This article discusses Edmund Clowney’s diagram for preaching from the Old Testament and the common pitfalls made while doing so. The diagram is in his book Preaching Christ in All of Scripture. Correct logical progression draws the symbolic meaning of an Old Testament text and shows its fulfillment in Christ through the redemption story. Then the significance of all of this to the church is shown. There are different errors jumps in this progression that can be made, all of which lead to some mistake.

This article draws a great analogy from firefighting to pastoral ministry, which I think applies to all Christian ministry.

This article talks about C. S. Lewis’ approach to apologetics, which started off more straightforwardly during World War II. In 1947, Miracles was his last directly theological book. From then on, he focused his apologetics more on books such as The Chronicles of Narnia. Perhaps we should also consider that “there is a time for war and a time for peace.”

This article tells Randy Alcorn’s story of persecution for peaceful protest of abortion and how he went through extraordinary measures to prevent the clinic from getting any money by court order. He showed tremendous faithfulness, having to go through significant life changes to hold fast to his conscience, and God accomplished much good through this season of life.

This article highlights that a number of deconversions share in common a “low view of doctrine and high view of personal spirituality.” This is nothing new, but another spin on liberal theology as highlighted by J. Gresham Machen in Christianity and Liberalism. A solid doctrinal foundation is necessary to a healthy spiritual life. Maturity certainly includes more than intellectual knowledge or assent, but not less.

This article is about Thomas Chalmers’ most famous sermon/lecture of the same title. The main idea is that it is pointless to try and live righteously by killing sin through fear or arguing that worldliness is not worth it, unless we fill our hearts with a greater pleasure, namely, Christ. Piper uses an analogy of being given a sophisticated lab and being asked to efficiently remove the air from a beaker.

This article is a reminder of the goodness and pleasantness of community (Psalm 133:1). Even as a secular town showed material benefits in being in close community, so much more should the church. We may sometimes believe that this kind of community is idealistic, but in fact it’s not!

This article highlights the importance in understanding the difference between temptation and desire. Temptation “is an event rather than a disposition.”

This article touches on many issues, but the biggest interests to me are the two types of biblicism and the topic of empowerment. There are two different kinds of biblicism presented in the article. Both claim to adhere to Scripture as the highest authority. However, “Biblicism One” does not exegete the text carefully, or consider how the text has been wrestled with in the past, while “Biblicism Two” does. Biblicism One, in my view, is often represented today by the slogan, “no creed but the gospel.