Crumbs from the Master's Table

"Trusting in God is to rely on his power as a Creator, and on his love as a Father" (Thomas Watson, The Ten Commandments , 52). 

Commenting on Nehemiah's reforms, J. I. Packer : Thoughtful pastoral leaders, like Nehemiah, always focus on families and family life, f...

 In the final chapter of  A Theology of James : Wisdom for God's People , Christopher Morgan draws out "four broader aspects of Jam...

"In [corporate] worship, the congregation should listen to the word read, receiving it by ear. We can read with our eyes at home. We sh...

"The church's liturgy should be Bible-saturated. There should be readings from Scripture, generous readings, not a few snippets fro...

"The cause of a given outcome is an empirical question, whose answer requires untangling many complex factors, rather than simply point...

Baxter: Anger is the rising up of the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some ...

"Tragically, many sectors of the church have become so worldly that they too are hostile to the demands of Jesus. If you call the churc...

"It may even come about that a man's most genuinely Christian actions fall entirely outside that part of his life which he calls re...

Speaking of his beloved Psalter, Luther says: Here we find not only what one or two saints have done, but what he has done who is the very...

"Here indeed is pure and real religion: faith so joined with an earnest fear of God that this fear also embraces willing reverence, and...

In these uncongenial days in which we find ourselves, "religion" is routinely tarred and feathered and set on fire. I understand w...

A couple months back now I published a post titled: "The Application of Redemption." That title comes from the fifth chapter in Th...

"The sacrament is a sealing ordinance. Christ made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread; so, in the holy supper, in ...

"There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them,...

"We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need...

"A Christian perhaps may think, because he does not see God's smiling face, God will not hear him. This is a mistake. 'I said i...

But that thou art my wisdome, Lord,               And both mine eyes are thine, My minde would be extreamly stirr'd               For...

"All God's commandments, one of which is, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' and all those precepts which are not commandmen...

BLESSINGS on the hand of women! Angels guard its strength and grace. In the palace, cottage, hovel, Oh, no matter wh...

These days of Covid-19 we are prohibited from leaving our homes without sufficient warrant. A couple of texts come to mind. I shall not comm...

One of the great needs during trials of various sorts that God sends us is to keep one's head and remain cool and calm. To put it anothe...

"Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creatures so wild as one of his own commentators...

I just started to read Robert Letham's  Systematic Theology , published by Crossway in 2019. And it just might become my go-to one-volum...

"Christian education is no more capable of transforming men than is humanistic education" (Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Le...

C. S. Lewis, speaking on a clear theology of creation, as it comes to us in the Psalter, over against the alternatives of the ancient world:...

In the last post from Thomas Watson's justly famous  A Body of Divinity  I sought to introduce a portion of the book and its...

The title above comes from the fifth chapter in Thomas Watson's magnificent and best-known book: A Body of Divinity . I have been readin...

"Zeal without prudence is rashness; prudence without zeal is cowardliness" (Thomas Watson, Body of Divinity , p. 173).

"To take hold of the Son and to believe in Him with the heart as the gift of God causes God to reckon that faith, however imperfect it ...

"The success of the gospel for which [the Puritans] yearned was bound up with their trust in Christ. They never gave way to the feeling...

In 1519 Martin Luther wrote a "Personal Prayer Book" to help people know how to pray in the midst of so much confusion about what ...

"When in 1 Corinthians Paul said that a man should examine himself, he spoke only of adults because he was speaking about those who wer...

Luther: I acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God, since the Word of God, which teaches freedom in all other ...

"Backbite (vt): To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you" (Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary , 12...

"Over the gates of Plato's school, it was written: 'Let no one who is not a geometrician enter.' But very different is the ...

The issues are different for us today from what Jonathan Edwards was addressing in the shortcomings or faulty views...