunday, this is a question worth considering. How do we know the Reformation was a success? Megachurches? Political church alliances? Rapid church multiplication? New York Times bestsellers? What could we point to?
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Confessing Our Sin By Faith
Prior to his conversion, Martin Luther wrestled with the reality of sin in his life. Luther devoted himself to the Roman Catholic system of good works in order to appease his sinful conscience, but none of those works ever satisfied his guilty conscience. Only when he discovered Paul’s teaching of justification by faith, did he discover “the gate of heaven” and receive the grace of God that is found in Jesus Christ. He would devote the rest of his life to proclaiming this good news that justification is to be received by faith alone.
But Luther’s message was not limited simply to preaching about God’s free grace in Christ. Luther understood that before justification by faith made sense, one also had to embrace Scripture’s teaching regarding sin. While Luther experienced deep conviction of his own sin, he knew that not everyone shared his experience or sensitive conscience. Therefore, the acknowledgment of sin could not ultimately be rooted in subjective experience. Rather, like justification, our sinfulness also has to be received by faith based on God’s Word.
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John Calvin, Teething Children, and Serving Christ in the Busyness of Life
Though I shared in this mental concept of Calvin, one line from a biography changed it forever. T.H.L Parker said that Calvin’s numerous writings, counted among the most important in Christian history, were “not written in an ivory tower, but against the background of teething troubles.”
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Rest for the Weary, Working Soul: Finding the Answer to Humanity’s Greatest Quest in one of Zwingli’s Favorite Passages
For Zwingli, the Christian can have assurance that Jesus offers rest for weary souls because of “the clarity and certainty of the Word of God.” Without this sure foundation, the faithful are subject to a life of uncertainty and toil, constantly re-plowing the ground that God has already prepared in their own lives.
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Henry Vaughan, an Old Man, and the Peace of Faithfulness
If our search for God is unsettled, there is a cure. As we watch biblical figures faithfully await the premiere advent, we learn how to better find our own peace in our faithful anticipation of the sequel. As Matthew 25:6 says: “at midnight there was a cry,” someone will shout ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’”
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Encouragement for Bible Reading from Puritan Women
“So how can we know what the Bible really says?” my classmate timidly asked at the end of a long lecture about interpretation. She was not playing the devil’s advocate, but was clearly discouraged by the fact that there seem to be many different and discordant ways of interpreting the Bible. Sometimes reading intense scholarly debates that dissect every tiny part of a passage, listening to sermons that use methods we don’t know how to use, or overhearing a friend joke about misapplying passages like Jeremiah 29:11 make us shrink back from Scripture.
Read MoreThe Martyr’s Cause: John Foxe and Our Gospel Embassy
On Easter 1555, the zealous English evangelical[I] William Flower burst into a rage in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, when he noticed a priest administering the Mass – a rite that Flower saw as the epitome of Roman Catholic idolatry. Immediately, he struck the offending priest with his woodknife, cutting him on the head, arm and hand. Blood from the priest’s wounds, according to the martyrologist John Foxe,[ii] sprinkled onto the consecrated host of the sacrament, which the priest was carrying in a chalice. Immediately, Flower was arrested and, after his trial, was burned at the stake as a heretic.
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Cry Like Charlemagne: Letting History Teach us How to Grieve
The human experience is one of loss but let us not forget those who have gone before us to lay their own pavers into the road of grief that we all must travel. Take their hand and lean on their tired shoulders for a few miles.
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Salt & Light: Historical Sermon Illustrations from Matthew 5:13-16
To this day, I remember a well-meaning college student teaching on this passage at an event when I was part of a youth group. With all the wisdom of a church father, they read the passage and then waded into interpretation by saying: “Christians are here to give flavor to the world” as they attempted to explain the meaning of “you are the salt of the earth.” I remember how strange and unhelpful that was for years to come. However, for all the weird and uninformed hermeneutics available, there are some great historical examples of references to this passage that will be sure to add flavor to any sermon or Bible study.
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The Explosive Effect of the Bible
“If there is a single thread running through the whole story of the Reformation, it is the explosive and renovating and often disintegrating effect of the Bible.”
It’s this idea that Timothy George unpacks in Reading Scripture with the Reformers. So often, when it comes to our retelling of the events of the Reformation, we focus on the preaching ministry of pastors like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others. And rightly so! After all, the recovery of God’s Word went hand-in-hand with a recovery of the preaching of God’s Word. In large part, this is how God’s Word was opened up for people.
However, we must not forget that once people received the Word, they themselves now were equipped to speak and defend and live out that Word. In Reading Scripture with the Reformers, George provides several vignettes of the transformational effect of the Word, even among some unexpected individuals:
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The Pastoral Transition from Mediators to Shepherds During the Early Reformation
No longer serving as the human gateways to God, these men and their office became reborn as shepherds of the flock of Christ. In this era, we see the rise of the pastor as we know them today. By the end of Hudson’s “Puritan Age,” it was firmly established in title, practice, and clothing that “there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” and the congregation looked to their “minister” to point them towards Him.
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Take Up and Read
“Tolle lege. Tolle lege.” Augustine heard a voice, perhaps of a child nearby, saying, “Take up and read. Take up and read.” He took this as a command from God, and therefore opened his Bible to Romans 13. From that day forward, Augustine would profoundly shape how believers read and understand the Bible. While the turn-to-a-random-passage and read approach is not encouraged, in this case it had incredible ramifications down to the present day.
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Four Lessons from John Knox on Local Church Reform
John Knox, champion of the Scottish Reformation, fearless preacher, uncompromising prophet… defeated by a church business meeting?
Knox’s legend began early. Converted under the preaching of the early Scottish reformer George Wishart, he became his sword-bearer, carrying a claymore to Wishart’s preaching engagements (29). After Wishart’s martyrdom, Knox became a preacher himself and his plain, fiery preaching with “ruide boldness… unto your faces” (59) won the hearts of both English and Scottish alike. Standing up to the Queen and royal authorities, he constantly called Protestant leaders to resist any compromise, not even when faced with persecution or exile (both which he himself experienced).
Soon after becoming a preacher, Knox was captured by French Catholic forces and enslaved in French galleys for 19 months. One story captures Knox’s spirit:
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John Calvin on God's Spirit and God's Word
The relationship between Word and Spirit is foundational for understanding Calvin’s theology. He maintained an inherent and necessary relationship between the Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit to teach, illumine, and reveal the Word. Never in Calvin’s theology are the two pitted against one another, but rather Calvin consistently maintained a mutual dependence.
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