Never Yours, Soul
Dear Sin, I thought of not engaging you at all, but decided it would be more profitable to respond—not for your sake, but for mine. It will be refreshing for me to review how wrong you are on every single point.
Dear Sin, I thought of not engaging you at all, but decided it would be more profitable to respond—not for your sake, but for mine. It will be refreshing for me to review how wrong you are on every single point.
Published out of order, Mark Baddeley marks the penultimate post in our series on The Apostles’ Creed with an examination of the spiritual implications of the incarnation. We have before us one of the lines of the creed that has received one of the more paradoxical receptions in recent centuries. It has been at ground zero for struggles to uphold classical Biblical teaching on the supernatural dimension of the Christian faith, and so has witnessed a multitude of attempts to defend it against secular scepticism. At the same time, however, that defensiveness has inhibited deep reflection about its implications for...
Neil Chambers continues our Apostles’ Creed series … Two years ago, while preaching through Deuteronomy and the instruction given there for Israel’s calendar, I was convicted of the usefulness of having times in our church year, where we remember God’s great saving acts and rejoice before him—celebrating his kindness to us in Christ. It would give a pattern to our year and make prominent what was core in our confession of Christ, and would help us remember, and not forget, that we are the Lord’s people, saved by His grace to live for Him. ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit,’ is...
A second letter responding to a reader’s query about miracles and our critique of the Bethel network. See the first letter here. Dear M_______, In my last letter I responded to some specific verses you cited—verses which might be seen as supporting the idea that we should all be expecting to do miracles like the apostles. I argued that when we look at the context, we see that those miracles were meant to be signs, and that the Bible wants us to focus on the meaning of those signs: Jesus and his great mission. But does it have to be...
What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the ministry of preaching? It would be hard to overstate. The Spirit is the author and preserver of Scripture, the teacher and guide of the preacher and—through the words and meaning of Scripture—the power and presence of God at work in the listening congregation. Deep Dependence The preacher is to be deeply dependent on the Holy Spirit in the preparation of sermons and the exercise of the preaching ministry. Paul says to the elders of the church in Ephesus that the Holy Spirit has made them overseers of the flock of...