Rejoice with us this day in the resurrection and the life of our King, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, King Jesus the Christ, the Name above all names.

Being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
For this reason also God highly exalted Him
and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow,
of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue will confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father
- Philippians 2:9-11 -

Jesus said to her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
he who believes in Me will live even if he dies,
and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”
- John 11:25-26 -

And Jesus answered them, saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.”
- John 12:23–26 -

Jesus is acknowledging that the time for His crucifixion is near. We learn from the next verse (which we’ll look at in a minute) that He was troubled. And that’s not terribly surprising. It’s not that He’s just going to die an agonizing and ignominious death at the hands of those who have perverted His Father’s holy Law, and have subjugated His people under a yoke of slavery that no one in history has been able to bear (Ac 15:10). That would be enough to trouble any of us, certainly.

But Jesus’ trouble went deeper than that. He was troubled at the fact that soon He would lose the delightful and exuberant fellowship that He had always enjoyed with the Father. There would, for the first time in eternity, be a horrible change in their relationship; it would go from one of perfect communion, love, blessing, joy, and delight in each other, to abandonment, hatred, cursing, wrath, and shame. On the cross, Jesus would experience the full exercise of the righteous wrath of His Father—wrath He had known objectively but never experientially. The bitter cup that He never deserved to drink would soon be pressed to His lips, and the delightful, well-pleased smile of His Father—the apple of His eye from all eternity—would be hidden from Him.

In a very real sense, Jesus is about to go through hell.    Continue Reading…

God rules the world, and he largely does so through ruling our wills. And, God largely rules our wills through our desires. This is the foundation of much of Edward’s theology, as well as Piper’s Christian Hedonism.

Piper and Edwards often describe this truth in the context of salvation and of sanctification. But one of my favorite books, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, approaches this same theological chain (Sovereignty, human will, human desires) in the context of trials. Jeremiah Burroughs shows how God is glorified when the person suffering increases in his trust for God through trials. The following is an excerpt from the book (the whole book is available in PDF for free, but it is also in a Puritan Paperback). Know that in this section Burroughs uses comfort to mean joy/pleasure, and he uses creature to mean things that are created. Where he uses creature, we might us the term world:

“This indeed is an excellent art, to be able to draw from God what one had before [experiencing suffering] in the creature.

With that, Burroughs makes the profound point that through suffering, God actually takes away the pleasures of the world. Had we not suffered, we would still be content with finding pleasures in the world. But with suffering, God makes that impossible, and when the result is more joy found in God, God’s glory is magnified. He puts it in the form of a question, and I quote it here without comment:  Continue Reading…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing to preach on the Christian grace of humility from Philippians chapter 2. To prepare myself for that, I decided that in addition to my normal study materials for Philippians that I would re-read C. J. Mahaney’s excellent little book, Humility: True Greatness. Certainly studying humility is a humbling experience, and for that I praise God. In the course of my study I’ve been freshly confronted with the universal relevance and absolute necessity of the grace of humility. It is a pursuit which never ends in this life—a goal to which we never truly attain, and yet a goal for which never cease striving.

In an effort to share with you the blessing I received while reading, and to aid you in your own pursuit of humility, I thought I’d reproduce some of my favorite quotes from the book. I hope this serves and benefits you all.

Continue Reading…

One of the quirks of Christian unity is that I – an American, free church, premillennial, baptistic pastor – find remarkable affinity with the reflections of one Carl Trueman – a British, Presybterian (OPC!), amillennial, paedobaptist.

A few months ago, Trueman shared an interchange with Sean Lucas and Michael Haykin over the place of “spiritual formation” in theological seminaries. I’ll leave that immediate issue to those more qualified. But I was particularly grateful for Trueman’s final thoughts, where he observed the real difference between a biblical piety and a performance or program-based “spiritual formation.”

Here’s a snippet:   Continue Reading…