The Grand Old Book Talking to Us Today

"I want people to fill their minds with passages of Scripture while they are well and strong, that they may have sure help in the day of need. I want them to be diligent in studying their Bibles, and becoming familiar with its contents, in order that the grand old Book may stand by them and talk with them when all earthly friends fail."

~ J.C. Ryle

"Hallowed Be Thy Name"

"Is your fundamental, daily disposition toward God a reverential, hope-filled hallowing of his name?"

-- John Piper

The Prodigal

A moving re-telling of the classic parable via dance and song.

J.C. Ryle on the New Birth

"To be born again is, as it were, to enter upon a new existence, to have a new mind, a new heart, new views, new principles, new tastes, new affections, new likings, new dislikings, new fears, new joys, new sorrows, new love to things once hated, new hatred to things once loved, new thoughts of God, and ourselves, and the world, and the life to come, and salvation." -- J.C. Ryle

Genuine Spiritual Experience

Spiritual experience that does not arise from God’s word is not Christian experience.… Not all that passes for Christian experience is genuine. An authentic experience of the Spirit is an experience in response to the gospel. Through the Spirit the truth touches our hearts, and that truth moves our emotions and effects our wills.

— Tim Chester and Steve Timmis
"Total Church"
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 31

Born to Adore

“I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and obey.”

-- C.S. Lewis in ‘Breakfast Table and other Reminiscences.’

What is really involved in becoming a Christian?

Here is an excellent, brief summary from Tony Payne.


"... if you had the opportunity to open up one simple Bible passage, and briefly explain to someone what it meant to be a Christian, where would you turn?

"I would turn to 1 Thessalonians 1, verses 8-10:

"For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

"And with all the boldness, fluency and clarity that I wish I had in real life but only ever have in scenarios, I would read the passage with my new friend, and then say something like this:

"This part of the Bible is a letter written by one of the early Christian teachers (named Paul) to some people who had become Christians after he had shared the Christian message with them. And as he writes to them, he reminds them exactly what they did to become Christians. So it gives us a very neat summary of what the Bible says it means to become a Christian.

"It basically meant doing three things.

"The first thing that these people did was to turn away from their religion and culture. They used to worship idols — fake gods. But then they turned their backs on all this. Becoming a Christian requires you to turn away from your old life, from all the things that are not really god that you used to worship and live for.

"The second thing follows on from the first. They stopped serving and living for false gods, and started serving the true and living God—the one, real and true God, who made everything and who is in charge of everything. To become a Christian is to put yourself at God’s service; to acknowledge that he is the one and only God, and that you are one of his servants.

"But there’s a third aspect. Even if they turned back to God to serve him, why would he accept them? After all, they’d been worshipping the opposition, ignoring him, sinning against him. He would have every right to be angry with them. So why should he accept them back? Because of what it says there in verse 10: God’s Son Jesus died to deliver them from the anger that was to come (that’s what ‘wrath’ means).

"That’s what it means when Christians talk about Jesus ‘dying for our sins’. It means that when we stand before God at the end, and give account for our lives, we don’t have to fear God’s anger or judgement, because Jesus died to deliver us from that. So these guys were waiting confidently for the end, for when Jesus would return, knowing that he would rescue them and save them when they stood before God.

"So there you go—a quick summary of what the Bible says it means to be a Christian: turn your back on the false gods you used to worship, start serving the true and living God instead, and put your trust in Jesus who will rescue us from God’s anger."


"Now when you said to me before that you were a Christian, is that what you meant?"

Tony Payne is an ordained minister who serves as the Publishing Director at Matthias Media. He has authored or co-authored numerous books, Bible studies and resources, including The Trellis and the Vine, Two Ways to Live: The Choice We All Face and Six Steps to Reading Your Bible. Tony is also a regular contributor to The Briefing, and lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife Alison and their five children.

"Science, Too, Calls for a Leap of Faith"

An excellent essay from Trevin Wax, appearing in the New York Times opinion pages.

The Evil of Boredom

"The great evil in postmodernity is boredom. Entertainment provides us meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. It gives us temporary, often intense, experience that alleviates anxious boredom, our implacable enemy. Entertainment has become our new religion." - Paul Hiebert

Civilization with God?

"The Christian belief system, which the Christian knows to be grounded in divine revelation, is relevant to all of life. For unbelieving multitudes in our times, the recent modern defection from God known in His self revelation has turned the whole of life into shambles. Ours is the first society in modern history to have ventured to erect a civilization on godless foundations; it may well be the last....

"...even the classic ancient Greek philosophers still warn us through their extant writings that no stable society can be built apart from durable truth and good and that any eclipse of these realities robs human survival of meaning and worth. Their writings are not the last word, however. Echoing from Creation to Calvary to Consummation, God’s eternal Word invites a parched humanity to the Well that never runs dry, to the Water of Life that alone truly and fully quenches the thirst of stricken pilgrims."


-- Carl Henry, quoted by Greg Alan Thornbury, "Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry"

"What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution"

“Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity.”

-J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Bulletin 25 (1974): 25.

Our Deepest Need

“The deepest need of men is not food and clothing and shelter, important as they are. It is God. We have mistaken the nature of poverty and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God’s re-creating, loving peace. Peer into poverty and see if we are really getting down to our deepest needs in our economic salvation schemes. These are important. But they lie farther along the road, secondary steps toward world reconstruction. The primary step is a holy life, transformed and radiant in the glory of God.”

-- Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York, 1941), page 123

The Essence of True Humility

"Because the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.

"Gospel-humility is not needing to think about myself. Not needing to connect things with myself. It is an end to thoughts such as, ‘I’m in this room with these people, does that make me look good? Do I want to be here?’

"True gospel-humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation, with myself. In fact, I stop thinking about myself. The freedom of self-forgetfulness. The blessed rest that only self-forgetfulness brings."

-- Tim Keller, "The Freedom of Self-forgetfulness"

"Gabriel cannot love Jesus as a forgiven man will do...."

"Gabriel cannot love Jesus as a forgiven man will do..."

"We are now capable of a joy which unfallen spirits could not have known: the bliss of pardoned sin, the heaven of deep conscious obligation to eternal mercy.

"The bonds which bind redeemed ones to their God are the strongest which exist. I believe that forgiven sinners will have a love to God and to his Christ such as cherubim and seraphim never felt; Gabriel cannot love Jesus as a forgiven man will do.

"Those who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb will be nearer and dearer to him, and he will be nearer and dearer to them, than all the ministering spirits before the throne."

— Charles Spurgeon
"Honey from a Lion"

The Spirit Versus the Guerrilla Forces of the Flesh

"A deep spiritual walk with God does not usually happen immediately after conversion. When the Holy Spirit invades the enemy territory of our lives and sets up Jesus Christ as King in the capital city of our heart, his strategy for conquering the rebel forces of the flesh that keep up their guerrilla warfare is different for each person. It may be fast or slow. God’s clean up operations are very strange."

-- John Piper,  "The Danger of Being Merely Human"