There is no power in our strength, but there is much power in our weakness—God’s power—made infinitely more visible and glorious against the backdrop of our frail humanity. I am convinced that the more trials we endure, the more opportunities God will give us to comfort those who will have to walk where we have limped so that we may dispense the same grace that we received along the way.

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake…
Colossians 1:24
The apostle Paul rejoiced in his sufferings because he knew that God was using them to produce growth in his own life through the experience of receiving divine comfort, which would then touch the lives of those whom he served. Writing to the Corinthians, he says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:3–4). Suffering enhances ministry because it produces a common ground on which to relate to others who are in the midst of the same types of trials that we have already experienced and endured.
Read More

The result of these shifts has been the elevation of sexual satisfaction to the apex of our culture and making sexual identity our deepest source of self-knowledge. He concluded with an account of how Christianity enables a proper sense of identity; one rooted in the transcendent law of God instead of authentic individual expression.

Asbury Theological Seminary President Dr. Timothy Tennent is facing a social media backlash for preaching a solidly orthodox sermon at Asbury’s convocation for the 2021-22 academic year.
Titled “The Restoration of Personhood”’, the sermon referenced a conversation between Tennent and the late Asbury theologian Dr. Dennis F. Kinlaw. Tennent, as he explained, asked Law what the most pressing theological issue of the age was. Kinlaw, instead of a long-winded answer, responded with one word: personhood.
Tennent proposed that the overarching problem with the spirit of the age is that it has a severely misguided notion of what it means to be a human being. In particular, he referenced the work of Grove City College professor Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
Trueman wrote Triumph of the Modern Self out of curiosity at statements like “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” going from nonsensical several generations ago to being “not only regarded as meaningful and authentic, but to deny it is stupid or immoral or an irrational phobia.” As Trueman argues, the 1960s saw the rise of a new kind of individualism, one radically different from what has come before. Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor, called this shift “expressive individualism.”
The Asbury Seminary president described some features of this new individualism. Firstly, “this new vision of human personhood has created a seismic dualistic separation or fracturing of the human will from the physical body. In this twist of Neo-gnostic dualism our bodies become moldable, like plastic contingent instruments which must be conformed to the intuitions, feelings and what other social constructions we may dream of in order to conform to our understanding of ourselves.”
Read More

The world is groaning, we are groaning, but God is protecting us, forging our faith on the anvil of affliction because of his love for us and because of a passion for his own glory. Charles Spurgeon once said that God’s sovereignty is a doctrine for rough weather; “God Moves” is a hymn for stormy days, and there are many such days in a fallen world.

God Moves in a Mysterious Way  by William CowperGod moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; he plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.Deep in unfathomable mines, of never-failing skill; he fashions up his bright designs, and works his sovereign will.Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, the clouds that you much dread, are big with mercy and will break in blessings on your head.Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace; behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour; the bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.Blind unbelief is sure to err, and scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.
I love this hymn for the same reason I love Romans 8 and country music. I’m not talking about modern-day country music, the kind that is slick and well-packaged, the sort that is merely countrified pop music. By country music, I mean Hank (Senior), Cash, Jones, the Hag. Legends, all, whose lives were marked by the profound suffering and searching of which they sang. They were not dime store cowboys and neither was the author of “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.”
In some ways, the British poet William Cowper is to classic, Reformation-tradition hymnody what Hank Williams was to country music: both men perennially suffered deep, dark depression and anguish of soul. Out of their pain, each man wrote deeply emotional, heart-felt poetry that was set to music. Of course, their biographies part ways there: both diagnosed the illness that drove their angst in a deeply fallen world, but only Cowper found the transformative cure, locating his healing balm in the old rugged cross. Sadly, Hank sought solace in the bottom of a whiskey bottle and died of an overdose of alcohol and pain killers at 29. Hank sang “I Saw the Light,” but never seems to have run to it.
Two bruised reeds, two smoking flaxes, two different outcomes, but two men who were unsentimental about the mysteries of life and God’s providence east of Eden. “God Moves” is my favorite for two fundamental reasons: the story of the man behind the lyrics and the robust theology of Romans 8 that it expresses in unforgettable poetry. Every time I sing it in corporate or family worship (and I love the revised tune by Bob Kauflin and our friends at Sovereign Grace Music), I think of its author, and I am strengthened by the grace of which it speaks.
Embattled Soul
John Calvin referred to fallen humanity and the world in which we live as broken actors performing on a broken-down stage. Cowper’s brokenness was as profound as it was palpable. In his excellent biographical essay on the life of William Cowper, John Piper wrote of him, “The battles in this man’s soul were of epic proportions.” Indeed.
Cowper lived from 1731 to 1800, a contemporary to John Wesley and George Whitefield in England and Jonathan Edwards in America. Heartache was his handmaiden virtually from birth. William and his brother John were the only two among seven siblings to survive past infancy. At age 6, his mother died giving birth to John, leaving William deeply distraught. Cowper moved from school to school before landing at Westminster school in 1742 where he was bullied mercilessly by older students. While studying for a career in law as a young adult, he fell in love with his cousin Theodora and sought her hand in marriage. Her father refused to consent to the union and nuptials were never exchanged. Lost love left him crestfallen.
Read More

Written by Patrick J. O’Banion |
Monday, September 20, 2021
Vermigli was an influential theologian, preacher, and abbot in Roman Catholic Italy. He came to embrace Protestant theology in the 1530s and began a reformation in the northern Italian city of Lucca. In 1542, finding himself too well known, Vermigli evaded arrest and inquisitorial trial by fleeing to the relative safety of the Protestant north. He spent the rest of his life as a trailblazing Reformed theologian and churchman who profoundly impacted three regions of Protestant Europe: the Holy Roman Empire (from Strasbourg), the Swiss Confederacy (from Zurich), and the Kingdom of England (from Oxford).

How we understand the church’s missionary past has everything to do with how we will proclaim Christ to the nations right now. If the great theologians and practitioners of our ecclesiastical tradition—whoever they are—taught that our Lord had commissioned his church to share the gospel with all people, then we who live downstream of them are likely to embrace that mission. The reverse, of course, is also true.
The Missiological Legacy of the Reformation
One of the stories told about the Reformation in missiological circles is that the reformers weren’t interested in seeing the gospel go to the ends of the earth. Those who make this claim propose a variety of reasons for the failure. Perhaps the Reformers’ horizons were limited to Christian Europe or they were too busy arguing amongst themselves about minute points of doctrine to worry about the millions perishing abroad. Maybe their exegetical method caused them to limit the Great Commission to the apostolic era. Or maybe something inherent in Reformation theology works at cross purposes with global evangelism.
Whatever the rationale alleged, one important source of the claim that Protestants were missionary failures is the founding father of academic missiology, Gustav Warneck (1834-1910), who took the Reformers to task. Warneck concluded that Luther’s “view of the missionary task of the church was essentially defective” and Calvin’s comments on the Great Commission (Mt. 28:18-20) had “not a word to say of a continuous missionary obligation of the church,” but instead used the text as a launching pad for an attack (yet another!) upon the papacy. [1]  Even in its second edition, Ruth Tucker’s popular biographical history of missions implicitly follows Warneck’s interpretation of the Reformation, and a recent missiology textbook claims that “the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation did not produce any missionaries.”
To state the obvious, the theological vision of Protestants draws heavily upon the reformers. If Warneck is right that they didn’t have time for missions, will those of us who locate our confessional roots in the Reformation find that they don’t nourish and support an effort to take the gospel to the nations?
Now, in their kinder moments, Warneck and his many followers concede that Luther, Calvin, and their fellows simply couldn’t do everything. They had their hands full with reforming the church and avoiding arrest and execution. To expect them also to have focused their limited energy on reaching the ends of the earth, which admittedly felt much further away in the sixteenth century than they do today, is presumptuous and a bit unfair.
But as more and more scholars reexamine the data, the story of a Reformation that wholly ignored mission is being replaced by one in which the “Reformation as a whole was mission,” to borrow historian Scott Hendrix’s lapidary phrase. [3]
Vermigli and the Psalms: Reformation Meets Great Commission
By way of example, consider Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), for whom the notion that the Reformers didn’t care about the global spread of the gospel would have come as something of a surprise. In his earlier days, Vermigli was an influential theologian, preacher, and abbot in Roman Catholic Italy. He came to embrace Protestant theology in the 1530s and began a reformation in the northern Italian city of Lucca. In 1542, finding himself too well known, Vermigli evaded arrest and inquisitorial trial by fleeing to the relative safety of the Protestant north. He spent the rest of his life as a trailblazing Reformed theologian and churchman who profoundly impacted three regions of Protestant Europe: the Holy Roman Empire (from Strasbourg), the Swiss Confederacy (from Zurich), and the Kingdom of England (from Oxford).
One of Vermigli’s most popular works is his Sacred Prayers from the Psalms of David, which provide a unique window into his theological heart.
Read More

We should learn to minister to others around us with Jesus’ kind of intentional and purposeful compassion. We need to “speak the language” of our hearers so they will know the love of Christ and most effectively hear his word. Even preachers can learn from the account a little something more of how to minister to congregations by seeing when to make note of the original language in a sermon, and by implication, when to stick to the language of the immediate audience.

Why did Mark, the gospel writer, use the Aramaic word “Ephphatha” in Mark 7:34? Just sounding out the word is an exercise in oral calisthenics. He did it to “speak the language” of his hearers so they would observe and know the love of Christ and most effectively hear his word.
The funny thing is, “Ephphatha,” is an Aramaic word; Aramaic wasn’t the language of Mark’s readers. That’s why he immediately translated the word meaning “be opened” into Greek as he recounted Jesus’ Aramaic declaration to the deaf mute. So how was the Aramaic word going to help Mark’s Greek-speaking audience? How do we know he wasn’t simply acting like a young preacher seeking to convince his audience that he really knew the original language of the event?
Like Jesus in the original story itself, Mark knew what would communicate most effectively to his intended audience. That included his original audience and even us today.
To understand more clearly, let’s revisit this gem of a story recorded in Mark 7:31-37 that features the healing power of Jesus so compassionately exercised:
Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” (ESV)
Jesus had healed the Gerasene demoniac in this region earlier; the friends of this afflicted man likely knew of Jesus’ power from that miracle. Jesus stopped to meet their friend, and he took six actions that all demonstrated his empathy for the man. Observing each of these will help frame the context of the exclamation “Ephphatha!” Jesus didn’t just heal the man, he walked him through a process that communicated love, concern, and a desire for the man to know who Jesus is.
First, observe that Jesus took him aside from the crowd, so that he could have one-on-one interaction.
Read More

Catherine was frustrated with the new queen’s compromises in the matter of religion. She supported preachers such as John Hooper, John A Lasko, John Field, opening to them the parish of the Holy Trinity Minories in London, which was under her jurisdiction. In her home, she employed as preacher and tutor for her children Miles Coverdale, who is known as an early Puritan.

When fourteen-year-old Catherine Willoughby married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, in 1533, she became one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in England. Thirty-five years her senior, Brandon had been married three times before. His latest wife had been Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister – a marriage that had greatly increased his sphere of influence.
We don’t know how Catherine felt about her marriage, but girls of her status didn’t usually have a choice. With Brandon she had two sons, Henry and Charles. In a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, the boys looked charming, their golden hair fashioned in the typical pageboy haircut.
The family’s estate increased when Henry VIII abolished the monasteries and divided the church’s properties among his nobles. When, in 1536, a group of Roman Catholics rose in a protest known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, Charles Brandon was chosen to quench the rebellion.
Slow Religious Transformation
If Brandon’s main motivation was obedience to the king and material prosperity, by this time Catherine was becoming increasingly influenced by the Protestant ideas that were infiltrating England and even her own household. In fact, in spite of his traditional views, Brandon tolerated the Protestant views of some of his helpers and administrators. For example, Pierre Valence, chosen by Brandon as tutor for his children, agreed with Luther’s protest against indulgences. Even the family’s chaplain, the Scottish Alexander Seton, believed in justification by faith alone.
Catherine’s Protestant convictions were strengthened at Henry’s court, where new religious ideas circulated, in spite of the king’s adherence to most Roman Catholic doctrines. There, she became a close friend of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. In fact, she was at court when the queen was accused of possessing banned books and narrowly escaped execution.
It’s hard to determine when Catherine fully embraced Reformed views, but she enthusiastically supported the Protestant King Edward VI after Henry’s death. By then, her husband had also died and left her with enough wealth to be able to finance causes she considered important, including the publication of Katherine Parr’s Lamentation of a Sinner, a controversial book that left no doubt on the former queen’s stand on justification by faith alone. Her correspondence around that time also makes reference to her study of the Scriptures.
Catherine also promoted the circulation of Bibles in English and encouraged bishops to bring protestant clergy to local churches, particularly in her region. Between 1550 and 1553, she invited bishop Hugh Latimer to preach to her household at Grimsthorpe, Lincolnshire. In fact, most of his sermons, pregnant with the gospel message of justification by faith alone, survived thanks to Catherine, who financed their publication.
When her sons grew old enough to attend university, Catherine placed them at St. John’s College, Cambridge, under the tutorship of Martin Bucer. Later, when Bucer became ill, she took care of him at her home.
Learning to Trust God’s Providence
The toughest time in Catherine’s life was in 1551, when her two sons died hours apart. The cause was the so-called sweating sickness, a contagious illness that affected England, in a series of epidemics, from 1485 to 1551. It was probably a viral pulmonary disease.
When the sickness broke out at Cambridge, Catherine moved her sons to one of her properties where they could isolate. But they had already been infected. Upon hearing of their illness, Catherine, also unwell, rushed to their side. She arrived too late to see Henry alive. Charles died soon after. They were 15 and 14 years old, respectively.
Apparently, the boys had some premonition of death, as they each spoke, in their last days of life, of leaving this world.
Read More

Kevin Halloron’s When Prayer Is a Struggle is meant to console Christians who are struggling to pray, to diagnose their troubles, and to provide practical counsel that can motivate them once more. A book that is appropriately simple and relatively short, it serves as a very relevant and very applicable guide to prayer.

I expect every Christian would agree that there are times when prayer is a struggle. Though we experience blessed seasons when prayer is the easiest and most natural thing in the world, we also experience seasons when prayer is difficult and when it feels awkward or even ineffective. And for this reason we all sometimes need a little refresher, a little reminder, a little spark.
Kevin Halloron’s When Prayer Is a Struggle is meant to console Christians who are struggling to pray, to diagnose their troubles, and to provide practical counsel that can motivate them once more. A book that is appropriately simple and relatively short, it serves as a very relevant and very applicable guide to prayer.
Read More

Your comfort is found in your belonging to Christ. Hairs may fall from your head, but they will not do so apart from the will of your heavenly Father. It is He who loves you, not the CDC or anyone else. So be steady, find your comfort in Him, and then live for His glory.

The beauty of good doctrinal statements is that they pass the test of time. The Heidelberg Catechism, though written in 1563, still benefits the church today, touching us where our greatest needs are felt. For example, this 16th century catechism begins with this very relevant question and answer: 
What is your only comfort in life and death?
There is no more relevant question to be asked today. The world, strained by 18 months of COVID restrictions and new geopolitical unrest, is filled with anxiety and worry. But here followes the answer for the Christian: 
That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.
Read More

Job’s counselors mistakenly thought they could discern the purposes of God in Job’s experience. Their errant conclusions led to erroneous counsel. If nothing else, the book of Job reminds us that the ways of God in any given situation are largely inscrutable. As the Lord shows Job when He appears in the whirlwind, our minds cannot put together all the pieces of the puzzle of God’s providential workings in this world. That is why we, like Job, must respond with humility and trust.

One pearl of wisdom from my father is indelibly imprinted in my memory. “Son,” he said, “I can’t change mistakes I’ve made in life, but there’s no reason for you to repeat them. If you learn nothing else from me, learn from my mistakes.” Those words come to mind when reflecting on the failure of Job’s friends.
Upon hearing of the calamities that crushed Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar traveled from their respective towns “to sympathize with him and comfort him” (Job 2:11). After silently mourning for seven days with Job, they spoke and things took an unfortunate turn. Job’s assessment of their counsel was blunt: “Miserable comforters are you all!” (Job 16:2). He then dismissed them with withering words: “So how dare you give me empty comfort? For your answers remain nothing but falsehood!” (Job 21:34).
How did things go south so quickly? How could these men turn on their friend they intended to comfort? These friends of Job made four key errors—mistakes we should strive to avoid.

They lost track of their purpose.

This trio came with generous empathy for their suffering friend. Horrified at the initial sight of Job, they sat with him in silence for seven days. Watching him scrape his boils with potsherd and hearing his moans through sleepless nights must have been unnerving. Understandably, they were haunted by a question: Why? Why was this righteous man suffering severely? So, they sought to understand the reason behind it all. They lost themselves in their own heads and failed to remember why they were there. Ultimately, their illogical reasoning turned them from compassionate companions to aggressive accusers.
Sitting with sufferers is hard. If we are not careful, we can forget our role and bring added hurt rather than help. Job did not need theological debate, he needed comfort. His friends failed him because they lost track of their purpose for being there.
Read More

Reeves argues that there are multiple types of fear. First, natural fear is the fear of pain, accidents, and death. These are the result of the fall, but they are not sinful in themselves. A second form of fear he calls “Sinful Fear,” which gets its name because it derives from our sin. We fear God as judge because we know we are guilty before Him. Finally, there is the fear of the Lord (I will call it Righteous Fear, though Reeves simply calls it “Fear of the Lord”), which is the center of discussion later in the book.

Books don’t often make grown men cry with joy, but I have heard that Reeves’s book on the Trinity (Delighting in the Trinity) has done so. That book is still on my reading list, but when I heard Reeves recently wrote a book on the Fear of the Lord, I knew I had to read it. I read it to get exposure to Reeves’s work, but I also read it because I am fascinated by the topic of the Fear of the Lord.
Reeves begins with a great question: Is fear good or bad? On the one hand, Jesus came to deliver us from fear (Lk. 1:74–75; Heb. 2:15); on the other, we are called to fear God (Prov. 1:7; Ps. 86:11; etc.). Reeves’s book is designed to “cut through this discouraging confusion” (16). His goal is that readers would be able to “rejoice in this strange paradox that the gospel both frees us from fear and gives us fear. It frees us from our crippling fears, giving us instead a most delightful, happy, and wonderful fear” (16).
Setting us Free from Fear
Reeves argues that there are multiple types of fear. First, natural fear is the fear of pain, accidents, and death. These are the result of the fall, but they are not sinful in themselves. A second form of fear he calls “Sinful Fear,” which gets its name because it derives from our sin. We fear God as judge because we know we are guilty before Him. Finally, there is the fear of the Lord (I will call it Righteous Fear, though Reeves simply calls it “Fear of the Lord”), which is the center of discussion later in the book.
Despite living in times where safety is undeniably greater than at any point in world history, many people live in perpetual fear. Anxiety is rampant. Reeves argues that “the loss of the fear of God is what ushered in our modern age of anxiety, but the fear of God is the very antidote to our fretfulness” (24).
Fear does not merely derive from uncertainty though; it sometimes derives from certainty—the certainty that God is holy and we are not. This realization, present in all humans, contributes to a Sinful Fear that leads men to flee from God. They hate His holiness, and they fear the life of holiness he would bring in their lives. Further, they know He will judge, and they know they will be guilty.
Sinful Fear is the natural state of man before God. The fanning of such fear is the grace of God, awakening the sinner to the reality of his predicament. As the old hymn says, grace teaches the heart to fear, and only then can grace that fear relieve.
Read More