Category: Pastoral Exhortation

The Christian message, the Christian story, goes something like this: God came to earth and we killed him. God came to earth in the God-man, Jesus, and we nailed him to a cross. Why? Jesus went around announcing he was God, the Great I AM, who can forgive sins, who was there in the beginning, who…

This is a good article, with lessons for the church that apply far beyond Hillsong. When the church puts being cool above being holy, when church leadership is more concerned with relevance than faithfulness, bad things happen. The article might be behind a paywall so here are some key takeaways: “Evangelicals would do well to…

On Maundy Thursday, Jesus gave his disciples a new command: to love one another as he has loved us. While the command to love had been given in the Old Testament law, Jesus deepens and redefines that law with his own example of love, first in washing the disciples’ feet, then in dying on the…

This is a modified email I sent out to my congregation in August 2020, but I thought it would make a good follow up to last week’s sermon on courage from Daniel 3. TPC family, The times we live in require courage on the part of God’s people. Our faith is assailed from various angles…

In 1 Timothy 3:4-5, Paul requires that a man rule his house faithfully if he is going to rule in the household of God. The proof he is ruling his house faithfully is manifested in the faithfulness of his children. Sadly, this is a very neglected qualification for pastors and elders in the evangelical church today. If…

The absurdist Albert Camus once wrote, “Death is philosophy’s only problem.” For Camus death is the ultimate problem because if every human story ends in death, it renders the rest of our lives meaningless. The wise man Solomon expressed a similar concern over death in Ecclesiastes 2:12-17 when he pondered the sobering fact that the…