Ministry

Today, Pastor Danny Hyde gives us an early glimpse of his messages at the upcoming Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in April. The conference is on the Holy Spirit and Danny’s knowledge on the subject is primarily Scriptural but also very personal. He gives us a little bit of his...
I recently read of one man’s experience as a student in the classroom of a famous professor. One student asked the professor, “What one trait separates the great scholar from all the rest?” The students sat in anticipation. Would it be pedigree, proclivity for languages, resilience, intelligence,...
Words hardly do justice to the experience of preaching and teaching God’s word. Irony is the blanket from which the preacher cannot free himself. After all, the hope of glory is Christ in you (Col. 1:27), but those in whom Christ resides are, by themselves, corrupt, polluted, wayward, deaf and...
We have all had moments in conversation when we did not understand someone, and anyone who reads the Bible comes across texts they do not initially comprehend. Sometimes a person or passage uses words that are simple enough, but we wonder, “what do you mean”? The best thing to do, it would seem, is...
Every pastor has encountered them. Every member of the congregation has wondered after reading the title of the sermon and the accompanying text, "I wonder what he is going to say about this text?" Let's face it some texts are difficult and when a preacher preaches through a book, well, he has no...
In 1869, the German physiologist, Friedrich Goltz, published a series of conclusions from tests he performed on frogs. In his book, Beitrage zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches ( Contributions to the Theory of the Functions of the Nerve Centers of the Frog ) , Golz revealed...
Benjamin B. Warfield wrote a little article for the Homiletic Review in 1897 titled, "The Indispensableness of Systematic Theology to the Preacher." As anything written by Warfield, it is a thoughtful and edifying piece with a clear aim. According to the Lion of Old Princeton, it is through Gospel...
What comes to mind when you hear the words “systematic theology”? For many Christians, they think of the halls of academia and the debating of obscure and minor details related to God. But for most of the history of the church, systematic theology was a discipline done for the church and by...
If all your paperwork rolled like a sea over your desk, you’d struggle to navigate and prepare your tax returns. If you blanketed your computer’s desktop with all your digital files, you’d smother the writing of a departmental report. So is any unorganized library a maze of confusion. This is why...
As an earlier post from Jeff Stivason made clear, this current installment of “Theology for Everyone” was inspired by Martin Luther’s fantastic little book on prayer entitled A Simple Way to Pray. In the spirit of truly offering theology to everyone, let me also recommend R.C. Sproul’s magnificent...