Reformation21

Every place has a feel, an impression or characteristic sensation. Home has a feel, even if it isn’t always positive. The neighborhood you grew up in has a feel. The noisy main street of your urban center has perhaps a collection of feels depending on the hour or day. Then there’s the shaded path...

In the New Testament, the word often translated as “sanctification” is sometimes translated, “holiness.” The Greek is hagiasmos (ἁγιασμὸς), the noun form of the verb “to sanctify,” “to make holy” ( hagiazo , ἁγιάζω). The basic meaning of the verb is to set apart from that which is common or unclean...

Every church in America is now a church re-plant. This is a hard truth, but healthy churches will own it, while those who ignore it will be walking down the path towards a painful decline. American Christianity has learned numerous lessons during the past 25 months: live stream, zoom meetings, and...

“You shall not covet…” — Deuteronomy 5:21 “Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor” (Ecc 4:4). Really? All toil? All skill? All driven by envy? What would that say about your ministry? It would say that your ministry (yes, yours ), is in your own human...

Among the ever-growing list of controversies and threats to Christ’s church, the disturbance of deconstruction looms large. Over the past two years, we have all seen and listened to many stories of deconstruction from authors, musicians, and even YouTube personalities. Sadly, these stories are...

Quite a lot has happened in the last week, hasn't it? The recent ruling of the Supreme Court has pushed central questions back into the public conversation - questions like: What makes human life valuable? How do we know right from wrong? Are we as individuals (and a society) subject to God's...

The church follows what God has said in Scripture, which is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). To do this in any meaningful sense, Scripture must be both clearly expounded and applied. As Elizabeth Charles said, “Where the battle...

When it comes to church growth, virtue really is a mean between extremes. It is right for churches to avoid falling into an implicit prosperity gospel, thinking that faithfulness will necessarily lead to obvious financial and numerical increase. It is also important, however, for churches to be...

From Cecil B. de Mille’s silent epic King of Kings (1927) to Mel Gibson’s intense and bloody Passion of the Christ (2004), movies about Jesus have always provoked controversy. In the 1940s, when Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of radio plays on the life of Christ for the BBC called The Man Born to Be...

True repentance grows in the gospel soil of God’s sovereign grace. Its roots comprise both biblically-informed grief over sin and biblically-informed apprehension of God’s mercy in Christ. Its trunk and branches are turning from sin and turning to God. Its fruit is the endeavor for new obedience in...