Articles

On Monday July 2nd Iola and I drove out east from Grand Rapids twenty miles to a lovely house in the woods overlooking Murray Lake on Red Oak Drive, Lowell to visit Bob den Dulk. Bob and I had begun our studies at Westminster Seminary together in 1961 and we graduated three years later (along […]

Sunday, March 4, 1739 – Age 24 Rose much refreshed in spirit and gave my early attendants a warm exhortation as usual. Went to Newgate and preached with power to an exceedingly thronged congregation. Then hastened to Hanham Mount, three miles from the city, where the miners live altogether. God favoured us in the weather. […]

…by revelation there was made known to me the mystery. (Ephesians 3:3) Pearl S. Buck, the great novelist, who won the Pulitzer prize in 1932 and the Nobel prize for literature in 1938, grew up on the mission field. In her memoirs, she took up the question, ‘Do we need missionaries to go to foreign […]

This is how world-famous triple jumper and high profile ‘Christian’ Jonathan Edwards has described his (now abandoned) belief in God. In a tragic interview in the The Times on 27th June 2007, Edwards speaks openly and candidly of his renunciation of the Christian faith, and of his apparent naivety in following Christ for 37 years […]

I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 3:1) Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, military and naval hero of 16th century France, who had converted to the Protestant faith during the awakening in France in the 1550s, was in Paris in August, 1572 for the wedding of Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, to Marguerite de Valois, […]

Be sober in all things. (2 Timothy 4:5) Paul, in his last epistle, written shortly before his martyrdom in Rome, gives several exhortations to his son in the faith, Timothy; and this one in particular needs our attention today. Paul’s exhortation to be sober is a present imperative, not referring to freedom from drunkenness but […]

All of us know the experience of reality not matching expectations. Sometimes the problem is with the reality. We buy a cruise on the internet. But, when we take the cruise we find that it falls far short of what was advertised. Other times the problem is with expectations. We get married expecting we are […]

Acts chapter 9 recounts two miracles performed by the Apostle Peter in regard to Aeneas and Dorcas of Joppa – Aeneas, a man who was paralyzed for eight years, and lay on a mat; the other Dorcas, who was very much alive, until she died suddenly in the midst of her labours. I thought of […]

‘Woe unto them! For they have gone in the way of Cain.’ (Jude 11) The deceitfulness of the human heart is a truth recorded in Scripture and borne out in daily life. Believers discover it increasingly in their own lives as well as around them. One of the ways this deceitfulness shows itself is the […]

Christ is our sufficiency. This statement is true on the highest and most vital level of our lives. Only Christ has regarded us in all of our unworthiness and unloveliness and has loved us to the uttermost, giving His life as a ransom for us. Only Christ can cleanse us of the guilt, heal us […]

Whatever we read in the Scriptures is there for our learning, both the warning beacons and the godly examples. ‘Don’t live like this,’ is the message flashed by those hazard lights; ‘Look at the patterns of these people’s lives,’ the examples declare. The man named Achan is set out for us in the Bible as […]

As a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ one of my chief concerns is the efficacy of the Gospel message. In fact, I am more and more convinced that the potency of the word is bound up with the character of the preacher. Keeping this in mind, it becomes needful for the Christian minister […]

The Bala conference of ministers takes place each June in a delightful little market town in North Wales, now enhanced in my eyes through having its gospel church under a new pastor, Gareth Williams. He changed his career last year from being one of the lecturers in Systematic Theology at the Welsh Evangelical School of […]

The Bible, God’s own Word, can be deeply disturbing to read. It has a ‘knack’ (being inspired by the Holy Spirit this should never surprise us) of unsettling us, and deeply humbling us. This has been the case with me these past few weeks in particular. Let me explain. I am trying (and trying is […]

Throughout my 63 years as an evangelical believer, the penal substitutionary understanding of the cross of Christ has been a flashpoint of controversy and division among Protestants. It was so before my time, in the bitter parting of ways between conservative and liberal evangelicals in the Church of England, and between the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now […]