The other day I mentioned that Knowing God by J.I. Packer is the one book I reread every year. This excerpt is one of the reasons why: What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlines it–the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in…
Yesterday, I preached my first sermon of the New Year from Psalm 27. This Psalm highlights David’s one thing, his single ambition: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after…to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.” Psalm 27:4 There is not a greater ambition for 2017 than this ambition, that we might deepen our admiration of God and our affections for God by gazing upon the beauty of God. There are many ways to do this,…
“How encouraging the thought of the Redeemer’s never-ceasing intercession is for us. When we pray, He pleads for us; and then we are not praying, He is advocating our cause, and by His supplications shielding us from unseen dangers…Little do we know of what we owe to our Savior’s prayers. When we reach the hill-tops of heaven, and look back upon all the ways in which the Lord our God has led us, how we shall praise Him who, before…
“A visitor to the contemporary church materializing from an earlier century would probably be struck by how enormously privileged we are. We each own a Bible; if they owned a Bible it was in small print Elizabethan English. We carry entire theological libraries on our eReaders, have access to vast resources via the worldwide web; they perhaps owned one or two Christian books. And yet, if the truth be told, what might surprise the most is that their familiarity with…
The ending to the book of Jonah is perplexing. The author doesn’t tell us what happened to Jonah. The author leaves us wondering: did Jonah repent of his anger toward God for not executing his justice and wrath upon his enemies, the Ninevites? What kind of storyteller is this? How could he not bring some resolution about the main character? And that, my friends, is the nub of the problem. If we think Jonah was the main character then we’ve missed the point…