A Story of Three Gardens

Have mercy on us, God Most High! Who lift our hearts to Thee; Have mercy on us worms of earth, Most holy Trinity! Most ancient of all mysteries! Before Thy throne we lie; Have merc When heaven and earth were yet unmade When time was yet unkown Thou in Thy bliss and majesty Dist live [...]

I was introduced to this hymn at “Together for the Gospel” Conference in 2008: How sweet and aweful [awesome] is this place With Christ within the doors, While everlasting love displays The choicest of her stores! Here every bowel of our God With soft compassion rolls; Here peace and pardon bought with blood Is food [...]

Dane Ortland shares some helpful reflections on this question: There has been a wave of books, blogs, messages and movements in recent years calling, in various ways, for the church today to be (more) ‘gospel-centered.’….In more recent days, though, some are raising the question of whether this is getting a bit out of hand, asking [...]

Nate Larkin’s book “Samson & the Pirate Monks” is an astonishing story of Larkin’s trek into finding an authentic community of men who are open about their struggles yet committed to change. I’ve read through half of it (I need to complete it) and every chapter, my mouth drops & I am moved by Larkin’s [...]

When the well-known twentieth-century conservative scholar A. Schlatter was considered for a professorial appointment to the university in Berlin, he was asked by a churchman on the committee whether, in his academic work, he ‘stood on the Bible.’ Schlatter’s reply: ‘No, I stand under the Bible!’ –Andreas Kostenberger, Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles, The Cradle, [...]

I decided that I wanted to engulf myself into one subject for the next few months and have decided to study more about the Trinity – that God is one yet three. I picked up my first book on my new Amazon kindle for $2.99. I bought Fred Sander’s “The Deeper Things of God: How [...]

I’m not a Potterhead, nor obsessed with Hogwarts and have never visited the website, pottermore, the online Harry Potter community. But I found the Harry Potter movies and what I did read in the books to have many Christian themes to it. I remember growing up in a world where, for years, many in evangelical [...]

In our small group, we have two couples going through the adoption process. Some discussed using their process of adoption as an opportunity to get into more gospel-centered conversation. This hymn below will equip all, but especially those going through adoption, to use the sharing of their adoption process as an opportunity to share the [...]

Henry Scougal (1630-1657) was a professor of divinity at Aberdeen University until dying of tuberculosis at age 28. He wrote a letter to a friend which was later turned into a small book called The Life of God in the Soul of Man. It was instrumental in the conversion of George Whitefield. Scougal writes these [...]

Leaving the first kind of fiery darts — enticing and attractive temptations — we now proceed to the second kind, those which fill the Christian with fear. It is only the power of faith that can quench these fiery darts. This is Satan’s weapon held in reserve. When alluring temptations fail, he opens his quiver [...]