Who Seeks Discipline? The Seventh Mark of a Healthy Church Member

Really, who seeks discipline?
In our pleasure-seeking culture and churches so inundated with the gospel of self-gratification: Not Many! Yet for those who know Christ and are known by him, discipline is not a pain to be avoided, but a necessary and blessed part of the Christian life.  As Thabiti Anyabwile shows in his chapter on the subject in What [...]

Committed Church Membership: The Sixth Mark of a Healthy Church Member

To many Christians today, church membership is a non-essential or an enigma.   Be it from the proliferation of extra-church ministries (i.e. Bible camps, collegiate ministries, or other parachurches), the ever-increasing array of Christian teaching diassociated from church membership (i.e. Christian TV, radio, Bible studies, etc), the creation of hybrid-churches (i.e. multi-site, Internet and virutal churches), or the simple neglect [...]

The Ways of Our God: God’s People (3)

In The Ways of Our God: An Approach to Biblical Theology, Charles Scobie moves in chapters 11-15 to speaks about God’s People.  Continuing to expound a multi-thematic approach to biblical theology, he shows how God has from the very foundation of the world worked in covenant relationship with his people and how he will continue [...]

Extra- “Ordinary Pastors”

This week I had the privilege of spending four days with more than 1000 pastors at Moody’s Pastor’s Conference.  It was a joy to get to know just a couple of these faithful shepherds as I manned the SBTS booth and talked to brothers, young and old, about ministry and on-going equipping for ministry.
At the same time, [...]

Oscar Cullman on Irenaeus and Redemptive History

Here is a great quote from Oscar Cullmann that shows the centrality and importance that redemptive history had for Irenaeus and should have for us.  He rightly understood that Christian preaching divorced from the fullness of redemptive history, had no vitality.  May our preaching be filled with biblical theology and its Christ-centered, gospel witness.  Here is the quote [...]

Top Ten Books of 2009 (D.V.) :: A Call for Prayer

Lord willing (Deo volente), the next year or two will have a host of books that will benefit and uplift Christ’s church.  Many of these books are from SBTS professors, others from some of the choicest biblical theologians today.  Below is a list of ten books that, Lord willing, will be appearing soon:
1. The Cradle, [...]

Carl Trueman on Academics and the Local Church

Lately, I have been thinking about my entrance into the PhD program and the impact such heavy-duty training has on the edification of the local church.  Such academic equipping is certainly not required.  Most biblical prophets and apostles were “regular joe’s.”  Amos was  a shepherd.  Peter and John were fisherman, “uneducated, common men” who had been with [...]

N.T. Wright: The New Testament and the People of God

N.T. Wright.  The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God.  Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992.
In N.T. Wright’s first book in a series of three (with two more projected), the British New Testament scholar gives a full-orbed presentation (535 pp.) on the history, culture, and worldview of the land and the people [...]

Colossians 1:24: Suffering for the Sake of the Body (pt. 2)

My Final Answer:
The “lack” that Paul’s sufferings are filling up is the representative absence of Christ’s redemptive sufferings. Let me expound: What Christ did on the cross was a singular event in space and time, yet it was for all time and for all people. The distance between the singular event and the fullness of [...]

P.T. O’Brien, W.E. Vine, and the Heavenly Assembly

Peter O’Brien in his commentaries on Ephesians and Colossians, in his article on the church in the IVP Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, and in his extensive chapter on the heavenly assembly in The Church in the Bible and the World  (edited by D.A. Carson) has argued for the eschatological orientation of the NT term “ekklesia.”  [...]