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…
The Bible must be divided rightly: the three dispensations are distinct, the New Testament is the law by which people living now will be judged, and within the New Testament there are two kinds of instruction — what God requires of sinners to be saved, and…
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 first gospel sermon ever preached included the resurrection of Christ. Peter did not work up to it, hedge it, or place it at the end as a supplement to a more comfortable message. It was the message. The sermon’s burden is to show why: not…
Everything that has life is active. The God who rested from creation has never stopped working (John 5:17); the Christ who completed his atoning work intercedes now; the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of the obedient. Every person whom God called in the biblical record…
Material and spiritual creation both came from the same source and operate through the same three persons — but with different materials: the Spirit organized and perfected matter in the one; in the other, he organized and perfected the spiritual realm through the incarnation, the apostles…
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…
The Holy Spirit called Barnabas “a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith,” and his life shows what such goodness looks like — generous with his possessions, glad at others’ blessing, and content to take second place for the cause of Christ. The…
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…
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…