Precious are the times when a classic hymn transfixes you. One did this week. Under pressure for a sermon draft deadline, my head was down and the fingers moving across the keyboard as iTunes played a shuffle of songs behind. That’s when I heard Anglican John Newton’s 1779 hymn, “I Asked the Lord that I… Read More I Asked the Lord that I Might Grow
The more determined men become to despise the teaching of Christ, the more zealous should godly ministers be to assert it and the more strenuous their efforts to preserve entire. And more than that, by their diligence to ward off Satan’s attack. John Calvin The reality of what was clearly taught throughout the Scriptures concerning… Read More Hello, I must be going, 5
There are times in a regular pattern of study in God’s word and in a regular pattern of prayer that brings together who God is in his holiness and my deep and desperate need in my sinfulness, to see afresh the amazing grace and mercy in our Savior’s bloody sacrifice done for me as a… Read More Man A Nothing
I read a blog by Brian Croft the other day who asked some questions concerning our assumptions on decline that got me thinking. Like him the more I hear the push “to overcome” the “plateau or decline” the more I pause and think of scenarios where a church’s decline in numbers is not necessarily a… Read More Decline and…
With sermons for tonight, tomorrow night and Easter Sunday done, my thoughts and prayer turn to those whom our heavenly Father draws to hear the gospel this year – those who only come to church on Christmas and Easter. Do you know what is true about folks who only come to church on Christmas and… Read More Holy Week, Easter, Prayer and Preaching
This is a tale of two Richards: George Richards and Richard Rohr. George Richards was a minister in the Reformed Church in the USA in the late teens/early twenties of the last century. He was the chairman of the American Council on Organic Union, what became the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. Richard Rohr is a present-day… Read More A Tale of Two Richards
The third phase in the renewal of my prayer life was how the past met the present. It was the way in which all I had been taught yet never valued in bible college and Westminster Seminary, I suddenly understood. I understood the “why” of the gospel. I understood grace. It all became real to… Read More This Praying Life, Phase 3
The second phase of my praying life was in and after my conversion. It was a glorious response to what my new pattern revealed to me at that time. I don’t have the exact day, but there was a time as I prayed out the latest crisis and to put if fairly crudely all the… Read More This Praying Life, Phase 2
When you grow older in the Christian life you are regularly knocked down in the dust astounded and amazed, only to rise up in doxology and praise as you see glimpses of God’s footsteps pressed upon you through the path of your life. The fullness of God’s ways are way past our ability to trace.… Read More He Plants His Footsteps in the Sea
“Consequently, too, there comes in that which Paul quotes from Aratus, that we are God’s offspring [Acts 17:28], because by adorning us with such a great excellence he testifies that he is our Father. In the same way the secular poets, out of common feeling and, as it were, at the dictation of experience,… Read More Nothing Comes Between Me and My Calvin, 1
The Vicar's Garden 