Articles

. . . but to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at my word. Isaiah 66:2 When the Puritans came to the Massachusetts Bay in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop, they came humbly, expectantly, seeking earnestly to fear and honour God, to […]

Wednesday night I was on my own in London. Such a void in the schedule gives me the chance to taxi in from Chelsea Harbour to Central London to Foyles, my favorite bookstore in all the world. The distinctive, boxy, black London taxi is a masterpiece of western civilization. In no other city can one […]

Introduction Someone once said that, if you want to be eternally relevant, you need to stop trying to say things that are relevant and focus on saying things that are eternal. Some ministers write their sermons according to what has featured in the news that week. When I was training for the ministry, a former […]

The finances of the Roman Catholic Church tend to be well concealed. But a spate of bankruptcy cases in the US (8 out of 196 dioceses, with Honolulu teetering on the brink) has enabled The Economist to examine the situation in that country in more detail than is usually possible. There are 74 million people […]

Judas Iscariot seems a most unlikely choice to be one of the disciples. He turned out to be a thief, the betrayer of the Lord Jesus, and a graceless man. But Jesus made no mistake; he did not act in ignorance; indeed we are told that he ‘needed not that any should testify of man: […]

If someone were to ask you, a neighbour, a fellow worker or fellow student, ‘What exactly is the gospel?’ what would you say? Perhaps I could ask you to stop reading this article, pick up a pen (or turn on your computer), and write in a few brief sentences what is the heart of the […]

‘He was probably the best exegete Princeton ever had,’ Benjamin B. Warfield once told Louis Berkhof. Abraham Kuyper was so taken with his academic acumen that Kuyper offered him the chair of Old Testament studies at the Free University of Amsterdam when he was only twenty-four years old. J. Gresham Machen commented that if he […]

On the whole, pastors in the West today minister without seeing revival on a large scale. Yet many of the role models we have adopted from history did labour in revival times: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles Spurgeon, among them. They have a great deal to teach us, of course. But their very success, […]

‘Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstacle out of the way of My people.’ For thus says the high and exalted One, who lives forever, whose name is Holy, ‘I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly of spirit in order to revive the spirit […]

Charles Hodge (1797-1878) embodied the ethos of Old Princeton, whose two hundredth anniversary we celebrate this year [2012]. Hodge was not the passionate pulpiteer that Princeton’s first professor, Archibald Alexander, was. Nor did he enjoy the sheer brilliance of his celebrated pupil and successor, Benjamin B. Warfield. In the fifty-eight years that Hodge taught at […]

My dear mother, Johanna Beeke, aged 92, passed on into the presence of her Saviour at 3:45 a.m. on July 23, 2012. Though words seem hollow right now, I have tried to write a little of the tremendous legacy she left us five children and our spouses. Some of this material I used for leading […]

Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth. Psalm 73:25 After John Wesley’s ‘heart was strangely warmed’ at Aldersgate in 1738, he preached and laboured for the gospel, unabated, until his death in 1791. In that fifty-three year period he wrote over two hundred books, compiled dictionaries in […]

Graham Miller was a friend and mentor to many – not least to me – and ‘I thank my God in every remembrance of [him].’ Many will echo this sentiment as they read A Day’s March Nearer Home, compiled from his journals, formed into an autobiography by the Rev Iain Murray, and published by the […]

On Monday 10th September 2012 I had the privilege of attending a minister’s fraternal in Mount Merrion Free Presbyterian Church, Belfast, where the guest speaker was Dr Joel Beeke. Dr Beeke is minister of the Heritage Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and President of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. The subject he had chosen to […]

If the world hated you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. John 15:18 At one time I taught logic at our Classical Christian School on St. Simons Island, GA to seventh graders, and the focal point of that first year curriculum was to demonstrate all the logical fallacies which people […]