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…
The Greek word ekklesia means “called out,” and a survey of its New Testament uses shows it applied to the local congregation (in several senses), to the one universal church, and to the household assembly — but never to a denomination. Doctrine often turns on a…
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…
The same office is named by several scriptural words — overseer, elder, shepherd, ruler, leader — and its qualifications, twenty in all from Timothy and Titus, are not impossibly high but are largely the marks of a mature Christian, attainable now as they were then. Many…
The outline grounds the sermon in I Tim. 5:21 — a text addressed to Timothy about judicial impartiality in church proceedings. He uses it to identify prejudice as the parallel sin to preaching a false gospel (Gal. 1:8-9). Both involve rejecting God’s power — the false…
Every person who encounters the crucifixion takes one of three postures: sympathy (deliberate, costly love — those who stood near by choice), apathy (presence without personal investment — those who were there by command, chance, or curiosity), or antipathy (open contempt — those who came to…
Within God’s commands there is a difference between the essential — what He specified and bound — and the incidental circumstances He left to human judgment; faithfulness keeps the essentials exactly while allowing liberty in the incidentals, neither binding what God left free nor loosing what…
God has always drawn a line between his people and the world — and that line is not man’s to erase, soften, or ignore. The call to come out and be separate is not an old covenant peculiarity; it is a permanent feature of the God…
Felix heard the most searching sermon ever preached to him, was terrified by what he heard, and sent the preacher away. “Go away for now, and when I have an opportunity I will summon you.” He never summoned him. There is such a thing as too…
The New Testament neither silences women nor makes them interchangeable with men in every function. It assigns them a specific, honorable, and demanding sphere — private instruction, domestic formation, and teaching younger women — while reserving public proclamation to qualified men. The grounding of this restriction…