Reformation21

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. — Augustine As James K. A. Smith reminds us in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit , Augustine’s prayer reveals several aspects about the human condition. First, human beings are made by and for the...

Apologetics requires certainty and confidence. Its basic purpose is conquering doubts cast on the Christian faith. But what about the doubts of Christians? How do we defend a faith that we are not always certain of? Doubt is not a virtue; it is a serious problem. Doubt is dishonorable. God wants us...

I have argued that our worship should glorify God and edify the Christian community . To that end, our songs need to be biblically based, yet also crafted in a way that promotes the active participation of the congregation. I have already offered some of my own opinions on how that is best achieved...

Have you ever spread Marmite on toast? It's a British condiment made from yeast left over from beer brewing. It is dark, thick, and sticky, like a savory molasses. Marmite is hailed as the superhero of sandwich spreads because it’s bursting with vitamin B. Over the past century, it has come to the...

“Honor your father and mother... that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Few things seem more American than rebelling against authority. After all, that’s how we started as a country, right? Leaving aside lengthy historical and...

One of Billy Graham’s early crises of faith was over whether he could totally trust the Bible. After much struggle he prayed to God, “I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.” [1] Graham’s conclusion sets a good...

In our last post, we saw why songs for congregational singing need to have biblical content , as well as music suitable for active participation. We have also seen how worship should be conducted for the glory of God and the building up the Christian community. With all of this in view, we can now...

Apologetics is often associated with the so-called proofs of God’s existence: ontological, cosmological, teleological—and already my head is spinning. But the quest to prove God has several problems. First, it ignores that all people already know God. Even animals can tell us that God created the...

One thinks of the oddest things while driving to church. One recent Sunday on my morning drive to services I had an unusually strange thought. The saints in heaven worship God and pray to God. [1] If they pray, would they perhaps pray using the Lord’s Prayer, which our Savior taught to us while on...

As we saw previously, meetings for worship should be conducted for the glory of God, and for the purpose of building up the people, the Christian community. Everything in worship should be oriented to these goals. Building on the principles set out in Part I, we now concentrate on congregational...