Excerpt:
A church may preach the gospel, teach young people, and support preaching in other places without building separate ministry structures, branded sub-organizations, or institutional networks beyond the local church. The issue is not whether evangelism and discipleship are important, but whether the New Testament authorizes the structures modern churches use to carry out that work.
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…
Because no one knows the day or hour of Christ’s return, every disciple must live in constant readiness through watchfulness, faithful obedience, personal preparedness, and holy conduct. Jesus did not ask us to calculate the day; He commanded us to be ready for it.
The church is in the world but not of it; worldliness creeps in through worldly leadership, worldly recreation, idle and unspiritual members, and neglected worship — and the only cure is for each member to refuse to be conformed to the world. Jesus prayed for His…
Because God is all-wise, all-powerful, and good, He gave a book that completely supplies man’s every spiritual need; Scripture is therefore sufficient, and the man of God equipped by it needs nothing added to it. A congregation rarely denies the Bible outright. It simply acts as…
Timothy’s life is the story of what faithful parents, a mentor-apostle, and willingness to be sent can produce. He was the son of a mixed household — Greek father, Jewish mother — with no obvious path to apostolic usefulness. By the end of Paul’s ministry he…
The New Testament church has identifying marks — undenominational, congregationally governed, missionary, made up of converted and worshipping and united and pure members — and every member should know them well enough to help keep the church true to the pattern. A congregation drifts the way…
The problems that multiply with the number of preachers are not primarily doctrinal in the obvious sense — they are structural and character problems that arise when the preacher’s role is not well understood or well executed. A church with a clear understanding of what a…
The sermon frames itself as a solution to the fundamental problem: What is the right way to live? Not in the sense of technique or discipline, but in the sense of ultimate orientation. Every person who does not live the Christ life is living a life…
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…