Yesterday I began a short series on the holiness of God and the existence of hell. In a day when hell is under attack, I want to show that any question of the existence of hell is not at heart a discussion of whether or not a place exists, but a question of the character…
One of the great questions that faces the church today concerns the existence and the nature of hell. Hell is under attack from outside the visible church and from inside. The question each one of us must answer is this: Does hell exist? Is it, as Christians have long claimed, a place of eternal, conscious…
A little while ago I received an email that, at heart, asked a straightforward question: Can a Christian starve to death? It’s a straightforward question but introduces a fair bit of difficulty. There are many places where the Bible states that the Lord will provide what we need or where Jesus himself says not to…
This is an article about preaching that is meant to be read by non-preachers. I am an unlikely preacher, a guy who was paralyzingly shy through high school and college and into later life who rather suddenly found himself speaking at conferences and preaching at churches. As someone who is rather new to the pulpit,…
Here is a pastoral conundrum for you to think about. In 1412 the pre-Reformation preacher John Huss found himself facing a difficult decision. The Roman Catholic Church had excommunicated him for his refusal to burn his copies of John Wycliffe’s writings and now the Church had also leveled an interdict against the city of Prague…
A reader of the site recently asked me this question: “What is your opinion about using eHarmony or some other online dating site to find a spouse?” He also asked that if I am in favor of such sites, I provide a recommendation of a good service. While this is a distinctly twenty-first century question,…
I guess every preacher has to take on Isaiah 6 (Isaiah’s vision of God’s throne room) at one time or another. My opportunity came this past Sunday. It is such a beautiful and powerful text and it was a great pleasure to just soak in it for an entire week. Don’t worry! I am not…
When you come across the word encourage in Scripture, the sense is make strong, usually in regards to strengthening a person’s resolve so that he will press on in following the Lord. When you understand that meaning, you see that every Christian needs continual encouragement as he lives this Christian life. It is helpful to…
Summer has officially begun here in Canada. School let out last week and then yesterday, July 1, we celebrated Canada Day. Between these two events and the heat wave we’re experiencing, it’s clear that summer is upon us. It won’t be long before my family is traveling and, actually, I have to make a brief…
After writing about this new genre of I went to heaven books, I received many comments and emails asking me about biblical examples of those who glimpsed heaven–John in the book of Revelation, Paul in 2 Corinthians, Isaiah in his prophecy. I will address this briefly today. There are several themes in today’s “I went…
Travelling to heaven and back is where it’s at today. Don Piper spent ninety minutes there and sold four million copies of his account. Colton Burpo doesn’t know how long he was there, but his travel diary has surpassed 6 million copies sold, with a kids’ edition accounting for another half million. Bill Wiese obviously…
John Piper sparked quite a storm with his biographical message on the “frank and manly” J. C. Ryle. One of his conclusion was that Christianity is meant to have a masculine feel to it. Response to his message ranged from outrage to applause. I found myself perplexed and needed to give it some time to…
A couple of weeks ago Carl Trueman posted a review of a new book from G.R. Evans. Trueman had read The Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence, and Rupture in the hope that he would be able to use it as a text for his Reformation History classes. Very quickly he came to see that…
Have you seen the video of the orchestral flash mob in the Copenhagen metro? A couple of months ago the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra surprised a car full of passengers by setting up shop in the metro and performing Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” right there in the train. The video is not even two-and-a-half minutes long,…
Today my parents and brothers and sisters and brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews are gathering in a little house in Chattanooga. Forty years ago today, the third of June of 1972, was a double celebration for my parents: my father marked his twenty-third birthday and he married my mother. Both had been born and raised…
Ann Voskamp sent me an email the other day. She invited me to bring my family to the Voskamp farm for a meal—they live just a couple of hours from us—to put people to the pixels, so to speak. It was a kind invitation and well-received. I am hoping that my family and hers can…
Near the center of every religion is a ledger. Every religion acknowledges, on one level or another, that people do good things and bad things and every religion then maintains a tally, supposing that one day there will come a reckoning. Every religion hopes that on the day of accounting, the day of the audit,…
In God’s revelation of himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, he says that he is “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). However, later in the Old Testament, in the prophecy about Christ in Psalm 2, we are told to “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is…
One of the more interesting sections of dialog in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has Christian and Hopeful discussing the danger of backsliding, of falling away from what had the appearance of spiritual life and growth. That dialog, drawn from the tenth stage of Christian’s journey, is important and instructive. Bunyan presupposes that such people…
Many a father has held an infant son in his arms, looked at that child and declared his delight. Yet, sadly, many years later the delight has turned to disgust, the joy to mourning. The son has done something, he has become something, that has driven away his father’s delight. I thought of my own…