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…
Division in the church is the most frequently condemned sin in the New Testament — more often and more severely denounced than covetousness, idolatry, adultery, drunkenness, or hypocrisy. The reason is theological: the church is the body of Christ, and to divide the body of Christ…
Revelation and inspiration are distinct acts in a related chain: God reveals truth about himself; inspiration ensures that revelation is accurately recorded and transmitted in human language. Divine revelation comes in two forms — general (through nature) and special (through direct communication, visions, prophets, and ultimately…
“What do you think about the Christ?” (Matt. 22:42). The question was first asked by Christ himself to silence the Pharisees. It has been answered by witnesses across every category of credibility — hostile witnesses, sympathetic witnesses, divine witnesses, and everything in between. The convergence of…
Teaching is not one function of the church among several — it is the function on which all other functions depend. God has been teaching from the beginning; every era of redemptive history has been structured around the transmission of divine truth from teacher to learner…
Acts 2 is the hinge of redemptive history. The promises Christ made before his death — “I will build My church” (Matt. 16:18), “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8) — were fulfilled on Pentecost. Peter preached the first…
“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth” (II Tim. 2:15). The call to accurate handling of the word implies the capacity for it — which means it implies study….
The burden is two-sided. First: a significant portion of the confusion about the Lord’s Supper comes from names that are not biblical — Eucharist, sacrament, emblems — names that carry theological freight the New Testament does not authorize. The names must be corrected before the practice…
The soul is worth more than the whole world — the Lord said so, and his statement has never been answered. The person who would not trade their house for a dollar still trades their soul daily for far less than the whole world. The four…