Articles

Day Three JOEL BEEKE (3) – PREACHING CHRIST’S OFFICES Luke 22:31 – The temptations of Peter. The threefold office of the Lord Jesus Christ is to be applied to our hearts by the Spirit. Our Lord is the only one who can meet our needs, and he does so as prophet, priest and king. As […]

We are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. [2 Corinthians 2:15.] I recently was making my weekly evangelistic visits at a rehab centre and introduced myself to a man recuperating from knee replacement surgery. We talked a while about his surgery and recovery […]

‘Berkhof’ – it has a certain ring of defiance about it, an abbreviation for an almost 1,000 page volume of systematic theology which is considered a touchstone of orthodoxy, but . . . ‘surely a bit out of date’ . . . ‘Dutch’ . . . ‘not a note about revival’ . . . ‘rather […]

“Unto a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13) Eric Liddell, the Scottish missionary and Olympic gold medal winner, while serving the Lord in China, often told his students to live a sincere life. He pointed out that our word sincere comes from two Latin […]

The Apostle Paul writes, “But to each one of us grace was given, according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Ephesians 4:7). William Farel became a true follower of Christ in the early 1520s, during the time the Reformation, under the leadership of Martin Luther, was raging like a wild-fire throughout Europe. Farel had a […]

Between 1875 and 1892 George Müller travelled the world preaching with seven objectives in view. The fourth of these was, ‘To promote among all true believers, brotherly love; to lead them to make less of those non-essentials in which disciples differ, and to make more of those great essential and foundation truths in which all […]

A Visit to Artillery Street Chapel in Colchester At first we couldn’t find it. We walked a long way down Artillery Street in a less than thriving area of Colchester, England. I was the guest of Graham Stevens and Abbeyfield Community Church, where he is the senior pastor. I had spoken there on Saturday night […]

John Owen’s classic work ‘On Temptation’ has recently been published by Banner of Truth in an updated edition as Temptation Resisted and Repulsed.1 The church which I serve used this newer version as the basis for a series of adult Sunday School classes over a course of months. It became quickly apparent that the material […]

Jeremy Walker provides an outline of John Owen’s Temptation: Resisted and Repulsed,1 from the Trust’s Puritan Paperbacks series. Author’s Preface – Aim stated. – Reasons given. – Warning and exhortation to the carnal, casual, or careless reader. – Warning and exhortation to the careful, Christian reader. Note that although the forms of temptation alter with […]

On Tuesday and Wednesday February 19 & 20, 2008, Ted Donnelly of Ulster visited Wales and gave the identical two addresses on the above theme to gatherings of ministers in Bala and in Bridgend. These are my notes taken at the first conference in Bala in North Wales. About 35 ministers were present – as […]

The Bible talks a lot about hospitality. In Old Testament times one of the marks of God’s people was that they opened their homes to others. Job said, ‘the sojourner has not lodged in my street; I have opened my doors to the traveller…’ (Job 31: 32). Abraham ‘lifted up his eyes and looked, and […]

And now do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. Genesis 45:5. George Washington Carver was born in 1864 to slaves living in Missouri. He could not read or write but as a young boy, after Emancipation, he had a burning […]

Guy Davies posted an interview with Robert Strivens, who is Principal-Designate of the London Theological Seminary, on his Exiled Preacher blog on 8 February 2008. The interview is reproduced here with kind permission. GD: Hello, Robert Strivens and welcome to Exiled Preacher. Please tell us a little about yourself. RS: Thank you, Guy. It is […]

An old writer on the Puritans tells us how Robert Atkins, in one of his last sermons at St. John’s, Exeter, before the Great Ejection of 1662, took the opportunity of declaring in the presence of Bishop Gauden and other dignitaries that ‘those ministers who beget converts to Christ may most properly be called Fathers […]

‘Stand firm in the faith’ 1 Corinthians 16:13. Ann Douglas, the feminist Harvard professor, in her book, The Feminization of the American Culture has observed that by the late 18th century America was jettisoning her God-centred, strong, objective Calvinism for a man-centred, emotional, subjective Arminianism which paved the way for feminism in our culture. In […]

‘And to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God’ Ephesians 3:19. The day after our oldest son’s wedding in May, 2002, my wife was having her private devotional time, praying on her knees, when she was overwhelmed with a sense of God’s […]

Turretin and the Place of Systematic Theology The second day opened with a paper of the above title given by Maurice Roberts of Inverness. The 1974 Dictionary of the Christian Church has no reference to Francis Turretin, but thirty years later the Wikipedia contains much, to the effect that Francis Turretin was also known as […]

The annual Westminster Conference was held in the Friends’ Meeting House opposite Euston Station on December 11 and 12, 2007, with the usual 200 people (largely men) in attendance. The first paper was given by Roger Fay, a pastor from Ripon, and the editor of the Evangelical Times. He spoke on The Clapham Sect and […]

Why a Translation from Hebrew to Hebrew? Spoken Hebrew differs from biblical Hebrew far more than Shakespeare’s English differs from the English of today. Biblical Hebrew speaks of a large woman (2 Kings 4:8) to indicate a woman of influence. Hosea (8:4) speaks of Israel’s idolatry: ‘With their silver and gold, they make idols for […]

Sometimes more is less and less is more. Whether more is less depends upon the character of what is more; whether less is more depends upon the character of what is less. Our first parents had all that they truly needed or could rightly desire. Adam and Eve had holy, loving communion with the God […]

They were sitting on tables and benches in John Newton’s old church on Monday 10 December 2007 for the Banner of Truth London meeting ‘An Evening with John Newton.’ The meeting was held to mark the anniversary of the death of the former Vicar of St Mary Woolnoth, who died two hundred years ago, on […]

‘When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy’ Matthew 2:10. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as Micah the prophet promised seven hundred years before He was born. Bethlehem, the city of David, is six miles south of Jerusalem on a limestone ridge, 2500 feet above sea level. The name in Hebrew means […]

The obituary of Aldous Huxley’s wife, Laura, was in The Times on Monday, 17 December 2007. It ended with that quotation which Dr. Lloyd-Jones used to such effect showing that man’s abandonment of God inevitably results in losing the meaning of life. Laura had been interviewed by a journalist in 1992 and asked what she […]

‘. . .that they all may be one . . . so that the world may believe that You sent Me.’ John 17:21. Currently the number one, fastest growing website in the United States is www.godtube.com, the brainchild of former CBS television producer and graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary Chris Wyatt. Before going to seminary […]

Sometimes, when I wake in the middle of the night, I hear the endless tramp, tramp, tramp of humanity crossing the arches of the years, each rank enjoying the spotlight of prominence, then passing into oblivion. How pathetically incapable we are of keeping our brief candle alight one second beyond its term! How fragile is […]