Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

The church is the “worshiping assembly,” and her mission is to call the nations to worship God. But worship is not only our goal; it is also one of the chief means for achieving that goal. Worship is not a retreat from the church's work of conquest. Worship is a fundamental “strategy” of the church militant. During this time of the coronavirus scare, we are being told that our worship services are...

Unless God humbles him, man won’t be humbled. Mankind has a hyperextended elbow from patting himself on the back. We look upon all the undeserved blessings which God has bestowed—our health, our financial stability, our routine, our safety, our full cupboards—and assume He owed them to us. Scripture is full of illustrative warnings against assuming the blessing of God as automatic (cf. Jdg. 7:2)....

Consistent Christian are not anarchists or scofflaws. We are gathered together today in this particular way precisely because we are not scofflaws. Every Christian who reads his Bible knows and understands that we are supposed to submit to the authorities that God has placed over us. What every Christian does not know, however, is that there are various understandings of how we are to do this. So...

There is a long tradition in the Christian Church in which ministers of the gospel delivered sermons that were directed to kings and governors and judges. Moses preached to Pharaoh. Jeremiah was called by God to preach to nations and kingdoms. Paul preached to a number of Roman Governors. John Calvin dedicated his Institutes of the Christian Religion to the King France. And you can read whole coll...

n the Garden of Eden, when God shaped the first man from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7), the Almighty was simply playing the part of a sculptor. He shaped Adam from the dust of the ground, but until the second half of the verse, this Adam was simply dust rearranged. After the semblance of a man had been fashioned out of dust, God breathed into his nostrils the “breath of life,” and it was then...

In the Garden of Eden, when God shaped the first man from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7), the Almighty was simply playing the part of a sculptor. He shaped Adam from the dust of the ground, but until the second half of the verse, this Adam was simply dust rearranged. After the semblance of a man had been fashioned out of dust, God breathed into his nostrils the “breath of life,” and it was then...

This is why Jesus took on a human body: so that He could drink death down, tasting it fully. This is why his mouth, tongue, and teeth were first formed in the body of his mother, the virgin Mary, so that He would be able fully to take in the acrid taste of death

A mid-week sermon from Pastor Douglas Wilson.

One of the greatest vices of the evangelical church over the past century has been our bad habit of attempting to read our Bibles in light of our current events, instead of the other way around, which is to read our current events in light of our Bible. In Scripture you have a firm and certain word. In the world around you, as we have right now, you have a raucous multitude driven by whatever emot...

A mid-week sermon from Pastor Toby Sumpter. There is something glorious here for us. The pagans were struck with darkness and could not rise, could not go out, could not move for three days, but all the children of Israel had light in their homes. The text doesn’t tell us exactly how this worked. It doesn’t say if there was some kind of massive cosmic miracle taking place or if the darkness was si...

In a recent press conference, the president said that his desire was to have our country emerge from this crisis in a matter of weeks, not months, and that it was his desire for the churches of our country to be packed out on Easter. This is a laudable desire on at least two levels, and we should support and applaud it, as I do. But there is something more that still needs to be said about it. Pac...

The prophecy of Joel is about a coming disaster in Israel, the hope of repentance and reformation, and the promise of international justice. We do not know the full nature of the hardship we are facing, but we know that it is from the Lord. It is for our good, it is for His glory, and it is part of His plan to fill the earth with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. But one of th...

We need to begin with the obvious, which is that Scripture teaches that our words affect how we are doing, not to mention those all around us. But this “obvious” truth can, if unattended, deteriorate into the vagaries of generic uplift. When we speak the good word, it must be a word that is truly wise and good.

Many of us recently read through Ezra and Nehemiah in the Bible Reading Challenge, and these books have a lot to say to us about the work of Reformation, which is what we are about. Ezra and Nehemiah take place after the 70 years of exile foretold in Jeremiah (Jer. 29:10), beginning around 539 B.C. While modern Bible commentators tend to date Nehemiah much later (100 years!) because he calls the k...

And here we come to a great hymn of gratitude and praise, offered up to God for His glorious law. We have here the definitive answer for those who accuse us of “bibliolatry” simply because we treat the words of God like the treasure they are. It is of course true that there is an absurd sin of actual bibliolatry out there in the religious world, the kind of sin that misses the whole point (John 5:...

WLC 159: How is the Word of God to be preached by those that are called thereunto? They that are called to labor in the ministry of the Word, are to preach sound doctrine, diligently, in season and out of season; plainly, not in the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit, and of power; faithfully, making known the whole counsel of God; wisely, applying themselves to the...

And so these Hallel psalms conclude on a note of high triumph—but it is triumph through the midst of trials. This is triumph through the heat of a great battle. It is the joy of a rejected stone, now made the corner. A likely occasion is the ascension of David to the throne. In Ezra 3:10-11, when they were laying the foundation of the temple we read that citations from the first and last portions...

Psalm 2 is understood to function along with Psalm 1 as an introduction to the Psalter. The blessedness that begins Psalm 1 is picked up again at the end of Psalm 2, which helps you to see the two chapters functioning together. In fact, some Hebrew copies of the Psalms actually just combine Psalm 1 and 2 as one psalm. So Psalm 2 in one sense completes Psalm 1 and it does so by pointing our eyes to...

The Hallel psalms are psalm of praise—they are Hallelujah psalms. This one also concludes with that exclamation of praise. This is a very brief psalm, and is one that many of you can already sing from memory. But although it is brief, it packs a throw weight that is considerable, and is a psalm of praise that encompasses the entire world.

Croesus, king of Lydia, died screaming his final words – “Oh Solon, oh Solon, oh Solon, count no man happy until he is dead.” The pagan gods were powerful, but fickle. And the state of man living under them was always uncertain. A short story by WW Jacobs, published at the beginning of the twentieth century, concluded with the moral, in a very creepy way, that you shouldn’t mess with fate. But Psa...

This psalm is a wonderful testimony of praise, giving glory to God for all the things He did to undertake for the psalmist. The Lord delivered him from grievous trouble, and he is not at all ambiguous about the fact that God is the one who did it. But in order to give thanks this way, we have to adjust some of our modernist assumptions about interpreting the events of history. In his penetrating b...

This message is directed at men, and husbands and fathers in particular, but there will be plenty of applications to go around for everyone in the room since the basic message can be summarized as “if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (1 Jn. 4:11). We begin with God’s efficacious love, and then we press that into the corners, beginning with the men and then to all.

God alone is the God of all glory, and so we must turn to Him to bless Him alone. And when we give glory to Him, He in His divine grace has fashioned the world in such a way as to allow us to be a reflected glory. This wonderful psalm can be divided into 5 sections. The first is an entreaty for God to vindicate His name (vv. 1-2). The second is a contemptuous dismissal of all idolatry (vv. 3:8), f...

One of the key doctrines recovered in the Reformation was that of the priesthood of all believers. What that resulted in was an increased fervor for piety. Calvin’s original (very catchy) title of the 1536 edition of The Institutes was: The Institutes of Christian Religion, Containing almost the Whole Sum of Piety and Whatever It is Necessary to Know in the Doctrine of Salvation. A Work Very Well...

As we continue through the Hallel Psalms, we come to the second of them, and this is a great song of historical remembrance. When we set ourselves to praise God, to say hallelujah, we are to remember His great works of deliverance in history. Keep in mind that the Christian faith is not a faith in detached theological doctrines, but is rather a faith in God’s meaningful interventions in history—Hi...