Christ is the perfect image of God, and God’s settled purpose is to remake every Christian into that same image — a change worked from within (transformation) and aimed at the likeness of Christ (conformation) until each trait of Jesus becomes ours. We talk easily about…
Christianity can be defended: the Bible bears marks no man would or could have forged, man’s universal religious nature points to a God who made him to worship, Christianity has elevated mankind beyond anything else, and the wise course is to make one’s standing in Christ…
Everything God has done — creation, redemption, Scripture, church, eternal life — is an act of love. God is love, and his every act must be interpreted in terms of that nature. Some themes are too large for words to do them justice. The outline says…
The word of God is not one power among others; it is the power through which God has always worked — creating the cosmos, sustaining it, ending it, and in the interval producing the new creation of souls through the gospel. “The gospel is the power…
The consequences of sin extend further than any human being can trace them. They begin in the ruin of the individual who sinned — the loss of dominion, the weakening of every capacity, the severance of companionship with God. They spread outward to the earth itself…
The Holy Spirit is a divine person — not a divine influence, not a force that can be poured like a liquid, not a vague spiritual energy. The evidence is convergent: the masculine personal pronoun used for him in contexts where the neuter grammatical gender would…
The word “worship” in some form occurs in the Bible 191 times — 113 times in the Old Testament and 78 times in the New Testament. That frequency alone establishes its importance. But frequency of occurrence does not tell us what worship is or whether any…
The kingdom of Christ is not a future, earthly, material realm awaiting His return; it is here now — begun at Pentecost, spiritual in nature, with Christ already reigning — and it is identical with the church, as both Christ and Paul plainly teach. The whole…
Love for God is not a feeling — it is a pattern of obedience. What looks like love but does not produce obedience is not love. What produces obedience, even in the absence of feeling, is love. The normal condition of the human heart is to…
Preaching is not one method of Christian communication among others — it is the method that God ordained for the propagation of the gospel, that every generation of the church has required, and without which no generation can hear. Its weakness in any era is not…