my burg

“God created man good and after his own image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that they might rightly know God his creator, heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal blessedness, to praise and glorify Him.” ( Heidelberg Catechism , 1563, Q#6.) "It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to a young bride and groom from his prison cell in Nazi Germany in 1943) "A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers."  (Ruth Bell Graham) “...most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.”  -- National Review   “According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after

The Law commands and makes us know  What duties to our God we owe;  But ’tis the Gospel must reveal  Where lies our strength to do His will.   The Law discovers guilt and sin  And shows how vile our hearts have been;  The Gospel only can express  Forgiving love and cleansing grace.   What curses doth the Law denounce  Against the man that fails but once!  But in the Gospel Christ appears,  Pard’ning the guilt of numerous years.   My soul, no more attempt to draw  Thy life and comfort from the Law.  Fly to the hope the Gospel gives;  The man that trusts the promise lives. ~ Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

At weddings where I am the officiant, I usually open with this statement about marriage... Marriage is the creation of God.  It is the lifelong and exclusive bond between one man and one woman who vow to live together as husband and wife for the rest of their lives.  It was established by God from the beginning for the first human couple and their descendants, as it says, (Genesis 2:24)  "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." Despite the rise and fall of civilizations, marriage has been held in high honor throughout all history and all cultures.  In biblical revelation, both the prophets of the Old Testament and apostles of the New Testament affirm marriage to be a sacred  bond.  The Lord Jesus himself taught the highest standards regarding marriage and brought blessing and joy to a marriage celebration that he attended. Why did God ordain marriage?  God created the institution of marriage to d

In J. R. R. Tolkien's biography by Humphrey Carter, the author records for us this conversation between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  Lewis at this point is still a skeptic, believing Christianity to be only a myth...  “But,” said Lewis, “myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.”   “No,” said Tolkien, “they are not.  ...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.  We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”   “You mean,” asked Lew

"What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it--the fact that he knows me.  I am graven on the palms of his hands.  I am never out of his mind.  All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters." ~ J. I. Packer, Knowing God , p. 41.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep [ preserve, guard ] it.  And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."   (Genesis 2:15-17 ESV) "Adam had to subdue the earth and have dominion over it, and this he must do in a twofold sense: he must cultivate it, open it up, and so cause to come up out of it all the treasures which God has stored there for man's use; and he must also watch over it, safeguard it, protect it against all evil that may threaten it, must, in short, secure it against the service of corruption in which the whole of creation now groans. "But man can fulfill this calling over against the earth only if he does not break the bond of connection which unites him with heaven, only if he continues to believe God at His word and to obey His

" [Christianity] insists upon a purposive and moral as over against a purely mathematical universe; it insists upon a personal God, as against impersonal ultimates whether of space-time or élan vital variety; it insists upon a divine creation as over against a naturalistic evolution; it insists that man’s uniqueness is a divine endowment rather than a human achievement; it insists that man’s predicament is not an animal inheritance nor a necessity of his nature but rather a consequence of his voluntary revolt against God; it insists that salvation can be provided only by God, as against the view that man is competent to save himself; it insists that the Scriptures are a revelation lighting the way to the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of mankind, as against the view that they stand among many records of religious experience without a difference in kind; it insists that history is bound up with man’s acceptance or rejection of the God-man, rather than that hist

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"  (Psalm 8:3-4 ESV) "We must not belittle man's achievements. In science, for instance, man's achievements demonstrate that he is not junk, though the ends to which he often puts them show how lost he is.  Our forefathers, though they believed man was lost, had no problem concerning man's significance.  Man can influence history, including his own eternity and that of others.  This view sees man, as man, as something wonderful. "In contrast to this there is the rationalist who has determinedly put himself at the center of the universe and insists on beginning autonomously with only the knowledge he can gather, and has ended up finding himself quite meaningless. It comes to the same thing as Zen-Buddhism, which expresses so accurately the view of modern man: '

I was asked recently to come up with a short list of Christian books that have impacted my life, being books that I would also heartily recommend others to read.  I would add that such books should be read more than once.  And we should intersperse newer works with older works. They are as follows:  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together .  Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (1541). Coleman, Robert. Master Plan of Evangelism . DeYoung, Kevin. Taking God at his Word . Keller, Tim. The Reason for God . Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity .  Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. Evangelistic Sermons .  Luther, Martin. Commentary on Galatians .  Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism . Packer, J. I. Knowing God .  Schaeffer, Francis. True Spirituality . Stott, John.   The Cross of Christ. Addendum : I also recommend that you read -- and seek to master -- the works of one author, or a few authors, who wrote deeply on biblical and theological topics.  Over the past f