Resources on Sanctification
Genevan pastor Simon Goulart (1543-1628) offers this advice to a friend: 1. Live with other people as if God were watching. Speak with God as if others were listening. 2. Endure with greatest patience what you are not able to change and walk with God (by whose authority all things occur) without complaining. Evil and wretched is the person who follows after the commander of Hell. 3. In times of activity as much as in periods of rest, all dimensions of life ought to be beautiful. 4. Commit your way to God. Hope in him and he will do it. Goulart adds: “[Only] eternal things endure.” – from Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging…
Read MoreAt RTS I’m preparing to teach again on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and am finding Derek Thomas’s lectures immensely enjoyable and edifying. Years ago I was introduced to Alexander Whyte’s magnificent Bunyan Characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Any reader wanting faithful guides as he journeys through Bunyan need not look further than Thomas and Whyte.
Read More“There is a third category [of hearers in the Parable of the Sower]. It is made up of those who not only hear the Word but also ‘hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience’ (Luke 8:15). Hearing the Word is not hard; holding it fast is a different matter. Here are the people who cut their lives to its truths, who hear in its words the voice of eternity, indeed the voice of their incarnate and resurrected Savior speaking. “In fact, there is nothing quite so cheering, so invigorating, as to be with people like this. They are people whose eyes are wide open to the shadows and pains of life, but they…
Read MoreEncouraging words from Herman Bavinck on faith: “[Faith] opens our heart to the grace of God, to communion with Christ, to the power of the Holy Spirit, and thereby enables us to do great things. Faith breaks all self-reliance and fastens on to God’s promise. It allows the law to stand in all its grandeur and refuses to lower the moral ideal, but also refrains from any attempt, by observing it, to find life and peace; it seizes upon God’s mercy and relies on the righteousness and holiness accomplished in Christ on behalf of humans. It fosters humility, dependence, and trust and grants comfort, peace, and joy through the Holy Spirit; it generates gratitude in our hearts for the benefits…
Read More“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4, NIV) D.A. Carson comments: “[W]e should rejoice because we know that when our faith is tested, the result is perseverance. As an athlete endures in order build up endurance, so a Christian perseveres under trial in order to build up perseverance. Perseverance contributes something important to our character. It ‘must finish its work that [we] may be mature and complete, not lacking anything’ (1:4). The alternative is a personality that may love the Lord when things are going…
Read More“Of all the feelings that man’s heart experiences, there is none perhaps which so soon runs into sin as the feeling of anger. There is none which once excited seems less under control. There is none which leads on to so much evil. The length to which ill-temper, irritability, and passion, will carry even godly men, all must know. The history of ‘the contention’ of Paul and Barnabas at Antioch, and the story of Moses being provoked till he ‘spake unadvisedly with his lips,’ are familiar to every Bible reader. The awful fact that passionate words are a breach of the sixth commandment, is plainly taught in the Sermon on the Mount. And yet here we see that there is…
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