Jesus Christ

For those of us who are pastors, one of our regular responsibilities is to use scripture to minister to the specific needs of our people. This should never merely be spiritual equivalent of offering placebos to those who are struggling – a kind of psycho-spiritual pick-me-up to make them feel...

Incomprehensible but Knowable Words are important, and some of them carry meanings that can be crucial for our understanding of God; words that will eventually affect the way we live the Christian life. Incomprehensibility is one of these words. But what exactly does it mean? Jonathan and James...

As I headed to the office to write this article, I tuned my radio to NPR, to one of my favorite programs: “1A, with Host Joshua Johnson.” He is an excellent conversational journalist who really knows how to get at the heart of an issue with winsome conversation and grace for folks on all sides of...

While rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol I recently read something I had forgotten. When Jacob Marley appeared to Scrooge his body was transparent, so that Scrooge could see not only the front of his long deceased partner’s waistcoat but the back of it too! But then this line appears, “...

Edmund Grindal and His Letter to the Queen In 1576, Archbishop Edmund Grindal joined the company of Puritans who offended Queen Elizabeth I. His most provocative statement was a reminder of her mortality. He was suspended from his duties for the rest of his life. The unwelcomed reminder came at the...

Who Goes to Hell? The simplest answer to the question “who goes to hell?” is to answer: “unrepentant sinners who do not have saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will go to hell.” In fact, when the Philippian jailer asked the most basic question: “what must I do to be saved?”, Paul and Silas...

It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that hell is a state of mind rather than a physical location. Far more people in modern America will proclaim their belief in heaven than admit hell exists. Even so, they must both exist in relation to one another, and scripture assures us they both do. Hell...

As a Presbyterian, I often find myself in attendance at the examination of our Seminary students. Our denominational seminary lies is within the borders of our presbytery, so we have a good number of students on an ongoing basis. Like most Reformed Seminaries and Presbyterian denominations, we have...

During the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Reformers came to the conclusion, in the face of defection and departure from biblical orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and doxology within the medieval Roman Catholic Church, that there needed to be a means whereby a true Christian church could be...

All that the church is can be found in her union with Christ. As John Calvin has so memorably put it, “we must remember that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value...