""Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, nd you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth." - Rev. 5:9-10
The great, ultimate, and final exodus is here being declared in song. Three (3) reasons to define the lamb's worthiness to open the scroll
[Michael Spencer interviews John Hendryx in the early 2000s]
One of the most urgent tasks facing evangelicals today is the recovery of the gospel. The crisis is real since many of those local churches we would have once considered conservative or doctrinally sound have genericised the gospel and could now be likened to multi site Starbucks franchises, with full-service branding for whatever your taste. Many of us who have jumped on this bandwagon have witnessed churches who have made doctrine and theology almost invisible to the naked eye.
Check out Reformed Companion on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Your go-to source for your favorite Reformed catechisms, confessions, creeds, and more. The catechisms include proof texts from the ESV Bible translation, as well as a quiz feature to test your catechism knowledge. Very useful and edifying! Thank Clayton Larson for all the labor he put into making this.
This app has an intuitively designed graphic user interface. Very user friendly.
Puritan Joseph Alleine declared that in order to demonstrate a sound converion, "We turn from our own RIGHTEOUSNESS. Before conversion, man seeks to cover himself with his own fig-leaves, and to make himself acceptable with God, by his own duties. He is apt to trust in himself, and set up his own righteousness, and to reckon his pennies for gold, and not to submit to the righteousness of God. But conversion changes his mind; now he counts his own righteousness as filthy rags. He casts it off, as a man would the verminous tatters of a nasty beggar.
Question from Visitor: Religions that tend to spread the best are those that have the promise of power looming behind them, most often the kind of power that comes either from the promise of associating oneself with a powerful outside culture, or else the power that comes from giving one hope against oppression. Notice that neither of these has anything to do intrinsically with the actual message of any given religion-- these are the function of most any religion.
The following is a excerpt from a very helpful essay by Mark Webb. He goes through some Scriptural references that thank God for the faith of the saints, a practice which acknowledges God to be the source of all faith, not our natural ability, desires, will or affections.
Paul's Patterns
Pastor Jim McClarty – an ex-rocker, current preacher, saved by astounding grace (and my friend) provides very good (biblical) responses to a critic of Reformed theology:
In his book "A Generous Orthodoxy", when speaking of the doctrine of unconditional election, Brian McLaren in an attempt to redefine TULIP, asserts that anyone who believes in a God who elects some and not others to eternal life (1 Peter 1:2) must be so self-absorbed in their standing before God that they view themselves as having what he calls "exclusive privilege" over others.
"Be advised to consider what others say of you and improve it to this end, to know whether you do not live in some way of sin...And though the imputation may seem to us to be very groundless and we think that they, in charging us so, are influenced by no good spirit; yet if we act prudently, we shall take so much notice of it as to make an occasion of examining ourselves ... it is most imprudent as well as most unchristian, to take it amiss, and resent it, when we are thus told of our faults: we should rather rejoice in it, that we are shown our spots ...
