Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

Psalm 73 is a reminder that a believer can have difficult spiritual experiences, even ones in which he or she reveals a sinful response connected to the misapplication of a divine promise.    Why is this psalm included in God’s Word? Obviously because God wanted to include it. This means that he inspired it secretly in Asaph’s mind and guided him what to say about his fall and recovery. The Lord included in his Word because Asaph’s experience is not unique, nor are those who are involved in public roles in the church immune from it.    Asaph had an important role in arranging the forms of worship that took place in the temple. One day he rebelled in his heart, and then later he felt divine pressure to record what he had done, why he had done it, and how God took him out of that state. So what we have here is the confession of a restored backslider. Of the psalmists, it is not only David who can be so described.   The sanctuary of God In this sermon, I don’t want...

George Muller had an inspiring prayer life, asking God daily to send food and other provisions for his orphanages. He also prayed for individuals. In November 1844, when he was thirty-nine, he began to pray for the conversion of five individuals, children of some friends. The first was converted after eighteen months (in 1846). The second was converted five years later (in 1851). The third then was converted after about six more years (in 1856). Muller died forty-one years later in 1897, but he had prayed for the remaining two every day for those forty-one years, which meant that he had prayed for them for almost fifty-two years. A few years later they believed in Jesus. Praying without ceasing, we might say.    There is a story told of a group of ministers who were discussing this text and they found it very difficult to explain. A maid came into the room and one of the ministers decided to ask her if she prayed without ceasing. They were surprised when she said that she did,...

We may imagine that the short account of the ascension of Jesus here at the end of Luke’s Gospel suggests it was not very important. True, he gives another description of it at the beginning of his second work, the Book of Acts, but again his words about it are few. Yet the ascension of Jesus is a crucial biblical event: it was prophesied in the Old Testament, for example in Psalm 68:18 and Psalm 110, it was predicted by Jesus in John 6:62, and it was prayed for by Jesus in John 17 when he asked the Father to give to him the glory he had with the Father before the creation of the world. When gathered with them in the upper room on the same evening as his arrest Jesus had told the disciples that it would be better for them if he went away because then the Holy Spirit would come to live in them as the Comforter. The Saviour had mentioned that he was leaving them, a departure that involved him going to the Father’s house, which clearly indicated his ascension to glory. We can also see tha...

John the Baptist, the forerunner sent by God to announce the coming of Jesus as the Messiah, is standing with Andrew and probably with John, two of his disciples. They had become John’s followers as he served God in the important way of making spiritual preparation, through the means of the preaching of personal repentance, for the arrival of the Messiah, which meant that these disciples were expecting the Messiah to appear in the near future, and no doubt they were excited about what would happen then. On the previous day, John had also pointed to Jesus with a similar but longer description of Jesus as the Lamb of God who was taking away the sin of the world, which is a picture suggesting that Jesus was focussed on a specific task as the Saviour. What ideas would have gone through the mind of the Baptist’s disciples when they heard this title of Jesus? That will be the first detail that we will think about, the description of Jesus as the Lamb of God. Then we will consider the discove...