We must pray, confess, confront, admit, intervene, befriend, and love. As the family of God, we must not give up on those who struggle with addictions as we depend on the transforming and renewing work of the Holy Spirit through the gospel of Jesus Christ, who has overcome the world.

As a pastor, I often find myself counseling people with addictions. Having served in local church settings for more than twenty years, I find ministering to addicts and their families to be one of the more difficult, complicated, and sad things I do. Every week, I preach the Word of God to people who have never been addicts and may never become addicts, to former addicts, to addicts themselves, and to future addicts. There are some addicts who know they are addicts, some who are seeking help for their addiction, and some who either do not know they are addicts or do not want to admit it. Some people think they will never become addicts because they do not have an “addictive personality.” Others think they will never become addicts because their parents were not addicts. And some fear becoming addicts because they think they have an addictive personality or because so many in their family history were addicts.
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We interpret and apply Scripture based on the words of the text as well as on the inescapable principles and necessary applications of the text. This is one of the most important hermeneutical principles for Christian life and doctrine, and it is precisely how we see Jesus Christ and the biblical authors approaching Scripture. 

One of the most important yet often most neglected fields of study in the church is hermeneutics, or the study of the interpretation of literary texts. As Christians, we are focused especially on the proper interpretation of sacred Scripture, for the lack of a sound, consistently applied hermeneutic results in poor interpretations and applications of Scripture. Many people in the church today base their hermeneutics on their feelings or impressions. As an example of this, small-group Bible studies often ask, “What does this verse mean to you?” rather than the more appropriate question, “What does the author of this verse mean?”
Hermeneutics must be based on established principles, not pragmatics or emotions. To that end, the pastors who drafted the Westminster Standards provided the church with the most concise and helpful summary of Scripture and its interpretation ever formulated. Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith is perhaps the most important.
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Rome was not built in a day, and neither was the confessional, Reformed, Protestant church. The faithful men and women of the seventeenth century continued the work of the sixteenth-century Reformers by bringing every doctrine, every practice, and every thought captive to the Word of God.

In our day, many Christians have a view of church history that is a popular, but unfortunate, caricature. They believe the church started in the first century, but then soon fell into apostasy. The true faith was lost until Martin Luther recovered it in the sixteenth century. Then, nothing at all significant happened until the twentieth century, when Billy Graham started hosting his evangelistic crusades. Regrettably, we form caricatures of history on account of our ignorance of history. Too often, our historical awareness is sorely lacking. What’s more, we don’t fully know where we are, because we don’t know where we’ve been. We might be aware of certain historical figures and events, but we are often unacquainted with what our sovereign Lord has been doing in all of history, particularly in those periods that are less familiar to us.
This is the seventeenth year that we at Tabletalk are focusing on a specific century of church history.
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Satan identifies us by our sin, and we often join him in doing so, but God identifies us in Christ. God identifies us as holy and calls us to be holy because He has declared us holy on account of the holiness of Christ. As Paul writes, God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4). 

Thinking about God leads us to quickly affirm God’s holy and righteous character. But pondering our own holiness can leave us feeling bad about ourselves. We heartily confess that God is holy, that He is unchanging in His holiness, and that His being and character exemplify and define holiness, yet we are painfully aware of our own sins. We don’t feel very holy, and therefore we conclude that we are not holy.
In ourselves, we are not holy. We are born in sin, and thus we are radically corrupt, at enmity with God, and bound for God’s eternal and righteous judgment. When it comes to our sin, if we’re honest, not only do we have to confess the sins we commit that people see, but we must also confess those sins in our hearts and minds that only God sees. Most of us not only don’t feel holy; we feel like the opposite of holy.
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We are too easily tempted to forget God and to avoid conflict with the world. It sometimes seems easier to live as if God really isn’t there, to go about our days without reflecting on His authority and that we’re called to live all of life coram Deo, before His face. But if we forget Him, we’ll forget who we are. We are His people, and we are called to stand firm against the creeping darkness of secularism.

“In God we trust” officially became the national motto of the United States in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into law. Originally implemented in part to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union and its explicit state atheism, the motto has remained to our day. Like many mottoes, however, the phrase has unfortunately become more of a throwaway statement for many Americans than a declaration of true faith in the one and only God of Scripture.
It is indeed our hope that our nation—and every nation—would genuinely trust God. Although many people claim to trust God, they act as if He has no authority whatsoever over their lives. They are an authority unto themselves, and the foundation for their self-appointed authority is as unstable as the emotions of their ever-changing hearts. Whether or not they know it, they have succumbed to secularism, which begins in the heart and ends in death. Secularism is the belief that man does not need God or God’s laws in man’s social, governmental, educational, or economic affairs.
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Much of society is being overtaken by a youth-driven culture because we have neglected God’s call to train up the next generation of young people in the way they should go. If we are to redirect the current paths of young people, we must begin in the church by taking up the charge to come alongside younger men and women, and teach them the old, ancient values of God’s Word.

My dad was fifty-two years old when I was born. When I was thirteen, he asked me if I was embarrassed that he was so much older than my friends’ dads. I told him I wasn’t embarrassed but that I respected him and learned more from him because he was older. He was born a few years after the end of World War I and fought in World War II. He had a newspaper route during the Great Depression, and he told me stories about real cowboys, bank robbers, and his father, who grew up at the turn of the twentieth century in the old West in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. My dad wasn’t just older than my friends’ dads, he was from a different era, an era when young men respected old men and when old men raised young men to be men and not just guys. It was a time when older men and older women took seriously the biblical charge to teach and train younger men and women in old values such as integrity, service, loyalty, sacrifice, honor, wisdom, hard work, and humility.
My father’s values were old, traditional values.
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True love means proclaiming the truth. True love means proclaiming the gospel. True love means proclaiming the love of God and the wrath of God, and the most unloving thing we could possibly do is withhold the truth from those who are perishing without Christ—the truth about God’s love, holiness, justice, and grace; the truth about man’s sin, death, and hell; the truth about faith, forgiveness, and an eternal life coram Deo, before the face of God in heaven, where God’s love will reign over us forever.

God is love, and love never fails because God never fails. Love cannot be separated from God and cannot exist without Him. God’s love is the foundation and definition of love, just as He is the source, fountain, sustainer, and enabler of love. God gives meaning to love, and without Him, love isn’t only worthless but meaningless. Without God as its source and center, that which humans conceive of as love is impatient and unkind, envious and boastful, arrogant and rude, always insisting on its own way, irritable, resentful, rejoicing in wrongdoing and falsehood. Without God, love is nothing more than a hateful lie of Satan.
Every day we hear people talk about love as if it were some sort of impersonal force and independent energy that alone has the power to change hearts, restore homes, cure diseases, rebuild communities, and unite nations. The world is infatuated with the idea of love. Even the word itself, love, has degenerated into an all-encompassing, catch-all term that seems to be at the heart of a rising one-religion-politically-correct world language—
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Discernment is not only the ability to choose right from wrong; it is the ability to choose right from almost right. Similarly, one of the closest companions to wisdom, a companion without which true wisdom cannot exist, is humility, the virtue whereby we recognize that we lack wisdom and must acquire it.

In our digitally dependent age, information comes at us constantly from every direction and, it often seems, with ever-increasing rapidity. Never before in history have we had such an abundance of information that we can so easily access, and yet never before in history has there been such a lack of wisdom.
In fact, it often seems that there are many who do not even see wisdom as something that they should aspire to possess. In many respects, Western culture has ignored the pursuit of wisdom for so long that even the word wisdom has almost completely disappeared from its vocabulary. We live in a culture that rebels against the wisdom of the aged and revels in the foolishness of the elementary.
Part of the problem is the idea that knowledge equals understanding and that understanding equals wisdom. Shortcuts such as a web search or echoing the perspective of social media gurus or celebrities provide superficial knowledge that often satisfies people today.
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God sustains us that we are able to endure faithfully to the end. By His loving hand, He blesses us with discipline. By His kindness, He leads us to repentance, and by His sacrifice, He has conquered the Enemy and defeated death. For this reason, we will endure because we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying, “Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.” Considering what he accomplished in his life, such a statement is certainly appropriate. Churchill‘s victories demonstrated his ability to persevere to the end. He overcame great odds, and his self-sustained fortitude enabled him to endure the hardships and complexities of political life during the Second World War.
While Churchill’s assertion is accurate, it is only accurate insofar as it pertains to our natural human capability. Churchill’s call to persevere to save ourselves is by all means applicable to soldiers in wartime. It is a stern charge to fight to the end in order to overcome the enemy. And, indeed, it conveys a similar exhortation found in Scripture. In Hebrews, we are called to run the race that is set before us (12:1). The apostle Paul likewise exhorts us to endure so that we might reign with Christ (2 Tim. 2:12), and, while teaching His disciples about persecution, Jesus said, “the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matt. 10:22).
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God has put eternity in our hearts. He has inscribed heaven on our souls. He created us to long for a perfect world and to desire what is supremely ideal. We want to be fully and finally free from the suffering and misery of this world, and ultimately from our sin—not only the conviction and sadness our sin brings us, but also the hurt and pain it brings to those closest to us. As redeemed but fallen creatures in this fallen world, we desperately want to be done with sin and its consequences. We want to be less proud, less impatient, less sad, less worried, less burdened, and we want to be more holy, more repentant, more prayerful, more at peace, and more content. We are, as Martin Luther taught, simul justus et peccator, “at the same time just and sinful.” In Christ, God has declared us righteous, though we still strive each day to mortify our sin in the flesh. But there is a day coming when we will no longer struggle, when our faith shall be sight, when we shall see Christ Jesus face-to-face, when we will no longer desire, no longer need, no longer lack contentment.
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