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…
“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…
Somebody must fill all second places. The refusal to do so — the insistence on first place when God, time, or circumstance has assigned the second — is one of the most consistent causes of failure in life. The man or woman who can take second…
“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (I Cor. 15:58). The “therefore” is the key: Paul’s exhortation to steadfastness is grounded in the resurrection. Because the resurrection is real, the labor of the Lord is not in vain…