J.I. Packer once provocatively wrote, "Law-keeping is that life for which we were fitted by nature, unfitted by sin, and refitted by grace" [J.I. Packer, Keeping the 10 Commandments, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007), p.44]. Is that you? Have you been refitted by grace? Apart from God's work of grace, we are sure to fail in keeping God's law. And even having been refitte...

When we studied John 11:1-44, and we considered Jesus' outrage and grief over sin and its consequences, namely death. Jesus, though he knew no sin, knew the effects of sin. Though he was sinless, he saw how full of sin this world was. It is his holiness and righteousness that fuels his outrage against sin and it is seeing its consequence in death and sorrow that fuels his ...

Not too long ago, I was meeting with a brother in Christ and he told me about how the Lord comforted him through various passages of Scripture. Does that happen to you? Do you interact with God's Word, as though it is his personal Word to you? You should. We all should come to God's Word expecting to hear from him, because when we are reading his Word that is precisely wha...

As is often the case, I've been reading the passage of Scripture I'm going to preach through during my quiet times throughout the week. As I've been reading John 15:18-16:4, I've been struck by how clear Christ has been with his disciples. He's always clear, but here especially he does not hold anything back. He says to them in John 16:2, "They will put you out of the syna...

This afternoon I was meeting with a group of pastors and we were talking about what pastors talk aboutministry. We prayerfully considered gathering our churches together one Sunday evening for a combined time of prayer. We thought that our congregations could benefit from praying through A.C.T.S. (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication) and hearing a sermon ...

When we worked our way through John 15 and 16, many of you may have noticed that I broke those chapters up in a way that did not exactly match the paragraph structure of the Bibles that we provide at our church. I actually had a couple of paragraphs explaining why I had broken the passage up in the way that I did, but due to time (and my love for the children of our congre...

As Christians, one of our great struggles is to live in the reality that what God has done far outstrips what we were and what we have done. When we live in light of what we were and what we have done, we underestimate the power of God. We remember our past, but we live in light of the present and coming reality. In Colossians 1:21-22, two short verses, Paul writes out the...

Food, football, and fake plates. That's what a number Thanksgiving's growing up looked like for me and my family. We would often travel to Ohio to visit extended family for the holiday, and rather than sitting around a table, we would sit around the TV. Then there were the Thanksgiving hockey tournaments. If we weren't with unbelieving family members in a smoke-filled hous...

It may surprise you that I celebrate October 31st. Then again it probably doesn't. In my pastoral prayer, I gave thanks to God for what happened on October 31st in 1517. I gave thanks that Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Chapel, and that the Lord used this event to help spark a recovery of the biblical gospel all across Europe and the World...

Over the past several months I've been reading up on a few theological trends and thoughts. Some of these issues have risen during my preparation of sermons in John's Gospel, while others have come up in personal conversations and evangelistic endeavors. While these theological issues, thoughts, and trends have been varied and disparate, they all have a similar undercurren...