John Newton, a great English singer and powerful preacher of the gospel, was at one time in his life perfectly content with a secondhand religion and the external performance of religious duties. Aboard his slave ship on Sunday he faithfully read the prescribed...
If you worship Christ as the Creator of everything, every cosmic speck across billions of light years of trackless space, the Creator of the textures, shapes and colors that dazzle our eyes: if you worship Christ as the Sustainer of all creation, who by his word holds...
One of the striking things about evangelical corporate worship in our times is the evident paucity of Scripture. There is relatively little Scripture read, prayed, or sung in our assemblies. While high liturgical traditions continue to infuse services with scriptural...
If we ask, “How should we worship God?” a healthy Christian and Protestant instinct will be to respond with another question: “What does the Bible say?” Rightly understood, this is a necessary and indeed a sufficient response. We must not, however, presume that we...
In the modern evangelical church, singing, praying, giving, and other congregational acts of worship are regarded at times as preamble to the sermon. Music, in particular, appears separate from elements of worship that seem to be more spiritual, such as praying and...
According to the Bible, our God is both male an female, and neither male nor female. The language of prayer, liturgy, sermon, and hymnody had best reflect that fact.
Lord, at the beginning of this Lenten season, I sense my need of you,Yet, I am not quite sure how to reach you. I heard someone say, “Read your Bible.”But too often the words are like Bullets that ricochet off my brain. I heard someone say, “Pray.”But my prayers,...
Pro Tip: It’s possible to get an A in Bible and still flunk Christianity.
It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.
Any time the Bible is quoted to defend behavior that is not motivated by the law of love, something is wrong.