Prayer is not the whole of the Christian’s responsibility to the thing prayed for. Prayer opens the transaction; action completes it. The person who prays for the sick and does not visit them; who prays for the gospel to spread and does not share it; who…
The tetelestai of John 19:30 marks the completion of the atoning work — not the end of Christ’s activity. The risen, ascended Christ is presently reigning as king (Col. 1:13), interceding as mediator (Heb. 7:25), governing as head of the church (Col. 1:18), adding the obedient…
The church was in the eternal purpose of God and the mind of Christ from the beginning; it is the true Israel, the saved remnant, the “little flock” that receives the kingdom — so that there is no Christianity without the church. People speak today of…
Everything in Christianity hangs on faith — “without faith it is impossible to please Him” (Heb. 11:6) — yet faith is one of the most misunderstood words in religion. Some make it a leap in the dark; some make it mere opinion; some make it a…
Every person who has ever faced his own sin has had to say the same three words: “I have sinned” — but what those three words mean depends entirely on the heart that speaks them. “I have sinned.” The phrase runs through Scripture like a wound….
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…
Sin did not originate with God. God created beings with the power to choose; some chose to disobey. The origin of sin is the misuse of freedom, not a failure in the design that produced the freedom. The first sins were angelic; the first human sin…
Every area of human life is in disturbance because man has displaced God from his proper center. The four categories — political, economic, ethical, spiritual — share one root and one cure. The only stability available to any person is the peace Christ gives — positional…
James teaches suffering Christians to endure by looking at the prophets, learning from Job, and trusting the Lord whose compassion is not cancelled by the furnace. Obedience may hurt, suffering may come without explanation, but God has not surrendered the story.
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…