What is the glory of God? Posted by appolus on August 13, 2024 The glory of God!! The light that reflects from God Himself is seen in Christ and magnified in our hearts. It has substance, there is an eternal “weight,” that is quite apart from gravity. This weight is the “train of His robe.” It…
Category: Health
You (Still) Need the Gospel
I can still remember when we first learned to preach it. We’d just arrived at grad school and were stretched thin by long nights, a baby boy, a budget we couldn’t possibly balance, and immaturities to boot. My wife and I had asked one of my professors for church recommendations, and he’d given us one,…
An Unbreakable Home: What God Says to the Fatherless
How do you feel about the word father? Growing up, I felt the word like a thorn in my flesh. A frequent reminder of what I didn’t have. A gateway term into descending valleys of discouragement, insecurity, and envy. Father: whenever I heard the word, it mercilessly brought back to my mind what I was…
Should We Ever Speak Directly to the Devil?
Audio Transcript Should we ever speak directly to the devil? Some Christians do. Many don’t. Who is right? Here’s the question, from Frederic, a listener in Germany: “Pastor John, hello! An episode of APJ — APJ 1439 — really jumpstarted my prayer life. Thank you for it. As I felt really blessed, I was also…
Zeal: To Live with All Your Might
When Jonathan Edwards was nineteen years old, he wrote a series of life resolutions. Decades ago, as a young man, I read them, and number six lodged itself in my mind and heart as something I very, very much wanted to make my own. And I have tried to. Edwards wrote, “Resolved, to live with…
‘Abraham, Take Your Son’: Wrestling with God’s Unsettling Test
Anyone who reads the Bible from cover to cover will encounter passages that deeply disturb — anyone, at least, who’s paying attention. And the more seriously one takes the Bible, the more disturbing these passages can be. I was reminded of this recently when an earnest believer, a mother of young children, shared something with…
Where Heaven Touches Earth: Why Mountains Mesmerize Us
Recently, my wife and I became fascinated with documentaries about mountain climbers. It started with Free Solo, which tells the story of Alex Honnold and his ascent of one of the most difficult rock faces in Yosemite National Park — without any ropes! We watched awestruck at what Honnold accomplished and, at the same time,…
Baptists Untimely Born: The ‘Puritan Dilemma’ of the Congregationalists
ABSTRACT: English and American Congregationalists like John Cotton, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards arrived at somewhat Baptist conclusions regarding the regenerate nature of the church and its distinction from the state. Because they also believed in infant baptism and state-sponsored religion, however, they had a dilemma. The steep decline in Congregationalism since the seventeenth and…
The opiate of modern worship.
The opiate of modern worship. Posted by appolus on August 8, 2024 1Sa 16:14 But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the LORD troubled him. There are two broad categories of people within Christendom. They are not equally proportioned. One represents the vast majority and the other a remnant,…
Seven Encouragements for Parents of Prodigals
Audio Transcript Today we read Luke 15:11–32 together in our Bible reading, the parable of the prodigal son, or the parable of the prodigal sons (plural). It’s a famous story about a father — a blameless father — and his two sons, who are anything but blameless, each of them entrapped by his own sin…