On the day of their engagement, a young man gave his fiancee a rather expensive necklace. It came with a note which said, “My dearest Diane, I love you with all my heart. I love you more and more each day. I will love you for ever and ever. I am yours for all eternity.” Signed, “Tom”. P.S. “If we ever split up, I want this necklace back.”
I want to speak to those who have been baptised. …
‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’
As clowns long to play Hamlet, so I have longed to preach from this great verse. Now that I have the chance to do so, I feel like a child standing by the edge of some vast ocean, wanting to dive in and swim across, and yet afraid even to put his toe in the water, for fear of quickly finding himself completely out of his depth. …
What does the word ‘church’ conjure up in your mind. A building? A denomination? A vocation? A slot in the diary?
The Christian church is the society of believers, united to one another and to Christ by love and faith in him. It is a congregation that belongs to God by divine election. ‘What the apostles meant by a church was not an edifice with pulpit, chancel and pews, but a congregation or society of regenerated people built together like living stones and content to meet in some upper room in private dwellings like that of Mary, mother of John Mark.’ …
‘Reasons are the pillars of the fabric of a sermon; but similitudes are the windows which give the best lights’ (Thomas Fuller).
Spurgeon expands the latter thought in this quotation, by suggesting that illustrations, like windows:-
1. should let in light: they should clarify and explain our meaning. Joshua Shute wrote: ‘That sermon has most learning in it that has most plainness. Hence it is that a great scholar was wont to say, “Lord, give me learning enough, that I may preach plain enough.”‘…
Preachers will do well to attend to the different types of hearers who may be present in any congregation. J.I. Packer quotes the Puritan Willam Perkins, who in his “Arte of Prophecying” ‘distinguished the different classes of people that the preacher could expect to be addressing in any ordinary congregation:-
R.L. Dabney (1820-1898) was an American theologian whose book on Sacred Rhetoric (reprinted in 1999 under the title Evangelical Eloquence) is a fine guide to preaching. According to Dabney, the cardinal pre-requisites of the sermon are:-
1. Textual Fidelity. ‘The preacher is a herald. The first quality of the good herald is the faithful delivery of the very mind of his king.’ Textual fidelity not only ensures faithfulness to the mind of God, but also gives fruitfulness and variety of matter. …
To grasp the true nature and impact of revival, it is necessary to examine the moral and spiritual conditions which precede such a time of awakening. As if to show us that it is “not by might, nor by power, but my Spirit”, God often seems pleased to pour out revival blessing when the land is at its most parched and dry:-
…Repeatedly these seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord emerge in the providence of the Lord at a time of crisis.
Plenty has been thought, said, and written about Steve Chalke and his comments on atonement in The Lost Message of Jesus. Although N.T. Wright (who endorsed the book) has said that he doesn’t think that Chalke intended to deny penal substitution, Chalke has gone on record to confirm that he did. (See here for Garry J. William’s reply to Chalke, and here for a penetrating review by Donald MacLeod).
As for The Lost Message of Jesus, D.A.…
The term ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’ is used by Pentecostalists and some charismatics to refer to a ‘second blessing’ of the Christian subsequent to the experience of conversion. It is seen as a full reception of, or release by, the Holy Spirit, issuing in the exercise of any of a number of ‘spiritual gifts’ including, for many, the gift of tongues.
This understanding is attended by a number of problems.
1. The expression ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’ (or something similar) occurs some seven times in the New Testament. …
Chris Tilling expresses an understandable longing that universalism might, after all, be an option for Christian belief.
…‘I used to think that exclusivist was the only option, and anything else, compromise. Now exclusivist makes little sense to me, not because of this or that verse of scripture alone, but because of life, the smile of a baby, the groan of an old man, the death of a precious Hindi old lady who’s served her family all her life, and other bigger issues such as what the death of Christ and his resurrection says of God’s character, why he would create only to send most to hell, why the sending of Christ would seem to damn more to hell than save for eternal life, why God is love if most experience anything but love and forgiveness, why God won’t forgive most as we are commanded to in the scriptures, why God would be so interested in the contents of our minds (our doctrinal beliefs) as central to salvation etc.’
