Image: crop of Saint Peter and Saint Paul: Artist: El Greco (1541-1614)  This is the text from my sermon recently. It is an understatement to say that the institution of the church in the western world today is in a mess.  There has been so much compromise and so much worldliness that the idea of a true Christian in the mind of many observers outside the Church is very confused indeed.  To whom do we point today to say, "That's a Christian?"   Is it Joel Olsteen?  Is it Pope Francis?  Is it Bishop Gene Robinson in the Episcopal Church?  All these people believe very different things and live very different lives.   Well, today we are remembering the apostles Peter and Paul , and I think it's safe to say that they were true Christians.  Thankfully we know what they would say about it all , for we can read their opinion in the New Testament.  As for Paul , he tells us here in our lesson from Ephesians - in verse 20 - that the...

Psalm 37:23 The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way.   Lord, we must believe that you are here and more present than all our circumstances combined; more present and determining than any disturbing imagination, any decision we make, any action we take. You are God. You do not fail your own. We are your very flesh and bones, and loved as such (Eph. 5:30). Fill us with thanksgiving and expectancy as we walk in your ways of delight. Father, You have already solved every problem we face.  We simply need to walk forward into your solutions, with you.  Your rod and your staff comfort us. Restore our souls.

If you are struggling with decision-making - as I often do - you've got to get this book.  I cannot recommend it enough.  Find it here on Amazon .  Yes, it's written more for ladies, but I'm finding it helpful.  :-)  Her website is here:  emilypfreeman.com  .

But what about praying to God for the saints departed, as we do in the communion service? This is different.  We certainly do not believe we should pray for those saints who have gone before us so that they will be delivered out of Purgatory, which is a lot of the kind of praying that has been done for the saints in the past.  But there is no reason why we cannot pray for God’s blessing on those for whom we have prayed all their lives beforehand.  They are still finite creatures, dependent on the mercy and grace of God, and we can pray for their enjoyment of the blessings of God as a way of identifying with them and continuing to express our love and care for them to God. We pray for all the saints and, in a way that is real, we all meet together before the same throne in prayer.  It’s a way of experiencing what the creed calls the Communion of the Saints.  Even though we are in two different places, we are still all one in Christ, sharing His life, and conc...

What about prayer to the saints, asking them to pray for us to God? Bishop Wright gives us part of the answer in his book For All the Saints.  He explains that the idea of praying to the saints as if they are representatives for us before the throne of God came out of the medieval idea of the royal court.  Someone living in a rural area, miles away from where the royal court may be held, could not petition the king for his needs.  However, if he had a friend at the court, he could ask that friend to plead his cause for him.  You can see how this could lead people to think about the divine court; a friend or a relative has now died and gone to the court of heaven and, perhaps if we ask them to, they will pray for us there. The problem is that this idea of needing others to address God for us in his court is wholly unnecessary.  The biblical doctrine is plain that all the saints, either those militant or triumphant, have the same access to God the Father, thro...

My sermon from this past Sunday at Hamilton Anglican Fellowship:     Among people who are familiar with the stories of the Bible, the expression "the patience of Job" will occasionally pop up.  Job is one of the most famous of all people for the trouble they had - not, I'm sure, something that anyone would like to be famous for!  Our Old Testament lesson today is about the end of Job's troubles.  Thankfully Job's life had a happy ending!  It's a part of the Bible we like to read!  We all like happy endings.  I would not be surprised if there are not some here who are waiting to see if the Downton Abbey series is going to have a happy ending or not.     Part of Job's happy ending was to finally hear from God, after all that time when God seemed to be ignoring him while he suffered.  It was, of course, a mixed blessing.  To hear from God meant coming face to face with that awesome Being, which is an experience indee...

The Dent du Midi area; photo source: http://www.worldwidewanderings.net/Hikes/2013/May/27/hike.html I've seen some comments of late ( e.g., from my friend Sheridan Voysey - item no. 6 ) about the need to be able to enjoy things without feeling you have to own them.  The concept is increasingly important to me.  Here is Bishop Moule writing a poem about it: "All Things are Yours." Written near Les Avants, Switzerland. 'All things are yours.' 'Ye are not your own.' 'All things are yours!' Then here I own The glories of this Alpine hour; Mine is the Lake, the gleaming Rhone, And sombre Chillon's famous tower; And mine yon vast aerial hill,* Yon white Sierra, Leman's queen, Height above height, and loftier still O'er woods and clouds transcendant seen; And mine these pastoral wilds around, Their chalet-roofs and tufts of fir; And mine the life-wind's tide profound, To which the inmost pulses stir. Yes, all i...

The apostle Paul, missionary to the pagans, had high hopes of one day being able to share the good news of Jesus and salvation in his name in the very center of the Roman Empire. He decided to forward to the believers in Rome a summary of his gospel, which was a good idea for several reasons. For example, what if he didn't make it? He would have at least been able to give them the core of what he had hoped to tell them face-to-face. Thankfully, this summary of Paul's gospel has been preserved for us and this morning we have read from its 6th chapter. Chapter 6 is part of the section of Paul's letter, chapters 5-8, which contain absolutely critical information for a full experience of the Christian life this side of heaven. Roughly, one could say that chapter 5 deals with our justification - how we are made right with God, ch. 6, our sanctification - or how to live a righteous life, ch. 7, our relationship to God's law, and chapter 8, our relationship to the Holy...

I just listened to Doug Wilson's Blenheim Lectures in the UK and thought them very thought provoking. Do give them a listen. You can download them here .

Everybody needs to hear this sermon (or one like it): How God acts when we suffer . It's by Rev. Joe Novenson of Lookout Mountain Presbyterian.

This was for my ethics students today. It's a way of understanding the Gospel that helps young people to understand the narrative in which they live and to help them turn from their self-centeredness. You can let me know what you think about it. *** The Christian life is a part of the story of Jesus. God has a plan to glorify His Son. He is to be His King - the Redeemer-Saviour King, who has a kingdom by rescuing it and cleansing it for himself. He did the work 2000 years ago on a cross, rising to victory and his throne. We come in later. We are conceived with a nature that could care less; our puny minds can only think of our selves; we are out of touch with what's really going on; in the Matrix. God steps into our lives and begins to make what Jesus has done for us to start to work - to do things to us. First, subconsciously, he changes our hearts. Then, he calls us, normally through his Church in some way, to follow Jesus (with the change in our heart, we are awake, we can...

Tomorrow, in the Anglican calendar, is the celebration of the Feast of the Transfiguration. As we have read, this is the occasion in which Jesus appears before the apostles in the glory He would have after his work on earth was done. God the Father also speaks to the apostles directly, identifying Jesus as His Son – which was synonymous with his being the King of God’s kingdom – and commanding them to “hear him;” to take heed to all that Jesus would say to them. One of the main purposes for the Church calendar is to help us to remember the basics of the Christian story; the Christian faith. Remembering is a very key ingredient to saving faith throughout the Bible. If we forget what we believe, we certainly cannot live by it, can we. In the Old Testament, the LORD had to frequently reprimand Israel for failing to remember things they had once known. Their failure to remember would lead them to unfaithfulness and idolatry and thus to the loss of their covenant blessings. The apostles ...

We all know that we cannot follow Jesus unless we follow him along the path of the cross. We have to die to ourselves, which dying includes denying ourselves those things which hinder us from joyful obedience and faith. When facing something that must be shed away from my life, it helps me to consider the fact that there is coming a day when I will be living without this thing anyway. This world, this age, is passing away. It will someday be gone. I, however, will be raised to live a new life in the world to come. Now, faith realizes the future (Heb. 11:1). By faith I can imagine being utterly happy in another time (very weakly, of course, since, as Lewis reminds us, our desires are too weak). Why not go ahead and start celebrating? You will leave that sin behind someday anyway; go ahead and do it now. You will leave that pleasure behind someday anyway; go ahead and leave it now. You get the idea. This is not contrary to the intent of our Creator for us to enjoy and be thankful for al...

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John R. W. Stott preached a sermon on Christian emotion in 2005. It is a good basic statement on how our feelings are to be a part of our discipleship. He quotes Bishop Moule, too! Good for him! Download the sermon from All Souls by clicking here.

I'm reading R. L. Dabney's The Practical Philosophy , which is a book on Christian ethics. The beginning chapters are very important and I cannot help but relate them to "youth ministry". His thesis is that a person's feelings play an absolutely critical role in how he lives. The feelings are the motivating part of our hearts. Unless feeling is involved in an intellectual decision, there will be no action following the decision. Indeed, without the feeling, there would be no motivation to do the thinking in the first place. Without feeling, writes Dabney, "man would be reduced to both apathy and idiocy." Here is an excellent passage: "The feelings practically make the man. Intellect is the cold, feeble magnetism which gives the ship its compass to steer by. Feeling is the motive power, throbbing within the vessel and propelling it; without which the ship, in spite of the needle pointing with its subtle intelligence to the pole, rots in the harbor a...

May I take this image of the sun lighting up the world and relate it to our duty to be spiritual examples? The image reminds us that, as the sun is the light of the earth, you and I are to be the light of the world – the light of the people who are around us. According to David, the sun moves through the sky and shines upon us all because God wants to make Himself known. He has also made us the light of the world so that He might make Himself known. Are you as zealous for God to be made known to the people around you as God shows himself to be by giving us the sun? We all should be. The creation not only declares the glory of God but it reveals the zeal of God that all the world should know that glory. It is a reminder for us to carry the light of the knowledge of God to all the world, as the sun carries its light of the glory of God to all the world. Wherever we may be, with whomever we may be, especially when we are with our families, we should be like the sun to them. We sh...

Socialism, of any kind in any country, has proven to not alleviate any of socialism’s ideals. Nevertheless, socialism in this country has taken the moral high-ground in many minds because capitalism became secularized and the servant of greed. For many reasons, the Church – in both conservative and liberal forms - has failed to foster the biblical assumptions behind the ideal of private property, leaving the public square open to the ravages of sentimentalism and misinformation. Americans have turned away from biblical truth in preference to their idol of Mammon. They have thus sewn the seeds of the destruction of the foundation upon which their idol has stood. Hopefully, the pain of their loss will lead them to repentance and a return to a biblical world-view. I recommend that everyone hear Greg Bahnsen's series on Economic Ethics, available here . It's going to take generations for us to correct our ignorance, so we better get started now.

Rev. Steve Wilkin's, Pastor of Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, in Monroe, LA, gave a great lecture on the nature and importance of the Christian calendar this past April. He spoke at St. Mark Reformed Church in the Nashville area. You can hear the lecture, entitled "I've Got Rhythm: Getting in Sinc with Time" by going here .

Descent of the Holy Ghost (Pentecost), Durer, c. 1510 Woodcut, 12.7 x 9.6 An excerpt from my sermon yesterday: Now Jesus established His kingdom in the hearts of those thousands gathered in Jerusalem on that Pentecost with the purpose that that kingdom should be spread throughout the world in the hearts of men everywhere. And as Jesus displayed His reign in the Pentecost event, He also displayed his wisdom in the circumstances of it – which He had engineered. In that this was to be the beginning of a world-wide spread of His kingdom, we see the practical wisdom of Jesus in setting things up so that this Pentecost would have its desired world-wide effect. First, note the timing of the event. There was a distinct, symbolic timing to Pentecost. Pentecost was essentially a harvest celebration. The word pentecost is Greek for the number 50. The day was the fiftieth day after from the first Sunday after Passover and the first day of the wheat harves...