Category: Spiritual Growth
Pursue Love
Two simple words forming one simple command lead the way in Paul’s introduction to 1 Corinthians 14 — the chapter best known for Paul’s instruction about spiritual gifts in the meetings of the local church. “Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts . . .”...
Answer Your Own Prayer, Then Give God the Glory
King David was in trouble. For four years his own son, Absalom, had been secretly gathering a powerful following for himself among the men of Israel by turning their loyalties away from the true king and deceitfully undermining David’s authority. As the story is summarized in...
George Muller — His Method and Thoughts about Scripture Meditation
Thus also the Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, either very soon after or at a later time, I have found to become food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word that I...
Now that Philippians is (Almost) Committed to Memory: Ten Ideas to Help You Memorize Larger Sections of Scripture
“The thing that you do crowds out the thing that you might have done.” That was a line I heard in a message this summer at a youth camp for multiple churches. It was said in a message about Enoch walking with God, and connected to...
Moses, Joshua, Jesus, and Rest
I’m sure you know the feeling of restlessness. There is a longing deep in our bones that desires rest. No nap can fix this lack of rest. Augustine, a prominent Christian from the third and fourth centuries, knew of this restlessness. He prayed, “You have made...
The Text of The Bible Is The Foundation of Your Faith
I once heard a woman who professed to be a Christian declare, in the context of a disagreement about what the Bible says about God and his ways, “I don’t care what the Bible says. It has nothing to do with my faith.” Her view on...
The Priority and Potency of Prayer
My wife and I recently realized we’ve become quite the “strategists” with our children. This is unfortunate. When our children share dilemmas for our consideration, we are too quick to offer (oftentimes) dogmatic counsel without asking clarifying questions and, more shamefully, without praying. You would think...
The Elements of Victory
Christians are people who have been saved by the grace of God through the sacrificial, substitutionary death of Jesus Christ. Not a single person will attain to eternal life as a reward for his own moral perfection, but only through the grace of God in Christ...
How to Avoid Being a Theological Ignoramus
J.I. Packer tells a personal story about his freshman year in college (see Bruce Milne, Know the Truth, IVP, 1998, p. 9). The chaplain at his school took some of the students on “pastoral walks.” Packer was on one of those strolls and said of the...
Loving What is Beautiful
We were made for beauty. Our concept of beauty will vary, distorted by what theologians call “the Fall.” That is a way of speaking of the evil present within us permeating all aspects of our person. This causes one woman to long for an illicit affair...
