What Is Grumbling?

I’ve recently tried to reflect on why I’m so prone to grumbling. The Collins Dictionary defines grumbling as “to murmur or mutter in discontent; complain sullenly.” I’m not the first to struggle with this sin. It has been a constant for the people of God.

The first instance of grumbling in the Bible is in Exodus 15:24. The newly redeemed people of God were fresh from joyfully singing the Lord’s praise:

The Lord is my strength and my song,
   and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
   my father’s God, and I will exalt him. (Ex. 15:2)

Just three days later, they grumbled against Moses in the wilderness, saying, “What shall we drink?” (Ex. 15:24). What began in Exodus 15 as a trickle of grumbling becomes a torrent in the next chapter. In Exodus 16, verses 2, 7, 8, 9, and 12 all make reference to the people’s grumbling, and it moves from grumbling about Moses to grumbling “against the Lord.” In Numbers 14–17 we see the same pattern: the people grumble against Moses and Aaron and about their situation, but when God addresses them, He states that their grumbling is actually against Him.

When the people of the Lord lost sight of who God was, what He had done, and how He had provided, they very quickly began to grumble, an action to which they often reverted.

Grumbling reappears in the Gospels when the Pharisees and the scribes (those socially upright and religious leaders) murmured at Jesus’ receiving and eating with tax collectors and sinners (Luke 5:30; 15:2; 19:7). The Jewish people grumbled at His teaching, “I am the bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:41–42). This is a mirror image of the people of Israel complaining in the wilderness. The disciples followed suit, grumbling to themselves that Jesus’ teaching was too hard (John 6:60), and from that point on, many turned away from Him (John 6:66). In the Gospels, grumbling reveals a heart of unbelief.

The Danger of Grumbling

When we come to Epistles of the New Testament, there are commands to be obeyed, imperatives to be heeded: “Do all things without grumbling” (Phil. 2:14), “Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged” (James 5:9), “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Peter 4:9), and do not “grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer” (1 Cor. 10:10). The New Testament writers see the obvious danger of grumbling and have no problems commanding us to avoid it.

Grumbling’s evil twin is discontentment. Refusing to recognize the providence of God—that He is sovereignly in control of my life such that the circumstances I face are not random fate—will lead to discontentment. Discontentment inevitably leads to grumbling and vice versa. They go hand in hand, and they are also contagious.

I spoke at a young people’s camp a number of years ago. It was toward the end of the week, and everyone was tired. In the midst of my preaching, I saw one of the young lads deliberately turn to his friend and yawn, and his friend responded in seconds by yawning involuntarily. I saw scores of young people in front of me putting their pens down to yawn. There was a chain reaction. It only stopped when I pointed it out and told them to stop yawning. Even as I write about it, I find myself yawning, and you might feel like yawning as you read that story.

There must be some psychological explanation, but yawning is contagious. It is the same with grumbling and discontentment. It happens in a marriage, in families, and certainly in congregations. Sadly, a little grumbling goes a long way.

Seeing grumbling for what it is helps us. My grumbling is not just against others or against circumstances but against the Lord. It is not a little thing.

I’ve found it helpful to think of what the Lord Jesus endured. He was so often misunderstood, abominably mistreated, and spoken against. His words were twisted against Him. He was doubted, denied, and betrayed—even by His closest followers. There were false allegations and insinuations laid against Him. He was bitterly opposed by the powerful. He knew deep loneliness. He had nowhere to lay His head. He had to borrow a coin for an illustration. He was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. “Bearing shame and scoffing rude,” He did not grumble. There are no recorded words of His discontent or murmuring.

As we look to Jesus for strength and help, we see in Him the perfect Man. Our faith and hope is in Him. It is only in Him that we find the power to change.

Thankfulness Drives Out Grumbling

Psalm 103:2 tells us,

Bless the Lord, O my soul,
   and forget not all his benefits.

I so easily forget who God is, what He has done, and how He has provided for me in Jesus. Recognizing that our grumbling is sinful, taking it to God, confessing it, and acknowledging that we need the help and strength of the Holy Spirit to deal with it is how we can free ourselves from the death spiral of grumbling and discontentment.

I also think we can help one another. If grumbling is infectious, like yawning, and is only stopped by us recognizing it and calling it out, then we can call it out in one another gently and with love, recognizing that all of us need God’s grace in this area. It is interesting that the instances of grumbling recorded in the Bible are corporate—Israel, the Jewish leaders, the disciples, and so on. We need to help one another in this area.

May the Lord be gracious to us and keep us from being a grumbling people.¹

Not long after having children, I realized the incredible impact that parents have on what our children grow to love. From sports teams to snacks to movies to the ways we spend our days, our children are naturally drawn to love the things that we love. For Christian parents, our greatest desire in raising our children is that they would grow to know and love the Lord above all else. So, we must ask ourselves, do our children see us loving God?

In Deuteronomy 6, Moses commands, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5). He then commands parents to teach their children to do the same: “These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children” (Deut. 6:6).

As we consider how to nurture a love for God in our families, notice the order of this command. God’s Word must first dwell in the hearts of the parents before it is taught to their children. Our children are paying attention to the things we do, the things we talk about, and the things we make time for. They see what brings us the most joy, where we seek comfort, and how we respond to disappointment and suffering. They see how we cling to God’s Word, how we draw near to God in prayer, and how we speak about His wondrous works in our lives. Our loves show our children what we believe to be most valuable and what we should turn our affection toward.

Therefore, we must first cultivate our own love for God in order that our children may grow to love Him. We will not always model our faith perfectly, and we are not expected to do so. But God gives us the opportunity to show our children what it looks like to live out our love for God. When we fall short, we can model repentance, confess our sins, seek forgiveness, and rest in Christ’s finished work on the cross.

As parents who seek to love the Lord with all our hearts, souls, and might, we find comfort in knowing that the Lord loved us first and that our efforts are anchored not in ourselves, but in His grace alone.

Moses continues, “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way” (Deut. 6:7). Teaching our children to know and love God means that we must teach them God’s Word. We are called to teach our children in such a way that they understand who God is, what He has done, what He requires of us, and why He alone is worthy of our worship and praise. This includes family devotions, Bible reading, and Scripture memory, but Deuteronomy 6 also calls us to display the kind of love for God and His Word that permeates everyday moments.

When our children are afraid, we can talk about how God is our refuge and strength in times of need. When our children experience success, we can consider how God is the giver of good gifts. When plans fail or disappointment comes, we can remind our children that God is sovereign over all things and that His purposes cannot fail. When our children have questions, we can open God’s Word with them. These ordinary yet diligent conversations remind our children that talking about God is not strictly for Sundays and that His truths and promises can meet us anywhere, anytime. And as they continue to see the world through the lens of the Bible, we can hope and pray that God will continue to reveal Himself to them through His Word.

Though the home is an essential place for cultivating a love for God, parents were never meant to do this alone. God has graciously gifted us with His church, His people. Our children don’t only need to see us love God; they need to see us loving and being loved by God’s people too. Being a part of a church allows us to sit under the preaching and teaching of God’s Word together, join fellow Christians in prayer and singing, and participate in the sacraments.

Our children need to see examples of those old and young, in different life stages, from different families, all worshiping the same God. They need to see examples of God’s truths lived out in community with others—bearing one another’s burdens, seeking forgiveness, caring for those in need, and persevering through hardship together. Christ has called His people to gather, and our commitment to our local churches can help stir our children’s affections for God and His purposes.

We cannot guarantee whether our children will ultimately follow Christ. Salvation belongs to the Lord. But we can faithfully place before them, day after day, the beauty and joy of knowing God. We can pray for their salvation, teach them God’s Word diligently, point them to Christ, and invite them into a life lived for Him. May our homes radiate with love for God, and may God, by His grace, use our imperfect faithfulness to stir in the hearts of our children a love for Him that lasts generations.

I spoke with a close friend who had gone through a period marked by personal disappointments, discouragements, unfair treatment, and even false rumors about his character and Christian service. I was moved and impressed by his response: “My great consolation is simply this,” he said, “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim. 6:6).

This is truly a Christian reaction to adversity (which is the context in which spiritual contentment is most deeply tested, as well as best manifested).

Such contentment is never the result of the momentary decision of the will. It cannot be produced merely by having a well-ordered and thought-through time-and life-management plan calculated to guard us against unexpected twists of divine providence. No, true contentment means embracing the Lord’s will in every aspect of His providence simply because it is His providence. It involves what we are in our very being, not just what we do and can accomplish.

Doing and Being

Contentment is an undervalued grace. As in the seventeenth century, when Jeremiah Burroughs wrote his great work on this theme, so today it remains The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. If it could be produced by programmed means (“Five steps to contentment in a month”), it would be commonplace. Instead, Christians must discover contentment the old-fashioned way: we must learn it.

Thus, we cannot “do” contentment. It is taught by God. We need to be schooled in it. It is part of the process of being transformed through the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:1-2). It is commanded of us, but, paradoxically, it is created in us, not done by us. It is not the product of a series of actions, but of a renewed and transformed character. It involves the growth of a good tree that produces good fruit.

This seems to be a difficult principle for Christians today to grasp. Clear directives for Christian living are essential for us. But, sadly, much of the heavily programmatic teaching current in evangelicalism places such a premium on external doing and achieving that character development is set at a discount. We live in the most pragmatic society on earth (if anyone can “do it,” we can). It is painful to pride to discover that the Christian life is not rooted in what we can do, but in what we need done to us.

Knowing First

Years ago, I had a somewhat painful encounter with this “tell us and we’ll do it” mentality. Halfway through a Christian students’ conference where I was speaking on the assigned theme “Knowing Christ,” I was summoned to meet with a deputation of staff members who seemed to feel duty-bound to confront me with the inadequacies of my first two expositions of Scripture.

“You have addressed us for two hours,” they complained, “and yet, you have not told us one single thing to do.”

Impatience to be doing hid impatience with the Apostolic principle that it is only in knowing Christ that we can do anything (cf. Phil. 3:10; 4:13)—or so it seemed to me at the time.

How does all this apply to contentment?

Christian contentment means that my satisfaction is independent of my circumstances. When Paul speaks about his own contentment in Philippians 4:11, he uses a term commonplace among the ancient Greek philosophical schools of the Stoics and Cynics. In their vocabulary, contentment meant self-sufficiency, in the sense of independence from changing circumstances.

But for Paul, contentment was rooted not in self-sufficiency but in Christ’s sufficiency (Phil. 4:13). Paul said that he could do all things—both being abased and abounding—in Christ.

Don’t skip over that last phrase. This kind of contentment is the fruit of an ongoing, intimate, deeply developed relationship with Him.

To use Paul’s terms, contentment is something we have to learn. And here is the crux of the matter: to learn it, we must enroll in the divine school in which we are instructed by biblical teaching and providential experience.

A good sampler of the lessons learned in this school is found in Psalm 131.

A Biblical Example

In Psalm 131, the psalmist gives us a vivid description of what it means to learn contentment. He portrays his experience in terms of a child being weaned from a milk diet onto solid food:

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty.
Neither do I concern myself with great matters, Nor with things too profound for me.
Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever.

To picture the scene and hear the sounds best, you need to remember that in Old Testament times weaning sometimes did not take place until a child was 3 or even 4 years old! It is hard enough for a mother to cope with an infant’s dissatisfied cries, the refusal of solid food, and the struggle of wills during the weaning process. Imagine battling with a 4-year-old! That was the measure of the struggle David went through before he learned contentment.

But what was the struggle all about? David helps us by suggesting the two great issues that needed to be settled in his life.

Holy Ambition

“Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty” (Ps. 131:1). Ambition in and of itself is not necessarily wrong. David had been set apart for the throne, after all (1 Sam. 16:12-13). But he had a higher ambition: to trust God’s wise providing, placing, and timing.

There had been occasions when David could have seized position and power by means that would have compromised his commitment to the Lord. First, Saul came into the very cave where David and his men were hiding (1 Sam. 24:3ff). Later, David and Abishai crept into Saul’s tent and found him asleep (1 Sam. 26:7ff). On either occasion, he so easily could have captured or even killed Saul—who had become his enemy. After all, was he not the anointed future king? But David was content to live by the directives of God’s Word and to wait patiently for God’s time.

Christian contentment, therefore, is the direct fruit of having no higher ambition than to belong to the Lord and to be totally at His disposal in the place He appoints, at the time He chooses, with the provision He is pleased to make.

It was with mature wisdom, then, that the young Robert Murray McCheyne wrote, “It has always been my aim, and it is my prayer, to have no plans with regard to myself.” “How unusual!” we say. Yes, but what people noticed about McCheyne was how content he was to pursue one driving ambition: to know Christ (Phil. 3:10). It is not accidental that when we make Christ our ambition we discover that He becomes our sufficiency and we learn contentment in all circumstances.

False Preoccupations

“Neither do I concern myself with great matters . . . things too profound for me” (Ps. 131:1). Contentment is the fruit of a mindset that understands its limitations.

David did not allow himself to be preoccupied with what God was not pleased to give to him. Neither did he allow his mind to become fixated on things God had not been pleased to explain to him.

Such preoccupations suffocate contentment. If I insist on knowing exactly what God is doing and what He plans to do with my future, if I demand to understand His ways with me in the past, I can never be content until I am equal with God. How slow we are to recognize in these subtle mental temptations the echoes of the serpent of Eden: “Express your dissatisfaction with God’s ways, God’s words, God’s provision. Take what He has forbidden. He does not really love you, so take it! And take it now while you have the chance!”

In our Augustinian tradition, it has often been said that the first sin was superbia, pride. But it was more complex than that; it included discontentment. A discontented spirit is both the fruit and the evidence of an ungodly heart.

Keep these principles in view and you will not easily be caught up in a this-worldly vortex of discontentment. Go back to the school in which you will make progress in being a Christian. Study your lessons, settle the issue of ambition, make Christ your preoccupation—and you will learn to enjoy the privileges of being truly content.¹

Teaching children about God can begin with a story.

This week only, save up to 50% on treasured children’s titles from R.C. Sproul and other authors who bring theology within the reach of children.

As Christmas approaches, add timeless stories under the tree that point to Christ and the hope of the gospel. Shop now and save.

Know a parent, grandparent, or Sunday school teacher shopping for the little readers in their life? Share this special sale with them. These discounts end on Saturday, November 14. While supplies last.

Not sure which books to choose? You can also purchase gift certificates to our online store ranging in value from $10 to $500.

In Luke 22 we read a description of the institution of the Lord’s Supper and we see that Jesus refers specifically to two dimensions of time: the present and the future. In our culture, we generally measure the passing of time by referring to the past, the present, and the future. When we look at the meaning and significance of the Lord’s Supper in the life of the Christian community, we see that it has significance and application to all three dimensions of time.

The Lord’s Supper is related to the past by virtue of its link to the Passover. In addition, what Jesus talked about in the Upper Room has since taken place, so His death on the cross is past to us as well. He tells the disciples that they were to do this sacrament “in remembrance of Him.” To the extent that our celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance, the focus is on what took place in the past.

Oftentimes, in the Bible, we see what we call the sacralization of space and of time. That is, we see countless examples where God or His people Israel, gave sacred, holy, and consecrated significance to particular times and to particular events that took place in their world. Consider Moses’ call by God in the Midianite wilderness: “Then he said, ‘Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground’” (Ex. 3:5). What God was saying to Moses was, “Moses, this place on the planet is now sacred; this is a holy site.” What made the ground holy was not the fact that Moses was there. It was holy ground because it was a point of intersection between God and His people. If you go through the Old Testament, you will see special places where God met with His people or acted mightily on behalf of His people. In these instances, it was often customary for the people to mark the spot. Usually it was done by building a very simple altar with stones.

For example, when Noah landed on the top of Mt. Ararat and exited from the ark, one of the very first things he did was build an altar there to remember the place where God had delivered him and his family from the deluge. After the children of Israel passed over the Jordan under the leadership of Joshua, they erected a monument. We see this again and again. When Jacob had his midnight vision of God ascending and descending from the heavens as he was on his way to find a wife, he named that spot Bethel because he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it” (Gen. 28:16). So he took the stone that he had used for a pillow during the night and he anointed it with oil and placed it there as a marker since God had appeared to him in the dream and had made His promise to him.

In the Bible, time and again, we see the sacralization of space. We do it today as well. A few years ago, there was a tragic and fatal traffic accident very close to my home in which one of the victims was a little girl who was a gymnast. She lived across the street from me, and on my way to work every day, I pass the tree where the car crashed. To this day, there are all kinds of memorials, flowers, and crosses marking the spot where she died. We all have special places in our lives. They may be special for good or bad reasons, but we count these places as holy to us, sometimes with physical markers.

Not only do we have sacred space in Scripture, but we also have sacred time. The festivals of the Old Testament involved the sacralization of time. With respect to the Passover, God ordained for the people of Israel to celebrate annually their redemption from slavery in Egypt by marking a sacred moment on the calendar for the feast of the Passover. This was sacred time.

We mark sacred days on the church calendar as well. We go to church on Sundays to remember the fact that Jesus was raised on Sunday morning. We celebrate the feast of Pentecost. We celebrate Easter and Christmas. We celebrate these things because, as human beings, it is strongly rooted in our humanity to have sacred time. We want to remember those moments that are most important to us in history. We celebrate our own birthdays as if there were something sacred about them. They are sacred in the sense that they’re extraordinary and special to us. It’s good to remember the day in which we came into this world. We celebrate wedding anniversaries because we want to remember the significance of them.

I’m sure our Lord understood this human need to recapitulate and recollect important moments. When He gathered with His disciples in the Upper Room, one of the elements of this institution was His command to repeat this supper in remembrance. “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). In a sense, what Christ said is that “I know that I’ve been your teacher for three years. I’ve done many things, some of which you’re going to forget; but whatever else, please don’t forget this because what you are going to experience in the next twenty-four hours is the most important thing that I will ever do for you. Don’t ever forget it. You are remembering me. You are remembering My death, the pouring out of My blood, the breaking of My body, which will occur on the morrow. Please don’t ever forget it.” And so, for two thousand years, the church has remembered the death of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.

Jesus also understood the traditional Jewish link between apostasy and forgetting. Linguistically, that link is found in the very word apostate, which means “a letting go of or forgetting.” An apostate is somebody who has forgotten what he once was committed to. We remember Psalm 103, where David cries,

Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And forget not all his benefits. (Ps. 103:2)

Jesus died two thousand years ago, and not one second passes on the clock that there aren’t people somewhere in this world sitting down, breaking bread, drinking wine, and remembering Christ’s death until He comes.

Great is our Lord, and abundant in power;
his understanding is beyond measure. (Ps. 147:5)

There’s a TV show in the UK called University Challenge. It’s a quiz show in which two teams, selected from various universities, compete against each other by answering questions on a variety of topics. My wife and I regularly watch this show but come away each time asking two things: How do we know so little? How do these teams know so much?

Knowledge is a unique human quality, and for some reason, some people possess more than others. But no matter how much knowledge we have, it is not exhaustive; there is always a limit to what even a genius knows.

God’s knowledge is one of His communicable attributes. This means knowledge is something that both God and man possess. But whereas our knowledge is limited, His is not; He is omniscient. Simply put, He knows everything about everything.

This means that God is aware of every event that has ever taken place in the universe. Nothing escapes His attention. He knows when every sparrow falls to the ground anywhere in the world. He knows about the smallest subatomic particle and the most gigantic star in the farthest reaches of the universe.

But God’s knowledge is not limited to content or bare information. As the ultimate source of all things, He knows the cause behind the effect. I can know that my eye is the organ through which I see the world around me, but I don’t know how it works. Furthermore, I don’t know how it was created or the process by which God put it together. But God’s knowledge and His creative genius are related to one another. He not only knows everything but He understands it all.

Here’s an interesting thought: God’s wisdom and His knowledge are linked. He has determined that humans have two hands. But He could equally have designed us with four or six. He knows how we would have functioned with different faculties, such as wings, but He has decided, in His wisdom and omniscience, to make us as we are.

Here’s another thought: God’s knowledge extends to the “what-ifs.” He knows what would have happened under different circumstances if events had gone in other ways. He knows not what might have happened if I had married that other girl I dated in high school, but what would have happened (1 Sam. 23:10–12). For that reason, I can be content in the assurance that my times are in His hands.

And here is a slightly more complex truth: God’s knowledge is also linked to His will or purpose. He doesn’t just know what will happen in the future, as if it is randomly inevitable or the outcome of unpredictable forces or arbitrary cause and effect. There is such order, even in a seemingly chaotic world, that He knows not only the what but the why, and He has foreordained everything that comes to pass.

Which, of course, leads us to ask: How does this fit with human freedom? If God knows and indeed has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, does that leave us with freedom to make choices? Yet foreordination does not remove our responsibility. We are responsible for the choices we make, but even the freedom we have falls within His purpose and knowledge.

God’s knowledge is also connected to His power (omnipotence). I have always wanted to drive a semitruck. I think I know how to drive it in theory, but if I was to climb into the cab, I’d probably crash it within minutes because I haven’t been trained. So, while my knowledge and ability do not always match, God’s knowledge and His ability always do. When He said, “Let there be light,” He not only knew what light was but how to create it instantly from nothing (Gen. 1:3).

There is an aspect of God’s knowledge that is particularly focused on humankind: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me” (Ps. 139:1). As God’s image bearers, we are fully seen and known by Him. Furthermore, as the gospel unfolds in the New Testament, we discover that our salvation in Christ is rooted in God’s knowledge and His predestining love: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29).

So how do we respond to this awesome truth? First, God’s extensive knowledge is a profound comfort to His people, particularly in perplexing times when the unexpected happens. To know that nothing happens outside of His sovereign will is a reassurance that God has always been in the place of ultimate authority and is able to make “all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

Therefore, God’s omniscience (like all of His qualities) ought to drive us to our knees in the kind of humble adoration expressed by the Apostle Paul:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. (Rom. 11:33–36)

Looking for meaningful gifts that won’t break the bank?

This Christmas, give your friends and family members discipleship resources that can help strengthen their faith and cultivate a deeper love for God.

Explore the collections below to find books, Bibles, and teaching series for every person on your list. Don’t forget to use code HOLIDAY26 to save 20% at checkout.

For Everyone

• Gift subscriptions to Tabletalk magazine: buy one and get the rest for 50% off
• God Is God and I’m Not by Timothy Witmer, hardcover book
• Heroes of the Christian Faith by R.C. Sproul, hardcover book
• Light in the Darkness: The Message of Judges by Michael Barrett, hardcover book
• Our Great Salvation: A 90-Day Devotional on the Christian Life, paperback book
• The Kingdom of God and the Work of Christ by Brandon Crowe, hardcover book
• Things Unseen by Sinclair Ferguson, hardcover book

For Men

• A Happy Marriage by Rebecca VanDoodewaard, hardcover book
• How to Lead Your Family by Joel Beeke, paperback book
• The Affectionate Theology of Richard Sibbes by Mark Dever, paperback book
• The Christian Lover by Michael Haykin, paperback book
• The Masculine Mandate by Richard Phillips, paperback book
• The Mighty Weakness of John Knox by Douglas Bond, paperback book
• The Missionary Fellowship of William Carey by Michael Haykin, paperback book
• The Poetic Wonder of Issac Watts by Douglas Bond, paperback book
• The Trinitarian Devotion of John Owen by Sinclair Ferguson, paperback book

For Women

• A Happy Marriage by Rebecca VanDoodewaard, hardcover book
• Contentment with Melissa Kruger, DVD teaching series
• Faithful Women & Their Extraordinary God by Noël Piper, paperback book
• Spiritual Mothering by Susan Hunt, paperback book
• Teach Them to Work by Mary Beeke, paperback book
• The Christian Lover by Michael Haykin, paperback book
• The Gospel Comes with a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield, hardcover book

For Children

• John Knox by Sinclair Ferguson, hardcover book
• The Knight’s Map by R.C. Sproul, hardcover book
• The Priest with Dirty Clothes by R.C. Sproul, hardcover book
• What Jesus Does by Sinclair Ferguson, hardcover book

For Teens and Students

• A Field Guide on False Teaching, paperback book
• Hard Sayings: Understanding Difficult Passages of Scripture by R.C. Sproul, hardcover book
• The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Gift Edition, paperback book

For Parents

• A Happy Marriage by Rebecca VanDoodewaard, hardcover book
• Family Worship by Donald Whitney, paperback book
• Growing in God’s Word, K–5 Bible Curriculum from Ligonier Ministries
• Parenting by God’s Promises by Joel Beeke, hardcover book
• The Westminster Shorter Catechism Gift Edition, paperback book

For Pastors and Ministry Leaders

• A Word Fitly Spoken by Aaron Garriott, hardcover book
• Dear Titus by Nate Pickowicz, hardcover book
• Expository Preaching by David Strain, hardcover book
• R.C. Sproul’s Expositional Commentaries, book collection
• Some Pastors and Teachers by Sinclair Ferguson, hardcover book
• We Believe: Creeds, Catechisms, and Confessions of Faith, hardcover book

For New Christians

• By Grace Alone by Sinclair Ferguson, paperback book
• Crucial Questions booklets, resource collection
• The Basics of the Christian Life with Sinclair Ferguson, DVD teaching series
• The Great Rescue by R.C. Sproul, paperback book
• The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Gift Edition, paperback book
• Things Unseen by Sinclair Ferguson, hardcover book

Study Bibles

• Reformation Study Bible, crimson hardcover
• Reformation Study Bible, black genuine leather
• Reformation Study Bible, premium cowhide leather
• Reformation Study Bible, Student Edition, black premium leather (Gift Edition)
• Reformation Study Bible, Condensed Edition, navy leather-like (Gift Edition)
• Reformation Study Bible, Condensed Edition, black premium leather (Gift Edition)

Once a year on Thanksgiving, we set aside a specific day to voice our gratitude. But what about the other 364 days of the year? Even as believers, we can be tempted to envy, grumbling, and discontentment in our lives. Like a car with alignment problems, we tend to veer toward discontentment and a lack of gratitude. It is only as we are renewed by God’s Word and Spirit that we can cultivate true contentment. The following resources, curated by the Ligonier editorial team, can help believers grow in gratitude and contentment as we struggle in a fallen world.

Contentment by Melissa Kruger

Scripture frequently calls us to be content. Yet we live in a world that encourages us to covet and consume in ways that are contrary to biblical teaching. In this Ligonier teaching series, Melissa Kruger defines biblical contentment and discusses how to cultivate it in our lives, noting that as we understand and rest in the person and work of Christ, we find ultimate contentment.

The Secret of Contentment by William Barcley

This book takes the writings of Puritans Jeremiah Burroughs and Thomas Watson, presenting their meditations on contentment in an accessible format for a modern audience. Part 1 focuses on pursuing contentment, including discussing its nature and necessity. Part 2 delves into the mystery of contentment, covering topics such as contentment in affliction, longing for heaven, and the contentment of being conformed to the image of Christ.

The Art of Divine Contentment by Thomas Watson

This Puritan classic is an exposition of Philippians 4:11, where the Apostle Paul says, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” In this book, Thomas Watson explains the nature of true contentment, as well as gives motives for seeking it and instructions for obtaining it. He also looks at special cases in which discontentment can arise due to changes in providence.

Chasing Contentment by Erik Raymond

We all want to be happy and fulfilled, yet we often find ourselves disappointed with our lives and comparing it to others’ lives. We may wonder if it’s even possible to learn the “secret” of contentment as the Apostle Paul did (Phil. 4:11–13). In this book, Erik Raymond seeks to explain what contentment is and how we can learn to be content, encouraging readers to trust in God no matter the circumstances that come our way.

The Practice of Godliness by Jerry Bridges

In this book, author Jerry Bridges looks at various godly character traits that Christians are to grow in. Chapters are divided into virtues such as humility, joy, holiness, patience, and love. Included in the book are one full chapter covering the topic of contentment, as well as another chapter that discusses thankfulness, allowing readers to learn more about these virtues in a briefer format. ¹

How did you come to Christ?

I was in high school, and there was an elderly gentleman on campus handing out little pocket-sized New Testaments. At the time, I was not a Christian and had not been raised in the church. I was polite, threw it in my backpack, took it home, threw it in my desk, and didn’t really think about it.

But a few years later, about a year after graduating high school, I had reached a low point in my life, and for whatever reason, God caused me to remember that Bible that was in that desk. I stayed up all night reading it, and the Lord opened my eyes while reading the gospel of John and brought me to Himself.

You began seminary as a dispensationalist. What made you begin to question that system, and what ultimately led you to Reformed theology?

I had not been raised in any church, so I didn’t know where to go after becoming a Christian. I knew there was a Christian bookstore at the mall, so I went there and happened to grab some Hal Lindsey books.

That’s what pushed me in the direction of dispensationalism, and for all I knew, that’s what the Bible taught. I ended up attending Dallas Theological Seminary, which was the Mecca of dispensationalism at the time.

The first thing that really started the wheels turning was my first Old Testament class. Our professor told us, “If you preach a sermon from the Old Testament, you should be able to preach that same exact sermon in a synagogue without raising an eyebrow.” And I remember thinking: “Paul raised eyebrows when he preached in the synagogue. The only way I could not raise an eyebrow would be not to mention Jesus and the gospel. There’s no way that can be right.”

Providentially, R.C. Sproul was invited to speak at Dallas in my first semester. At some point, somebody asked him, “What do you think of dispensationalism?” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of, “I just think it’s kind of silly.” That stuck with me.

Then in 1991, John Gerstner published Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth, and that was the first time I had seen a systematic critique of dispensationalism. By the spring of my second year, I became convinced that dispensationalism wasn’t biblically defensible and that Reformed theology was taught in Scripture. I started looking for another seminary and found out where Dr. Sproul was teaching: Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. So, we packed up our bags and moved in the summer of 1992.

Do you remember the first class that you were in with R.C.?

It was the doctrine of Christ, and I remember doing something I should not have done, which was sit in the front row. Dr. Sproul wanted to teach students to think under pressure. One of the things he did, if you were foolish enough to sit in the front row, was he would plant his hands right in front of you, get his face just a few inches from yours, and start grilling you. I was not prepared for that. And so, I made sure from that point forward to show up early and sit in the back row.

What was it about Dr. Sproul and the ministry of Ligonier that resonated with you?

After I graduated, I found a nighttime job at Ligonier for the Tape of the Month; then I worked for Frontline, where we received incoming phone calls.

What attracted me to Ligonier wasn’t just the fact that they were hiring. R.C. had always talked about aiming between Sunday school and seminary and wanting to get that deeper theology to the laity. That’s where I felt my gifts were: taking the academic stuff, bringing it down to a level that anybody can understand, and getting it out there. That was something that Dr. Sproul was uniquely gifted at—being able to teach those deep truths with clarity and conviction.

When I read What Is Reformed Theology?, one of the chapters that struck me the most—and was the most unsettling initially, but the most helpful ultimately—was the chapter titled “Reformed Theology Is Catholic.” In my background, catholic meant Roman Catholic. The flags went up.

But then Dr. Sproul defines his terms—catholic means “universal, ecumenical.” It’s the church around the world and throughout time; it’s not Roman Catholic. And then reading that section where he’s showing the connections and continuity of the theology of the early and medieval church with the Reformation and pointing out the fact that the Reformation isn’t just this completely new thing—it has precedents, it has continuity with the early and medieval church—that was mind-blowing to me.

The 1990s were a time of enormous change in how people accessed information. How do you think the internet and social media have changed the way that Christians do theology?

That’s one of the main things that changed in the ’90s for all of us who lived on both sides of that decade: the advent of the internet. It has really impacted a lot of these issues that might have been a little more containable before. With the internet, everybody has access to publish whatever they want and to read all of this material. Controversy happens, and it blows up and goes around the world in ten seconds. We have to be continually vigilant to maintain a no-compromise stand on the crucial doctrine of justification.

I think social media has some benefits, but this is one of the downsides of the internet and social media. It’s one of the things I’ve tried to emphasize to my students in the classroom: If a lot of people doing this are seeking to glorify themselves—“Look at what a great internet debater I am”—and just ignoring the damage they might be doing to Christ’s sheep who come in and witness these things, they’re missing a very valuable element of traditional Reformed theology.

If you go back and read those early Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they understood the connection between the head and the heart and the hands, to use John Calvin’s metaphors, and the relationship between theology and godliness. The character of the theologian is as important as the content of the theology. If you’re not growing in your sanctification, then you haven’t really understood the theology that you say you’re fighting for. Many of them picked up on Titus 1:1, with the “truth, which accords with godliness” phrase.

That was something I believe R.C. emphasized: Theology isn’t just this academic game being played in journals. It involves real Christians with real issues in real churches. We need to do our theology with the understanding that this should not make us arrogant. It has to get from our head to our heart, where we meditate on the Word, and then it has to get to our hands—praise of God, service to the church, proclamation of the gospel.

That was made really clear as we sat under the preaching of Dr. Sproul at Saint Andrew’s Chapel. He was taking this theology and delivering it to the people in the pews. So that’s been a huge influence on me as well, watching how he did that.

You were still in seminary when the Evangelicals and Catholics Together controversy unfolded. What did you learn from watching R.C. respond to that controversy?

Dr. Sproul and his wife, Vesta, came into the bookstore one day while I was working, and he was angry. I think it was very soon after the ECT document had come out. He was explaining to the people in the bookstore why this was so wrong and why he felt that he was going to have to do something. I believe that’s what led directly to his writing Faith Alone.

A lot of what was happening in the background was the culture war that was going on. What they ended up doing was putting together this theological document, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, trying to find these points of agreement. One of the points they said they had agreement on was the doctrine of justification. You had this claim that both evangelicals and Roman Catholics believe in justification by faith and by grace, but they didn’t really carefully define the terms. So, it ended up being a very vague statement.

That’s what bothered Dr. Sproul. He knew that they had to understand that Roman Catholics mean something different when they say “justification” and “grace.” So it’s not just a matter of using the same words. It left out a lot of the key elements of the Reformed doctrine of justification, such as “faith alone” and “imputation.”

So just making this blanket statement that evangelicals and Roman Catholics both believe in justification by faith is not true if you actually define the terms. To say that we agree on that, you’re basically agreeing on audible sounds but not on the concepts behind them.

That was huge in what Dr. Sproul talked to us about: the need to define our terms. He went to great lengths and made great efforts to convince his friends to recant of this because, in reality, they didn’t actually agree. It was not something that he was willing to compromise on, and he was willing to do that at the cost of friendships.

If we compromise on that, there’s really no reason to remain Protestant. Honestly, if the gospel of justification by faith alone, by grace alone, is negotiable, then what are we doing? We’re not doing anything but being schismatic, if that’s the case.

And Dr. Sproul said: “Nope. We can’t compromise on this. We need to be crystal clear.” This is a matter of life and death—eternal life and death.

The Cambridge Declaration brought together a number of Reformed leaders around the five solas and a recovery of the gospel. Why does that message remain important today, thirty years later?

I reread it recently. The discussion of the five solas is so central. During the seeker-sensitive movement, churches had lost the concept of the sufficiency of Scripture.

It’s very well laid out in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1.6): Everything that is necessary for our faith and life either is expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence can be deduced from Scripture. Scripture is sufficient for our Christian faith and life.

Many churches forgot that and started looking to the culture, to consumerist ideas and marketing ideas from Madison Avenue, for how best to sell their services to unbelievers.

If you’re basing what you do in church and your worship on what unbelievers want, rather than what Scripture dictates, you’ve got a serious problem—because unbelievers don’t want the truth. They’re suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They want to be entertained. They want to be coddled. They don’t want to hear the hard truth of the law, and they don’t want the stumbling block of the gospel.

And so I think James Boice was right. The issue of sufficiency had been a problem with Rome, but we transposed that issue into a similar problem. We’re acting like Scripture’s insufficient; we need to supplement it with modern cultural ideas.

You now hold the R.C. Sproul Chair of Theology. What does that responsibility mean to you?

I’m very grateful. I remember that faithfulness was one of the key things that R.C. emphasized about the school. He didn’t want the college to continue if it didn’t remain faithful. If we depart from Scripture and start teaching unbiblical ideas, there’s no point in continuing.

So that’s the main thing that having the R.C. Sproul Chair means to me: remembering that call to faithfulness—not just for myself, but also reminding the other faculty of that.

Given my history and how I first met Dr. Sproul, there’s a surrealness to it that’s kind of strange. Looking backward, the providence that worked through all of it is absolutely amazing. Even when I first came back to Florida, the gentleman who told me that my wife and I could stay in his home while I looked for an apartment lived on Wayside Drive, which is where Ligonier eventually ended up. Of all the thousands of roads in the Orlando area, that’s where we ended up, right across from the cemetery down the road.

God’s providence is just astounding. It’s really remarkable to go from seeing R.C. Sproul as a guest lecturer, whom I’d never even heard of, to now teaching at the school he started and serving in this role.

By God’s grace, I can remain faithful to his vision for the school. That’s what’s exciting about it. It’s an honor to be called to strive for my own faithfulness and to encourage others toward that same faithfulness—to the vision, to Scripture, and to our biblical theology.

Many people may only know Reformation Bible College by name. If they were to visit the campus, what do you hope they would experience—not just in the classrooms, but in this special community that’s developed here?

I’d want them to meet the students. We have such an incredible group of students from different backgrounds with different stories. If all you hear are the bad things about Gen Z and Gen Alpha, come talk to our students. They are passionate about the Lord Jesus Christ, about sharing the gospel, and about serving His people. These students go in groups to the beach, to downtown Sanford, to the abortion clinic, and they share the gospel face to face with people. So, if anyone came to this campus, I’d take them to talk to the students.

What do you most want your students to take from their time at RBC?

The generation coming into RBC has grown up with a phone in their hand—it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s a constant flood of notifications and information. So we need to remind them that the authority of the Word of God is their anchor point in the midst of so much change and chaos. Everything else may be fluctuating. But you have a stable anchor point—a stone in the middle of this storm that’s constantly around you.

They’re going to have to learn how to depend on that, because unless the Lord returns, there’s no indication that this is going to stop anytime soon. Lord willing, as the gospel goes forth, people will be converted. But the enemy is also going to continue to intensify his attacks and seek to sow confusion. So, we have to have confidence in the authority of the Word of God and in the goodness of God—that He is sovereign over all of this.

And I see that same confidence in my colleagues and in the younger people around us. When I talk to the younger people working at Ligonier now, or the twentysomething RBC graduates, and hear them express the same passion and vision that R.C. Sproul had for this ministry, and the same commitment to remaining faithful and continuing the work, that gives me a lot of hope and confidence.

When I’m gone and this ministry is in the hands of that generation, I believe it will continue to remain faithful. The young people here at RBC and on the staff at Ligonier give me a lot of hope that the Lord is going to continue to do this work through the ministry that Dr. Sproul started.¹

Eschatology is defined as the “doctrine of last things.” But we won’t see the full significance of how God’s story ends if we start reading at the last chapter.

When we trace each stage of development from Genesis to Revelation, we see that all God’s promises are fulfilled through the coming of Christ and His kingdom.

View the whole span of redemptive history with From Age to Age by Dr. Keith Mathison. In more than 800 pages, this book shows us that eschatology is the ancient story of our future hope: the salvation of sinners, the defeat of evil, and the renewal of creation for God’s everlasting glory.

A Look Inside the Book

“The fulfillment of all of Israel’s eschatological hopes is found in Jesus. All of the ancient promises of redemption are to be realized in Him.”

—Keith Mathison

Read a sample and order your copy today.

What Others Are Saying

“Meticulously comprehensive, this veritable compendium of biblical theology from Genesis to Revelation examines every possible nuance of eschatological insight. Mathison has provided us with an invaluable reference tool, a tour de force unlike any other on this hugely significant topic.”

—Dr. Derek Thomas, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic and Pastoral Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary

Our Hope Has a History

Our great hope rests in the return of Jesus Christ and the perfecting of God’s redemptive plan—but this hope has a history. To understand the end, we must go back to the beginning and see the progression of God’s work of grace through all of Scripture.

Order From Age to Age today to discover how God’s whole story and our whole lives culminate in the glory of Christ.

Ordering from Canada? Place your order through Reformed Book Services to receive the lowest shipping rate.

Luther, Calvin, and the other “founding fathers” of Protestantism were disciples of the early church fathers. They had a special regard for one father in particular: Augustine of Hippo. Luther belonged to the Augustinian order of friars and found life-transforming resources of theology in his order’s patron saint. Still, the Reformers were widely read in the fathers generally. Calvin famously said to a Roman Catholic opponent, Cardinal Jacob Sadoleto:

Our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours. All we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the church, which was at first besmirched and distorted by uneducated men of undistinguished character, and afterwards disgracefully mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman pope and his faction. I will not press you so closely as to call you back to that form of the church which the apostles instituted (though it presents us with a unique pattern of a true church, and deviation from that pattern, even slightly, involves us in error). But to indulge you so far, I beg you to place before your eyes that ancient form of the church, such as it is shown to have been during those times in the writings of Chrysostom and Basil among the Greeks, and Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augustine among the Latins.¹

If we are Protestants, that very fact should give us a bias toward knowing the early church fathers. We are simply doing what the original theologians of the Reformation did. They considered the fathers to be much better interpreters of the gospel than the medieval theologians were. In a careful study of the fathers, they found weighty historical testimonies to the supremacy of Scripture and justification by faith, the twin pillars of the Reformation.

But who exactly were the early church fathers? It is a name we give to the significant leaders and writers of the first few centuries of Christianity. Different historians suggest different timeframes, anywhere from the first three hundred years to the first six hundred. However, the name “father” isn’t automatically given to every Christian figure from this early period. It is normally reserved for those who came to be recognized as sound, reliable teachers. This means that the two most famous and influential theologians of the third century, Tertullian of Carthage and Origen of Alexandria, are often not acknowledged as “fathers,” owing to some of the more questionable aspects of their theology. This, incidentally, is the same reason they were never granted the status of “saint” by the Roman Catholic Church.

Accepting these qualifications, the lives and writings of the fathers are well worth knowing. There is a noble spirit breathing through their words. These were people who—at least for the first few centuries—lived on the margins of their society. They belonged to a despised religious minority, always liable to being persecuted by the authorities of the pagan Roman Empire. Hollywood did not invent the spectacle of Christians being thrown to lions in the arena; it really happened. It gave the early Christians a deep sense of not belonging to this world, of being exiles and pilgrims, journeying to heaven. This can be challenging and edifying for us today. As the anonymous second-century author of the Epistle to Diognetus says of Christians:

They live in their own countries, yet as pilgrims. As citizens they share in everything with their fellow citizens, and yet experience all things as if they were foreigners. Every foreign land is to them their native country, and every birthplace as a land of strangers. They marry, like everyone else, and beget children; but they do not kill the unborn. They share their food with all, but not their sexual favors. They live in the flesh, but not according to the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but are citizens of heaven.

The fathers were also the first theologians of the church. The basic bedrock doctrines we often take for granted—the Trinity and the incarnation—were first hammered out by the fathers on the fierce anvil of controversy. Not a few fathers suffered exile, torture, and even death for giving a voice to these truths and seeking to define them more clearly when others in the visible church were undermining them. The great Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, spent seventeen years in exile for his heroic championing of the doctrine of Christ’s deity, sometimes even having to hide in the trackless wastes of the Egyptian desert. Calvin would later hail Athanasius as “the principal defender of the orthodox faith, a divine writer worthy of immortal praise.”

The understanding of the Trinity and the incarnation thrashed out by the orthodox fathers was expressed preeminently in two great creeds. These were the Nicene Creed (finalized at the Council of Constantinople in the year 381) and the Creed of Chalcedon (produced at the Council of Chalcedon in 451). To this day, the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds are honored among Protestants as the gold standard of a right biblical interpretation of the tri-unity of God and the two natures (divine and human) of the incarnate Christ.

Reading the fathers on the Trinity and the incarnation immerses us in the rich, formative period of church life when those fundamental truths were first given clear and precise expression. The debt we owe to the early church fathers is thus incalculable. They were not infallible; but after the prophets and Apostles, they were truly our fathers in the faith.²

You can’t stand for the truth unless you know the truth.

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate’s question still echoes throughout our world. Beyond questioning the truth, people today seek to redefine it.

Following our Lord Jesus, who came to “bear witness to the truth” (John 18:37), Christians are called to bear witness to Christ in a culture that rejects His authority. But are we prepared? If the church loses confidence in God’s revealed Word, we have nothing to offer a confused world.

This is why Ligonier Ministries exists and why your support matters. By God’s grace, you have helped establish His people in the historic Christian faith so they can bear witness to the truth in every generation.

When you donate this month, we’ll send you Truths We Confess by Dr. R.C. Sproul. This comprehensive study of the Westminster Confession can deepen your understanding of Scripture and help you to strengthen others in the faith.

The church today faces a danger greater than outside opposition: compromise within. Many evangelicals are wavering on questions of gender, sexuality, and the sanctity of human life. Why? Often, they’ve already failed to uphold the Bible’s divine authority. Moral drift flows from doctrinal drift.

Ligonier’s recent State of Theology surveys in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom all reveal similar patterns. Wherever God’s truth is neglected, confusion follows.

Faithful Christianity is confessional Christianity. Throughout church history, Christians have written summaries of the Bible’s teaching to pass down the faith, training the next generation to think from first principles so they can evaluate worldly ideas against the truth of Scripture.

This pattern defined Dr. Sproul’s ministry. For decades, he taught through the Westminster Confession to establish Christians in the foundational truths of God’s Word. R.C. reminded us that we’re responsible not only to believe and proclaim the truth but also to contend for it.

Ligonier Ministries provides biblical teaching to help Christians contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).

Your thoughtful support is establishing children in the truth through the Growing in God’s Word curriculum, strengthening teenagers at Always Ready conferences, forming faithful students at Reformation Bible College, equipping pastors through Reformation Study Bible distribution, and edifying Christians worldwide with thousands of trusted Bible teaching resources.

You’re also helping to make the truth of God even more accessible. Dr. Sproul’s entire teaching series library is now free to stream in Ligonier’s app, Grow, while new trusted Bible teaching is released every week in the world’s twenty most-spoken languages.

God’s Word knows no bounds—even behind prison walls (2 Tim. 2:9). After receiving copies of Truths We Confess for inmates in Florida, prison ministry leader Rev. Chris Coppolo wrote to us:

“These are more than just books—they are tools the Lord is using to deepen understanding, strengthen faith, and equip these men as they grow in their knowledge of God’s Word and Reformed theology.”

Now, as Ligonier prepares for another year of ministry, your continued support will help establish more Christians in the truth so they can bear witness to Christ in a confused world.

Give this month and receive Dr. Sproul’s book Truths We Confess. Spanning the doctrines of the Bible, this book shows how Christian theology directs our entire lives to the glory of God. Read it throughout 2027 to become further established in the teaching of Scripture.

Together, by God’s grace, may we help more Christians know, love, and bear witness to the truth of our Lord Jesus Christ until He comes.

How can you go deeper in your walk with Christ?

By letting “the word of Christ dwell in your richly” (Col. 3:16).

With Grow, the new app from Ligonier, you can study the Bible wherever you are.

Read or Listen to the Bible

• Even when life is full, cultivate a habit of dwelling in God’s Word.
• Highlight passages for further reflection.
• Share verses to encourage others.

Reformation Study Bible Notes

See Christ in every passage and add depth to your daily study with 20,000+ verse-by-verse notes. Try this feature free for 30 days or become a Ministry Partner for unlimited access.

How to Start Your 30-Day Trial

• Download the Grow app.
• Create an account and sign in.
• A notification will invite you to begin your trial.

Already have the app? Make sure it’s updated to the latest version.

More Ways to Go Deeper

In the Grow app, find Bible teaching you can read, watch, and listen to every day to feed your faith. The Grow app lets you:

• Stream all of R.C. Sproul’s teaching series for free
• Access articles, devotions, and conference messages in one place
• Get answers to your Bible questions with the Ask Ligonier intelligent assistant

At the very heart of the life and worship of the early Christian community was the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In the early days of church history, the celebration of Holy Communion was known by different names. On the one hand, the early church used to come together and celebrate what they called an “agape feast” or a “love feast” in which they celebrated the love of God and the love that they enjoyed with one another as Christians in this holy supper. The sacrament was called the Lord’s Supper because it made reference to the last supper that Jesus had with His disciples in the upper room on the night before His death. In the early church and later, the Lord’s Supper was called the “Eucharist,” taking its definition from the Greek verb eucharisto, which is the Greek verb that means “to thank.” Thus, one facet of the Lord’s Supper has been the gathering of the people of God to express their gratitude for what Christ accomplished in their behalf in His death.

The Lord’s Supper is a drama that has its roots not only in that upper room experience, but the roots reach back into the Old Testament celebration of Passover. In fact, you will recall that before Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper in the upper room, He had given requirements to His disciples that they would secure a room for the purpose of their meeting together on this occasion because He was entering into His passion. He knew that His trial, death, resurrection, and return to the Father were imminent, so He said to His disciples, “I deeply desire to celebrate the Passover with you one last time.”

The immediate context in which Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper was the celebration of the Passover feast with His disciples. The link to Passover is seen not only in His words to the disciples but also in similar language used by the Apostle Paul when he wrote to the Corinthian church. He wrote, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7). It’s clear that the Apostolic community saw a link between the death of Christ and the Old Testament Passover celebration.

For us to get a handle on that, we have to look back to the pages of the Old Testament to the historical context of the institution of the Passover. We must remember the enslavement of the people of Israel in Egypt under the domination of a ruthless pharaoh. Recall that the people suffered greatly, and they moaned and they groaned in their suffering, but their groaning did not go unheard. We understand that God appeared in the Midianite wilderness to the aged Moses who was living in exile as a fugitive from the forces of Pharaoh at that time. When God appeared to Moses and spoke to him out of the burning bush, He said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5).

In that encounter, God directed Moses to go both to Pharaoh and to the Jewish people to deliver the Word of God to them. We recall that Moses felt inadequate for the task and wondered how he was going to be able to communicate the Word of God with any authority to either Pharaoh or the people of Israel. Essentially, Moses said, “Why would they follow me? Why should they believe me?” And to paraphrase it, God replied: “Look, you go. You tell them I’ve heard the cry of My people, and you tell Pharaoh that I say, ‘Let My people go that they can come and worship me on the mountain where I will show them,’ and you tell the people to pack up and to leave Pharaoh and Egypt.” So God empowered Moses with the ability to perform miracles in order to authenticate the origin of this incredible message.

From there, what took place was a contest of will and power between God, through Moses, and the magicians of Pharaoh’s court. In a very short time, the tricks of the magicians were exhausted, and the power of God was made manifest through Moses in dramatic ways. There were ten plagues in all, but it’s in the first nine that we see an escalation of drama and conflict between Moses and Pharaoh. One plague would befall the Egyptians. Then, Pharaoh would relent and say, “Okay, leave; take your people and go.” But as soon as the phrase left the lips of Pharaoh, God would step in and harden Pharaoh’s heart. This was to make it very clear to the people of Israel that their redemption was from the hand of God and not from the grace of Pharaoh. So, another contest would ensue. Another plague would befall the Egyptians, Pharaoh would relent, God would harden Pharaoh’s heart and he would keep the people in captivity. Then another contest would ensue, then another, and then another, until finally, Pharaoh had just about all he could take from Moses, and he said: “Get away from me! Take care never to see my face again or you shall die.” And Moses responded by saying, “You have spoken well, for I will never see your face again.”

It was at this point in the drama where God announced to Moses the tenth plague that He would bring upon the Egyptians. This plague was the worst of all of the plagues because it involved the destruction of the firstborn sons of all of the Egyptians, including the firstborn son of Pharaoh. So God told Moses:

“Yet one plague more I will bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt. Afterward he will let you go from here. When he lets you go, he will drive you away completely. Speak now in the hearing of the people, that they ask, every man of his neighbor and every woman of her neighbor, for silver and gold jewelry.” And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people.

So Moses said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle. There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again. But not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.’ And all these your servants shall come down to me and bow down to me, saying, ‘Get out, you and all the people who follow you.’ And after that I will go out.” And he went out from Pharaoh in hot anger. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh will not listen to you, that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.” (Ex. 11:1–9)

Then, in the beginning of the twelfth chapter of Exodus, God brought Moses to Himself and instituted the celebration of the Passover. We must consider the following narrative from the book of Exodus because it has such a dramatic impact on the future life of the Jewish nation. This is the institution that is celebrated in the upper room between Jesus and His disciples:

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.

Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.” (Ex. 12:1–13)

This is critical because we know that the sacraments of the New Testament are understood in the life of the church both as signs and seals of something extremely important. A sacrament gives a dramatic sign that points beyond itself to some truth of redemption that is crucial to the life of the people of God. When God instituted the Passover in the Old Testament, He was saying to Moses, to paraphrase it:

Take this animal, the lamb that is without blemish, and kill it. Take its blood, and mark the entrance to your houses. Put the blood on the lintel of the door, on the doorpost, as a sign that marks you as the people of God, so that when the angel of death comes to smite the firstborn of the land, and to execute My judgment on the Egyptians, the destruction of that judgment will befall only the Egyptians. I’m going to differentiate between the people that I have called out of the world to be My covenant and holy people and those who have enslaved them. So My wrath will fall on Egypt but not on My people. The angel will pass over every home that is marked by the blood of the lamb.

The sign character of this ritual was really a sign of deliverance. It was a sign of redemption because it meant that these people would escape the wrath of God.

Ultimate calamity is exposure to the wrath of God. Christ saves His people from the wrath of the Father. Not only are we saved by God, but we are saved from God, and that idea is dramatically displayed in the Passover as recorded in the book of Exodus. The sign on the doorpost, the sign marked by the blood of the lamb meant that the Israelites would be rescued from calamitous exposure to the wrath of God.

So that night, the angel of death came and killed the firstborn of the Egyptians, but the people of God were spared. After that, Moses led them out of bondage, through the Red Sea, into the Promised Land, where they became God’s people under the covenant of Moses, receiving the law at Mount Sinai. They did go out and worship God at His sacred mountain, but as a perpetual remembrance of this redemption, every year thereafter, the people of Israel obeyed the institution of the Passover. They gathered in their homes, and they ate the food and bitter herbs, and they drank the wine, all of which they did to remember the salvation God had wrought for them in the land of Egypt. They participated in this original celebration with their staffs in their hands, as people who were ready to move, ready to march at any second because the Lord said they were to be ready to move out of Egypt, out of bondage into the promised land as soon as Pharaoh and his forces were destroyed.

When Jesus celebrated His final Passover with His disciples, He departed from the standard liturgy in the middle of the celebration. He added a new meaning to the Passover celebration as He took the unleavened bread, attaching a new significance to it when He said, “This is My body which is broken for you.” Then, after the supper had been completed, He took the wine and he said, in effect, “I’m attaching a new significance to this element as you celebrate the Passover because this wine is my blood. Not the blood of the lamb in the Old Testament whose blood was marked on the doorpost, but now this cup is my blood.” In essence, Jesus was saying, “I am the Passover; I am the Paschal Lamb; I am the one who will be sacrificed for you. It is by My blood being marked over the door of your life that you will escape the wrath of God.” So He said: “From now on, this is My blood, which is shed for you for the remission of your sins. This is the blood of a new covenant.” This new covenant that He instituted that very night fulfills the old covenant, giving it its fullest and most meaningful expression.

As a doctoral student, Martin Luther finally had access to the university library. Here, for the first time in his life, he held a complete Bible in his hands.

The Bible was venerated in the medieval church, and portions of it were read from the lectionary used in worship services. But Bibles had to be copied by hand, so they were very expensive. Many churches did not even own one. And if they did, most people were illiterate, so they could not read it anyway.

No wonder the church had drifted from the Word of God. Yes, the medieval church taught that Jesus died for our sins, a salvation applied at baptism. But if you sinned after that, you had to pay. Each sin that you confessed before a priest could be forgiven, as long as you performed some kind of penance. Even forgiven sins, though, required a temporal punishment, if not in this life, then in purgatory. In the meantime, to be saved, a Christian needed to accumulate enough merit through good works and acts of devotion in order to deserve God’s grace and to earn a place in heaven.

Young Luther was no rebel. He took the church’s teaching seriously. Church vocations, with their vows of celibacy and other ascetic disciplines, were thought to be more spiritual and more likely to lead to heaven than the worldly lives of the laity. So Luther became a monk, then a priest. Still, he would agonize over his sins. Once he had access to a Bible, he read it voraciously, and a new picture of God, of Christ, and of salvation started to become clear.

The University of Wittenberg was one of the new Renaissance schools that stressed going back to the original sources. The medieval universities taught theology through the method known as scholasticism, using authoritative textbooks and rationalistic disputations. But the original source for Christianity is the Bible. And since Renaissance-style, classical education also taught Greek and Hebrew, it became possible to study the Bible in its original languages, whereas previously it had only been available in a Latin translation. When Luther earned his doctorate, the university put him on faculty and gave him the responsibility of teaching the Bible.

In preparing a lecture on the book of Romans, Luther struggled to understand this passage: “The righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17). Suddenly it hit him: We are justified by grace through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ! Luther said, “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”

Meanwhile, it became clearer that the medieval church thought otherwise. It was sponsoring a sale, promising to release Christians from purgatory if they would buy a certificate called an indulgence. People had been taught that they would suffer in penitential fire for seven years for every sin they committed, including those that had been forgiven. Christians were expecting to be in purgatory for thousands of years before they could enter heaven. Of course, they gladly bought indulgences.

For Luther, not only was this a cynical scam that exploited the poor (an indulgence cost workers about a week’s wages), it was a monstrous violation of God’s saving Word.

On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed to the church door a list of Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences, which he was willing to debate. Someone, using the newly invented printing press, printed hundreds of copies. Someone else translated them from scholarly Latin into popular German, selling thousands. They soon spread through all of Germany. They were then translated into French, Italian, and English. The Ninety-Five Theses, as we would say today, went viral.

The Vatican responded with treatises of its own, which Luther answered. The controversy escalated into other issues. Luther said that the Bible gives no support for indulgences. The Vatican replied that they are authorized by the pope. Luther responded that the Bible is a higher authority than the pope. The Vatican asked Luther how people could escape punishment for their sins and get to heaven without indulgences. Luther answered that Christians are justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ.

The pope excommunicated Luther. Notice that Luther didn’t “break away” from the Roman Catholic Church or “start his own church,” as is often said. He was trying to reform the church by bringing it back to its foundational gospel. For that, he was cast out.

Luther went on to translate the Bible into the language of the people, whereupon the Bible spread like wildfire. He then opened schools to teach people—including peasants, women, and everyone who wanted to learn—to read it.

He taught the doctrine of vocation—that farmers, craftsmen, husbands, wives, and parents all belong to “holy orders,” no less than priests and nuns—and that God Himself works through them as they love and serve their neighbors in their various callings. Luther himself got married and, with his wife, Katie, and their children, offered a model of the Christian family.

Luther would deal with many other issues, from “enthusiasts” who believed God spoke to them directly apart from God’s Word (which, to Luther, was exactly what the pope claimed) to other Reformers who believed Luther did not go far enough in reforming the church. Whenever he was thanked for launching the Reformation, Luther would deflect the praise. “I did nothing,” he would say. “The Word did everything.” ¹

“Who is God?”

This is the most important question we can ask, yet many people in the United Kingdom are unsure of how to answer it.

In this year’s State of Theology survey, 39% of UK adults responded “not sure” to the statement, “There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”

The doctrine of the Trinity is fundamental to the Christian faith, because what we believe about God shapes our entire lives.

This uncertainty extends beyond the Trinity. This year’s survey results reveal that many UK adults are also unsure about other core Christian beliefs:

• 39% are unsure of whether Jesus is God
• 46% are unsure if the Holy Spirit is a personal being
• 33% are unsure if the Bible is literally true

These findings reveal a significant need for clear, faithful Bible teaching. Many people simply do not know what Scripture teaches about God and the Christian faith, and new believers need to be firmly grounded in the truth amid a society that has forgotten many of its biblical roots.

Download the Free Study Guide

What can we learn from these survey results? Gather a group and download the free digital study guide for The State of Theology UK. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insight to guide your conversation.

More Resources on the Trinity

R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier to help Christians know who God is and who they are. Here are several of our resources addressing the Bible’s teaching on the doctrine of the Trinity.

• Delighting in the Trinity book by Michael Reeves
• “God the Trinity” message from Sinclair Ferguson
• The Mystery of the Trinity teaching series with R.C. Sproul
• The Holy Trinity book by Robert Letham
• “The Trinity” guide from Ligonier Ministries

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, now in his mid-thirties, made his way to the Castle Church in Wittenberg and posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the church door. Originally intended as propositions for public debate, the theses were written in Latin—the language of the scholar, not of the street. Luther could have had no idea that they would echo around Europe and become the catalyst for a spiritual revolution.

Many of those who saw the papers on the Castle Church door—which seems to have served as a public notice board—would not have been able to read Latin. But soon the theses were translated into German and thereafter spread throughout Europe like wildfire—indeed, like an “act of God.”

What were the Ninety-Five Theses? They were statements aimed directly at specific corruptions in the church of Luther’s day, many of them related to issues of pardon, purgatory, and the power of the pope. The first of them was particularly startling:

By saying “Repent,” our Lord and Master Jesus Christ willed that the whole of the life of believers should be repentance. (Dominus et magister noster Iesus Christus dicendo “Poenitentiam agite etc.” omnem vitam fidelium poenitentiam esse voluit.)

Luther had grasped that the Vulgate translation of “Repent” (poenitentiam agite) was open to the misinterpretation “Do penitence (or penance).” And he had also grasped a principle that John Calvin would later expound with great clarity: penitence or repentance is not the action of a moment; it is the turning around of a life—the rejection of sin effected by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. It cannot therefore be a single act completed in a moment; it is a style of life that lasts until glory.

Luther led a full and adventurous life that only an extensive biography can well describe. He was a remarkable man with enormous God-given energy. His speech was direct and plain and not infrequently earthy. He was a teacher of theology, a preacher of the gospel, and an author of some of the most important books in the Reformation period. Notable among his early publications was his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which exposed the church’s failures, while in On the Freedom of a Christian he explained how in Jesus Christ believers are set free both to love God and to serve their neighbor. Thus he wrote in a beautifully crafted sentence that captures the paradox of the gospel-centered life: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.”

By his preaching, by writing, and especially by his influence in the explanation of salvation by grace through faith in Christ, Luther was used by God to transform the Christian church. The leading Reformers in England and Scotland were influenced by his writings, often smuggled in by merchant sailors. In Scotland in particular, the martyrs of St. Andrews, Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart (whose bodyguard John Knox had been), were disciples of Luther’s teaching. Likewise in England, the heroic William Tyndale left a legacy not only in his English translation of the Bible but in an entire body of literature that echoed the German Reformer’s work.

But what did Luther teach? His chief emphases are aptly summarized in the well-known Reformation solas: (1) sola Scriptura: we come to know God through Scripture alone, not through the traditions of the church as such; (2) sola gratia: we come to receive forgiveness by God’s grace alone, not because we are able to earn merit; (3) sola fide: we receive justification by faith alone, and not by faith plus something else; (4) solus Christus: all of God’s riches are given to us in Christ alone; (5) soli Deo gloria: the goal of all of life is the glory of God alone.

These principles simply underlined the emphases Luther found in Scripture. But in context, what is most significant about them is not only what they stressed but what they bypassed. Neither Luther nor the other magisterial Reformers despised the church. But they saw the church as only a witness to and a powerful illustration of salvation by grace—not the dispenser of that salvation. In a sense, then, the church had not only failed to teach the gospel rightly; it had usurped the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation. It was the reestablishing of the Spirit’s ministry in the application of redemption that brought such a sense of the immediacy of God’s grace and the joy and relief of pardon and new life in Christ. It is to Christ alone and not to the mediation of the church that we need to turn for grace and salvation.

We have not discussed here the other great Reformers—Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin and John Knox, and many others. But even this brief glance at Luther and his influence shows that the sixteenth century was a monumental period in the history of the Christian church. It was not without its faults, nor without its failures. But Christians in those days were bursting with the power and the energy of this great discovery—that the burden of their sins had been taken by Jesus Christ and they, at last, could be set free. These were days, as Knox explained, when “God gave His Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance.”

That is what we still need! ¹

“Retirement at last! Now I can sleep as late as I want to. Now I get to do nothing all day.” Such is a popular description of how retirement looks to many people. I know some who would even add, “Now I get to play golf every day.”

Obviously, this does not reflect the Christian perspective of someone who understands that his chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever” (see Westminster Shorter Catechism 1; 1 Cor. 10:31; Rom. 11:36). This is not to say that sleeping later and playing golf are anti-Christian. However, there are some significant ways that retirees can still serve the church.

1. Be a volunteer.

Retirees have valuable practical and professional experience that can be used in service to others. For example, some of you may have skill sets and expertise that enable you to erect a building or a cabin at a camp from the ground up in very little time. One organization I’m familiar with travels to camps and other locations, bringing their own living accommodations, tools, and know-how to be a blessing to other ministries. Some may volunteer in maintenance of a church’s lawns and gardens to keep them looking tidy. Volunteers can save churches and various ministries a great deal of money and provide much encouragement to them.

The church where I attend has many volunteers (both retired and pre-retired) who help at the annual church youth camps. They serve in the kitchen and dining hall, as cabin staff and counselors, as camp nurses and in technical positions, and pay their own way to camp.

While not everyone can serve in such physical ways, everyone can volunteer in some way according to their abilities and gifts: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another . . . in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:10–11).

2. Show the younger generations a model of an older person who still walks with the Lord.

The youth in our churches need models of older believers who are faithful in their daily walk with the Lord. What might this example look like? We can show that we have not waned in faithfulness in our older years, that we are active and unashamed to belong to God’s people, and that we continue to radiate joy in our relationship with the Lord. We can model what it looks like to have no hesitation to speak about Christ in the doctor’s office, store, or when traveling, and that we are not reluctant to share Scripture with other people.

Paul wrote to the saints in Philippi: “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us” (Phil. 3:17). Note these words from the psalmist:

O God, from my youth you have taught me,
and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
So even to old age and gray hairs,
O God, do not forsake me,
until I proclaim your might to another generation. (Ps. 71:17–18)

3. Regularly attend worship services and wholeheartedly participate.

Not only should retirees maintain a faithful walk with the Lord, but they ought to remain consistent in their attendance at the regular worship services of the church. It is a testament to the Lord’s faithfulness when they are seen in the pews, not just taking up space or putting in their time, but wholeheartedly and enthusiastically singing, listening, and note-taking.

This is important because it seems that many young people today view church as optional rather than a joyful habit. Granted, this should begin with the influence of godly parents, but it is reinforced and aided when the testimony of the older generation displays undiminished love for corporate worship, viewing it not as drudgery but delight.

Hebrews 10:23–25 instructs us in this way:

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

4. Teach or assist those who are teaching.

Some retirees are no doubt former teachers. They might have a knack for teaching and still love to teach. A good way of utilizing their skills would be to teach a class (Sunday school, youth ministry, etc.) or assist someone who is already teaching. There always seems to be a shortage of teachers in church. If this is the case in your church, and you have the ability to fill that role, then contact an elder or staff person and express your willingness to help. You may need some additional training, but you already have a head start.

5. Pray.

Although this is listed last, it is a matter of first importance. Prayer is not a last resort when all else fails. It is the God-ordained way to move mountains and shape hearts. True, this is largely an unseen ministry, but it is valuable and reaps a great reward: “Finally, brothers, pray . . . that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you” (2 Thess. 3:1).

Before my retirement I heard some retired friends say, “I’m busier now than I ever was!” Now I understand.

The five solas (Latin for “alone”) of the Reformation—Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, to the glory of God alone—are indispensable for the church in any era. They will always be relevant because they summarize the biblical gospel, which is the church’s lifeblood in every age. They are particularly significant today because even professing evangelicals, to say nothing of the culture around us, are being tempted to abandon the gospel. Therefore, the church must recognize the dire need of not only defending the five solas but also celebrating them.

The five solas are important for us today for at least three reasons.

1. The five solas set apart the true gospel from every other religion, worldview, or philosophy.

Every day, the world calls out its siren song of spiritual compromise. Satan loves to negotiate the nonnegotiables of biblical truth. He whispers the lie that we don’t need to have strong convictions about the Bible as our only standard of truth or hold firm to the teaching that only those who trust Christ alone for salvation are right with God. The temptation to downplay doctrine is unceasing. A winsome but unyielding grasp of the five solas can help us resist these attractive lies.

2. The five solas provide us with unspeakable comfort in a chaotic world.

The pace of modern life is unsustainable. It colors our understanding of “the normal Christian life.” We tend to equate busyness in ministry with productiveness for Jesus. But the two must not be confused. Knowing that we are saved by God’s grace alone through faith alone gives us rest from an exhausting world. We leave behind a performance mindset in our relationship with God and embrace a life of trusting, resting grace. Safe in the arms of our Savior, we are set free to let go of trying to earn what God freely gives us—Christ Himself.

3. The five solas remind us that our salvation is secure.

Only when we are assured of the love of God will we live out the commands of God. The five solas enable us to say with David, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97). Following Jesus, obeying Him by the Spirit, and killing sin become our joy. So many Christians drift, unconsciously most of the time, to the belief that God loves them when they obey.

But the true gospel of the five solas pulls us back to the bedrock scriptural truth that God loves us and therefore we obey. The difference is subtle, but it makes all the difference in our daily lives. Your Father loves you! He is pleased with you in Christ. When those realities come home, John’s words become our delightful creed: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).

In sum, nothing is more urgent for the church than protecting, propagating, and passing on the true gospel encapsulated by the five solas. It is our only hope, our greatest comfort, and our supreme joy. Most of all, these biblical teachings will always be important because they bring us to Christ, who is our life.¹

In the old city of Geneva, Switzerland, there is a large park on the grounds of the University of Geneva that commemorates the Reformation. That park is adorned with a huge wall, called the International Monument to the Reformation or simply the Reformation Wall. In statues and bas-reliefs, the wall depicts figures from the Reformation including John Calvin, John Knox, William Farel, and Theodore Beza. Surrounding these and other statues, the motto of the Reformation is inscribed on each side: post tenebras lux—after darkness, light. This phrase refers not only to the unveiling and liberation of the Scriptures—which were made available to the common people during the Reformation—but also to the loss and recovery of the most important biblical doctrine there is: the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This was the primary and central issue of the Protestant Reformation. During the dispute between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics, both sides saw that justification was so important that no compromise was possible. Both sides were convinced that what was at stake in the doctrine of justification was the very essence of the biblical gospel. When the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake, because the gospel tells us how we can be right with God.

In Galatians 1:6–9, Paul writes about the importance of getting the gospel right:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

This Apostle was a man who was constantly extolling the virtues of patience, gentleness, meekness, charity, and tolerance; who, conversely, constantly rebuked the sins of contentiousness, divisiveness, quarrelsome spirits, belligerence, and so on. This man said that we ought to strive as much as we possibly can to live at peace with all men; he was known as the Apostle of peace and unity. Yet suddenly he came to a point over a doctrine where he said, “There can be no toleration here. To tolerate the distortion of the gospel into another gospel is to tolerate the intolerable.”

The first thing that Paul did was express his amazement—not that the people had left the gospel that he had preached to them, but that they had done it so quickly. He was hardly gone from their midst before they wanted to listen to the teachings of the Judaizers, who insisted that one cannot be saved by faith in Christ alone but must also have good works and obedience to the law in order to be saved. This “other gospel” was no gospel at all—there is only one gospel, the gospel of God, revealed in and through Christ and proclaimed and expounded by the Apostles. The stakes are so high when it comes to this point that Paul pronounced a curse on anyone who teaches otherwise. The Greek work translated “accursed” is anathema—damned.

The Apostle understood that the issue of justification was no mere academic issue, but one that touches every person’s life ultimately. It can be summed up in one question: How are we saved? It is a life-and-death matter, an eternal life matter. The New Testament makes it clear that each of us will be called into account before God, and that God is righteous while we’re not. The doctrine of justification addresses the solution to that problem, declaring how we, as unjust people, can be reconciled to a just and holy God. So if there’s anything in the essence of the Christian faith, of the good news of the gospel, it’s this doctrine.

Martin Luther, building on Paul’s assessment, called the doctrine of justification the article on which the church stands or falls. Luther understood that theology is systematic, and that a distortion of the gospel will influence and affect everything else that we believe in the Christian faith. John Calvin said something very similar: “We must so discuss [justification by faith] as to bear in mind that this is the main hinge on which religion turns, so that we devote the greater attention and care to it. For unless you first of all grasp what your relationship to God is, and the nature of his judgment concerning you, you have neither a foundation on which to establish your salvation nor one on which to build piety toward God.”¹

Do you think it’s important to know how you can be saved? Does it matter to you what is the basis upon which your own salvation rests? I can’t think of anything that matters more. We must all ask, with the Philippian jailer, “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30).

Theodore Beza is an unfamiliar figure today in the evangelical world. He has been much maligned by many historians and theologians who created the image of an austere man who turned Calvin’s theology into an arid scholastic system. This image is actually very far from the truth. So who was Theodore Beza really?

He was born in Vézelay, France, in 1519 in an affluent family of the minor French nobility. His life spanned almost the whole sixteenth century, and he died in 1605 at the age of eighty-six. By God’s providence, there were two clear turning points in his life.

The first occurred at the age of nine when he was placed as a lodger with a Lutheran scholar, Melchior Wolmar, who became his preceptor. He spent seven years with Wolmar, who taught him law, Latin, and Greek. Interestingly, one of Wolmar’s other students during that time was none other than Calvin, who was just ten years older than Beza. Wolmar gave Beza a first-rate education, and, like Calvin, Beza was likely more fluent in Latin than in French. More importantly, Wolmar was instrumental in his journey toward the new Reformed faith. It was through Wolmar that, sometime around 1535, Beza read a book by the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger and was converted. Years later, Beza wrote to Bullinger: “You made known to me true piety, and its purest source: The Word of God.”¹

However, Beza had a lot to lose if he disclosed his newfound faith. He received substantial ecclesiastical incomes through one of his uncles, who was an abbot, and this allowed him to enjoy a life of pleasure in Paris, dedicating himself to poetry and humanistic studies. For several years, he kept his faith secret, and he secretly married Claudine Denosse, the daughter of a Parisian Protestant merchant. Beza promised he would marry her publicly whenever they could find a truly Reformed church.

The second turning point of his life came in 1548 when he contracted the plague and came close to death. He took it as a clear warning from God and came out openly about his faith. Shortly after, he fled to Geneva. Theodore and Claudine were publicly married by Calvin himself, and they remained devoted to each other and to the cause of Christ until Claudine’s death in 1588.

After teaching Greek in Lausanne for a few years, Beza settled in Geneva permanently in 1558, mainly because of his admiration for Calvin. He lived there until his death, faithfully serving alongside Calvin and assuming his mantle as leader of the French Reformed church after Calvin’s death in 1564.

Beza’s legacy is immense and multifaceted, and it is difficult to summarize it in a few words. He was first and foremost a man of letters. One of his first tasks in Geneva was to complete the translation of the Psalms from Hebrew into French for the Huguenot psalter, a translation left unfinished by another Reformed poet at his death. Beza also published a critical edition of the Greek New Testament that was influential on the Textus Receptus, from which the King James Bible was translated. In fact, the 1565 edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. In many ways, this was Beza’s lifetime project. He tirelessly corrected and improved the text and published several editions, with the last major revision appearing in 1598. In 1559, he published a “Confession of the Christian Faith,” addressed to his father, to explain why he had embraced the Reformed faith. Although it was penned in a few days, it was hugely popular, as it was published at least thirty-five times during his lifetime and translated into Latin, English, German, and Dutch.

He consolidated Calvin’s legacy in Geneva by preaching regularly and teaching theology for forty years. We know from several sources that his teaching was greatly appreciated. For example, an alumnus wrote in 1578:

We listened to you with so much admiration and pleasure. Apart from your own personality traits, you combined Melanchthon’s penetrating insights, Calvin’s solid and direct common sense, and Vermigli’s abundant learning and method. ²

His voluminous correspondence of 2,792 extant letters reveals his important diplomatic activity, interacting with Lutheran and Reformed theologians and heads of state throughout Europe.

But his defining legacy was undoubtedly consolidating—and probably saving—the Reformed church in France. He famously stood before the king of France and the whole nobility and Roman Catholic cardinals at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561, boldly setting out the main tenets of the Reformed faith. After Calvin’s death, when the French church faced increasing persecution, culminating with the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, Beza provided the Huguenots with the strong leadership they needed. He also presided over the national synod at La Rochelle in 1571, which approved the Gallic Confession of Faith. Significantly, Beza also gave the Huguenot church a sense of identity by producing its history in his massive Ecclesiastical History of the Reformed Churches (1580).

How can we sum up the man Beza? He was essentially a poet and a scholar whom the vicissitudes of life in sixteenth-century Europe and God’s providence turned into a theologian and spokesman of Reformed Protestants. He was a man with an unshakable faith in Christ’s promise to Peter: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). When the wars of religion started in France, he exhorted his Huguenot brothers to restraint, but he also defiantly told the king of Navarre, who was wavering between Rome and Geneva:

Sire, it is true that it belongs to the church of God, in whose name I speak, to endure blows and not to inflict them. But it will also please your majesty to remember that she is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.³

Before John became the Apostle of love, he was known as a “Son of Thunder” for his zeal, which was often misplaced. How did this transformation happen, and what can his story teach us about following Jesus today?

In Derek Thomas’ new video teaching series, explore the life of a man shaped by the love of Christ. As we witness the Apostle’s transformation, we’re reminded that our Lord is still fashioning His people into servants marked by humility and love.

This teaching series is available to stream in Ligonier’s Grow app. Don’t have the app? Download it today.

In The Life of John, explore how the Lord shaped His beloved disciple into a man who desired to point others to the Savior. This study shows us what it looks like to grow in our love for Christ and others.

17 Messages, Including:

• A Galilean Fisherman
• A Son of Thunder
• A Prideful Protégé
• The Beloved Disciple
• A Witness to the Resurrection
• And More

Watch the first message for free to start your study.

Preorder the Companion Book

You’ll be among the first to receive the hardcover edition of The Life of John when it becomes available next year. This book from Dr. Thomas offers readers an opportunity to walk alongside and learn from the man whose writings have helped generations of Christians to see the depth of God’s love in Christ.

You can also purchase a digital study guide for this series, join the Ligonier Connect course, and preorder the DVD edition.

Watch the Full Series in the Grow App

When you download Ligonier’s Grow app and sign in, you’ll unlock 30 days of streaming access to Dr. Thomas’ new teaching series, The Life of John. Sign in to the app today to stream all 17 messages.

More people are entering the doors of churches in the United Kingdom.

This year’s State of Theology survey reveals an encouraging trend in church attendance: 28% of UK evangelicals say they began attending Sunday church services for the first time as adults within the past two years.

This flood of new visitors should be met with joy and gratitude. But ultimately, attendance is not the same as conversion. And the findings from the State of Theology survey reveal that these new attendees are confused about core doctrines of the Christian faith.

• 71% of ‘new evangelicals’ believe God accepts the worship of all religions
• 57% of ‘new evangelicals’ believe that the Bible, while helpful, is not literally true

The need for faithful teaching and discipleship is clear. As congregations welcome newcomers, they have a responsibility to proclaim the whole counsel of God, call sinners to repentance and faith, and help believers grow in the knowledge of God’s Word.

Download the Free Study Guide

What can we learn from these survey results? Gather a group and download the free digital study guide for The State of Theology UK. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insight to guide your conversation.

More Resources on the Church

R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier to help Christians know who God is and who they are. Here are several of our resources addressing the Bible’s teaching on Christ’s body, the church.

• The Bride of Christ teaching series with R.C. Sproul
• The Church in a Changing World teaching series with W. Robert Godfrey
• “The Marks of a Church” article by W. Robert Godfrey
• “Remembering Sundays” article by Paul Levy
• Welcome to a Reformed Church book by Daniel Hyde

“Are you going to hell when you die?”

How often have you heard this question come up in conversation? Probably not often. Yet this is a question of eternal significance. It concerns the condition of our souls before the holy God.

Today, we live in a world that desperately avoids such questions. Many people live as though reality is limited to what we can see, hear, and feel. Others laugh away life’s greatest questions. We see this every October as our society trivializes the demonic as a source of amusement. Satan is happy for people to fear haunted houses and scary movies, so long as they remain blind to the eternal destruction of their souls.

Even Christians are tempted to live as though this world were all there is. Yet in the words of Dr. R.C. Sproul, “Right now counts forever.” He taught us that we can only truly understand our lives in light of unseen realities.

Ligonier Ministries confronts spiritual apathy by proclaiming the eternal truth of God and applying it to all of life. With our prayerful and generous supporters, we’re providing clear Bible teaching around the world.

Your gift of any amount this month can accelerate this outreach in an increasingly secular age. As thanks, we’ll send you Unseen Realities by Dr. Sproul. This book brings biblical clarity on the spiritual realm that impacts our daily lives.

We are a people at war. Yet this struggle is not against flesh and blood (Eph. 6:12). Satan has blinded the minds of billions, leading the world in rebellion against God. This battle rages because our Lord Jesus Christ has invaded the domain of darkness to redeem His people. Through His death and resurrection, Christ has delivered us from the devil’s tyranny and brought us into God’s eternal kingdom.

In this battle for souls, Ligonier Ministries does not shy away from confronting people with the truth about God and about themselves. Our teaching resources directly address the holiness of God, the threat of Satan, and the urgency of the gospel. Since God’s Word makes Christians sober-minded and watchful, we can “resist the devil, and he will flee” (James 4:7).

Your support reaches more people with truth to fortify their souls:

• All of Dr. Sproul’s 170+ teaching series are now free to stream. Thank you for helping to remove financial barriers to these 1,400+ messages to strengthen the global church.

• Ligonier’s app serves Christians around the world, around the clock. With your support, significant app upgrades now help more Christians set their minds on eternal truth.

• Hundreds of thousands of pastors worldwide are receiving the Reformation Study Bible to better shepherd their flocks and equip their congregations for spiritual warfare.

Through all of Ligonier’s outreaches, we seek to arm our Lord’s church with the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God (Eph 6:17). And since Satan never rests from sowing seeds of indifference, neither can we slow down from rousing sleepers to watchfulness.

Help us spread the Word to every nation and generation, knowing that victory in Christ is certain. When you donate this month, we’ll send you Dr. Sproul’s book Unseen Realities. R.C. draws our attention to the spiritual battle around us. His chapters on angels and demons, heaven and hell, remind us of the eternal significance of our lives and our absolute dependence on the Lord Jesus.

Since Christ has overcome the evil one, we can march forward with confidence. Thank you for joining Ligonier in proclaiming the holiness of God with full assurance that the gates of hell will never prevail against our King and His church.

How serious is our sin?

The State of Theology survey has returned to the United Kingdom, revealing what people really believe about God, the Bible, and salvation.

The results reveal significant confusion, even among professing Christians.

63% of evangelicals in the United Kingdom agree with the statement, “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.”

This response shows that the confusion has grown worse since Ligonier’s last UK survey in 2018, when 48% of UK evangelicals agreed with this false statement.

Now, nearly two-thirds of evangelicals seem to misunderstand the effects of the fall. Though God created humanity upright and in His image (Gen. 1:26–27), Adam’s sin corrupted the entire human race. We’re not good people who occasionally do wrong. By nature, we are fallen sinners in desperate need of God’s grace.

Scripture is clear about the seriousness of our sinful condition. We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s perfect standard of righteousness (Rom. 3:23). That is why we need Jesus Christ, the only One who has perfectly obeyed God’s law and whose righteousness alone can make sinners right with our holy Creator.

Download the Free Study Guide

These survey results are serious, and they warrant serious discussion. Gather a group and download the free digital study guide for The State of Theology UK. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insight to guide your conversation.

More Resources on Total Depravity

R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier to help Christians know who God is and who they are. Here are several of our resources addressing the Bible’s teaching on the doctrine of total depravity.

• The Bondage of the Will, book by Martin Luther
• “Radical Corruption” article by R.C. Sproul
• “The Sinfulness of Man” message from Reformation Truths with Michael Reeves
• “TULIP and Reformed Theology: Total Depravity” article by R.C. Sproul
• “The Bondage of the Will” article by Nicholas Needham

What do people in the United Kingdom really believe about God, the Bible, and salvation?

For the second time since 2018, Ligonier Ministries UK has sought to find out through The State of Theology survey. This nationwide survey takes the UK’s theological temperature, exposing what people actually believe—both outside and inside the church.

The results are in, and they reveal great opportunity and great need.

There is some reason for encouragement. Many churches appear to be welcoming newcomers, and 28% of UK evangelicals say they began attending Sunday church services for the first time as adults within the past two years.

Yet the findings also reveal significant theological confusion among professing evangelicals and widespread uncertainty among the wider public:

• 63% of UK evangelicals believe that most people are good by nature.
• 39% of adults in the UK are unsure about who God is.
• 57% of ‘new evangelicals’ think the Bible contains ancient myths but is not literally true.

An Opportunity for Discipleship

As new people enter churches, there is a significant opportunity to ground them in God’s Word through faithful teaching and discipleship. At the same time, widespread uncertainty about religious matters within Britain points to the need for faithful gospel witness throughout the country.

Ligonier Ministries UK exists to support the church in this opportunity by equipping Christians with trusted Bible teaching anchored in the historic Christian faith. To that end, we hope The State of Theology can equip you with insights for discipleship in your community.

Respond to the Results: Free Study Guide

Gather a group from your church or community to discuss the significance of these results from the UK State of Theology survey. A free digital study guide can be found at the bottom of the webpage. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insights to guide your conversations.

Engage with the UK State of Theology Survey:

• View key findings.
• Explore complete survey results.
• Take The State of Theology survey to compare your responses.
• Create a private group survey for friends or members of your church.

Even amid our failures, God remains faithful.

The book of Judges records one of the darkest times in biblical history—and its pattern is familiar. Like ancient Israel, our world today rejects God’s authority and does what is right in its own eyes. Yet, when His people cry out for mercy, the Lord proves faithful.

In his new book, Light in the Darkness, Dr. Michael Barrett reveals the enduring relevance of Judges, reminding us of God’s faithfulness, our weakness, and the hope of Christ, who never fails His people.

A Look Inside the Book

“To miss seeing Christ in the prophetic book of Judges is to miss the principal message: Christ is the light in the darkness.” —Michael Barrett

Read a sample and order your copy today. 

What Others Are Saying

“This book is what I call a ‘gripper’—that is, neither a superficial survey nor a dense technical tome but a study that gives the reader a real grip on the book of Judges. And Dr. Barrett believes in ‘overspill’—he constantly points out implications for the believer’s life and always has his eyes fixed on Jesus. Ideal for church study groups.” —Dr. Dale Ralph Davis, Professor of Old Testament (Retired), Reformed Theological Seminary

Finding Strength in God’s Character

This hardcover book underscores how the Lord’s mercy and faithfulness shine brightly even amid human failings and sins. Each chapter concludes with study questions for personal reflection or group discussion, making this an ideal resource for small groups or Sunday school.

Purchase copies today for yourself or for your study group.

My other favorite Reformer, partly because I love his name, is Johannes Oecolampadius. His name literally means “house lamp,” but he was a brilliant language scholar. He wrote a Hebrew grammar. He wrote a commentary on Isaiah that became the model for Luther, for Calvin, and for all the Old Testament work of a whole century of scholars. Every time we pick up our English Bible, we know that a boatload of scholars made that possible. Some of them gave their blood for us to have an English Bible. Oecolampadius was one of those guys. He died young, but he filled his life as much as he could. And what a great name!

This text doesn’t literally mean we should never do anything other than pray. It’s clear the Scriptures call us to all sorts of other things. But prayer should be a regular, recurring part of our whole experience, such that there are not only, perhaps, set times of prayer for us but that we turn to the Lord throughout the day. We don’t have to pray at great length all the time, and I think that’s part of the reminder here. This text calls us to cultivate a sense of the presence of God with us, along with us turning our hearts, minds, and cares to Him regularly throughout the day.

It’s an encouragement to think of ourselves as a prayer-filled people. That’s the call, and it’s a valuable call for us to hear.

To know who you are already in Christ is invaluable. You belong to Him. Any persecution you experience, any demeaning you experience, yes, it will be sore, but you can look up to Him and say: “Lord, I belong to You, I’m Yours, and I know this is about You. You will help me cope with it.”

The other thing I would say is really get to know your Bible. Psalm 119 was written for people your age. That’s why it says, “How can a young man keep his way pure?” (Ps. 119:9). Psalm 119 teaches us that if we hide God’s Word in our hearts, it will not only protect us from sinning, but it will make us wiser even than our teachers. That doesn’t mean you’ll know more than a rocket scientist, but it does mean that you have the clues to the meaning of life and that you learn in Scripture first principles that will enable you to negotiate your way through life. That is such a tremendously stabilizing force.

I would also advise that you really seek to understand Christian doctrine. Understanding Christian doctrine gives you a framework of reference, and most of your peers have no idea of their framework of reference. They don’t have any roots. They don’t have any first principles of which they are conscious. They are awash. They’re blown around, as Paul says, by any teaching that comes along. There is “cool” teaching that you’ll come across—for example, it’s cool to be an atheist today just like it was cool to smoke fifty years ago. But just like it was cool to smoke fifty years ago, being an atheist is going to kill you.

There is a tremendous strength in the Christian gospel, and one of the things our conference time does for youngsters is give them a sense that the gospel has its own intellectual power, and we don’t need to be ashamed of it.

There are people in the visible church—that is, they attend church and may even be members of the church—but they are not members of the invisible church. They may even make a profession of faith, but we don’t know the heart. We can’t see into the heart. In some denominations, in order to be a member, you have to have a credible profession of faith. They are looking for evidences, but even then they don’t know if someone is genuinely saved.

To sum it up, false converts are not converts who then become not converts. They were never converts. This is not something that’s new for us; it’s there in the epistles of John and in the New Testament church.

I started reading the Bible when I was nine. I had read John 5:39–40 before, but I was fourteen when it hit me. That verse applied to me in this way: I thought being a Christian meant reading the Bible, saying prayers, helping old ladies cross the street, and doing good things, but that verse hit me like a hammer. I thought: “This is exactly where I am. I’ve been searching the Scriptures and reading them diligently. In five years, I’ve probably missed only five days of reading the Bible.” It really came to me with great power and awakened me. It didn’t convert me; it awakened me. A number of months afterward, I was brought to a living faith through John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Those are reasons why I love John’s gospel from my mid-teens, but there are many other reasons. One of them is simply because of the sheer wonder of the portrayal of Christ in it. There are also sections of it that I particularly love. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve loved John 13–17 particularly, but there is no part of it I don’t love. Every time I read it or preach on it, I think, “This is absolutely endless.” The early fathers used to say that John’s gospel was like a sea that an elephant could swim in and in which a lamb could bathe—it’s just so rich for all believers. So, I think my favorite book of the Bible is John’s gospel.

I remember when I was converted as a high school student and first found myself worshiping amongst the Dutch Reformed, we always prayed the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” We can debate the translation, and it can go either way, but I think our Lord is reminding us that He withstood temptation for us and overcame the evil one. We pray that He will continue to preserve us so we don’t face temptation as He faced it and that we would be delivered from the evil one to live for Christ. I think that’s at least part of what’s going on in the Lord’s Prayer.

REEDER: I love the translation, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” I actually think it’s a better translation because that’s exactly where this is aiming: we are reminded of Christ having endured temptation for us, and therefore, we are delivered through His faithfulness in all of life under the assault of the evil one.

On the other hand, the notion of testing itself is not evil. On the contrary, God uses testing. Further, God can sovereignly take that which the world, the flesh, and the devil would use to ensnare us, and the Lord can use it instead to disciple us and develop us. But we are to flee temptation. I’ll make two comments.

First, Christians make a big mistake in this area by saying that we resist temptation and flee Satan. I think the Bible would have us do the opposite. The Bible does not want us to flee Satan; the Bible wants us to resist Satan, and he will flee from us. But that which is designed to ensnare us into sin, we are to flee that temptation and pursue the environment of holiness and the means of grace that build us up.

Second, having said that, when God brings tests, they are not designed to ensnare us. Rather, they are designed to edify us. A test from the divine hand does three things. It’s kind of like my algebra teacher in the eighth grade. I was convinced she gave me tests to flunk me. I have always told people: “You never have to worry about prayer in school. As long as you’ve got algebra tests, you’ll have prayer in school, I can promise you.” But a test in the hand of the Almighty is there to show us what we know, to show us what we don’t know, and to show us what we need to know. That is from the hand of the Lord. But we flee that which is designed by the world, the flesh, and the devil to bring us down.

PARSONS: I think it is confusing for everyone when we hear that translation. Part of the issue with the way it’s translated into English and the way we understand that portion of the Lord’s Prayer is that it’s a bit of a Hebraism. It’s a way of speaking. It’s a manner of getting a point across to say: “When we are tempted, Lord, lead us away from it. Get us out of it. Help us to flee it.” I know that sounds like the opposite of what it is saying, but that is the way the Hebrews thought and spoke. We see Hebraisms throughout the Gospels, and I think that’s what it’s getting at.

The second thing I would say is that many Christians have been taught to have prejudices against the Reformed faith, but often they don’t know what it is. However, if they are really the Lord’s people, there is one person they are not supposed to have a prejudice against, and that is the Lord Jesus. So, immerse yourself in the teaching of Jesus.

Our late friend, James Montgomery Boice, once preached a sermon on the radio, which I think was called “Was Jesus a Calvinist?” He got more bad press for that sermon than for anything else, but that is actually quite a good question because we can get prejudices about “isms,” but if we are the Lord’s people, we love the Lord Jesus. We know even at the instinctive and emotional level that if He taught it, we should listen, and if He believed it, we need to learn to believe it.

So, a great tool for us in keeping friendships and helping our friends is our own study of the way in which Jesus Himself taught about the grace of God, the depravity of man, the nature of the atonement, and the sovereignty of God. It’s all in the Gospels. I think that will enable you to maintain friendships, or if you lose them, they will be lost because alas, people won’t listen to Christ Himself. That is very sore, but I think it does mean that you have not been the offensive one. That’s one thing that I’ve found helpful.

The Spirit primarily does two things in us, and if you understand these two things, you’ll understand how the Spirit helps us pray. First, the Spirit illumines us. He opens our eyes to see who God is truly, and we then find our minds turned. We have a complete misunderstanding of what God is like, and then the Spirit opens our eyes, and it’s a mighty aha moment that carries on as we carry on being educated by the Spirit. So, the Spirit renews our minds as we think: “Oh, that is what God is like. I did not think God was like that.”

Second, by renewing our minds, the Spirit transforms our hearts. He takes away a heart of stone to give us a heart of flesh. That is an initial work that He does, but it’s also an ongoing work. The Spirit gives us a new mind and a new heart, but He also ongoingly educates us and affects us. In regard to prayer, that means that as the Spirit works in me, my mind is enabled to know what to pray for.

As a young Christian, I naturally tended to have a prayer life like a shopping list of blessings for me, my family, and my friends, and it was pretty self-centered. And then I’d remember that I ought to do some less self-centered prayers. But as the Spirit works in me and transforms my mind, and I see reality differently, as I start seeing the centrality of God and not me, then my prayers start following that change. My prayers start becoming more God-centered and less me-centered. That’s the Spirit’s re-education work.

Further, through the Spirit’s re-education work, He is also transforming my affections and desires. It’s not merely as the Spirit works in me that I know, “Yes, I really ought to be more God-centered and less self-centered.” Rather, the Spirit is doing a deeper work. He’s actually making me want to be and enjoy being God-centered so this just becomes natural to me. I’m not trying to work at it. It just comes out of who the Spirit is making me to be. Therefore, I begin to desire to pray God-centered, God-loving, and God-adoring prayers.

The Spirit educates and affects me such that I begin to desire to pray, to desire long communion with God in a way that I did not think about before. Initially, prayer was just one of those things that I ought to do every now and again. But the Spirit’s work runs so deep that I begin to enjoy communion with God.

So, it’s those two things that the Spirit does. He educates me, transforming my mind, and He transforms my affections so that I enjoy prayer and begin to pray more intelligently and more Christian prayers.

The basic principle is to make sure that you have space in your day, then space in your week, and then space in your month set aside for reading. I remember the late John Stott saying that he tried to read one hour a day, a morning a week, a day a month, and a week a year. If you keep that up, or some such program, even though it seems slow, you will eventually get through a lot of books over a longer period of time.

This is not a matter of setting a pattern or a standard for everyone. Some of us read very quickly, and some of us read more slowly. Some books should be read quickly. Others should be read slowly. I think the thing that helps is breaking the back of our sloth and indifference and saying, “Even if I have to start small, I will do it.” And if you keep going, it’s amazing how much you can get through.

I would also recommend paying attention to the style. If you read something and think, “That is really good,” then don’t just go on to the next thing. Look back and ask yourself: “Why is this really good? How is this person doing this?” Then, see if you can build some of these principles into your own use of language. I think we often forget that we use language in ministry, and the better we can use it, the better it will be. In a sense, the better our language is, the better we will be able to glorify God with words—not just cheap, easy words and slang but words that exalt God and lift the spirits of those who listen to us.

In the ministry of Christ and the seventy, when they came back from their mission, Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). An aspect of Satan’s control over the world was affected by the ministry of Christ, His death and resurrection, and the day of Pentecost, which suggests that now the gospel is to be preached in all the world.

That being said, Satan is still referred to as the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). He still has power. He does not have as much power as he did under the old covenant, but he is still to be reckoned with: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). In his Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis said something along the lines that you can make too much of the devil, but you can also make too little of him. He hasn’t yet been cast into the bottomless pit that the book of Revelation speaks of in Revelation 20. So, he is very much to be reckoned with, even in the new covenant.

GODFREY: I certainly agree, but we have to be very clear: Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords now. I think Lewis is exactly right: we can’t make too much or too little of Satan. On the “too much” side, sometimes we talk about Satan almost as if he were a minor god. He is a finite creature, which means he can’t be everywhere at once. He can’t be the Holy Spirit, so he has minions who serve him.

Sometimes we talk as if there is the Holy God and then there is the evil god, Satan. Satan is not God. He’s a finite creature. He’s limited by his finitude as well as by God’s sovereignty. He is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, but he is chump change compared to the sovereign God. He has been defeated, and he will be destroyed. Our calling is not to let him destroy us before he is destroyed.

FERGUSON: We all try to answer questions by saying the same thing in different ways, and there are two things I’ve found helpful in this context.

The first is what Bob has alluded to in Matthew 28:18–20. Jesus is saying in Matthew 28:18–20 that as the second man and the last Adam, He has won back the dominion on earth that Adam lost. Adam lost his dominion. He fell to the tempter. Christ has overcome the tempter so that He now says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” We might instinctively think, “He’s the Son of God—of course all authority in heaven and on earth is His.” But Jesus is speaking in a particular context, saying that the dominion Satan won in the garden of Eden has been overthrown, and that authority is now His.

The second is to pick up what Derek said: the limiting context of the expression regarding the binding of Satan is that he would no longer deceive the nations. It isn’t just a general statement, “Satan is bound,” but that Satan is bound in this particular respect: until the resurrection of Christ, the sending of the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the last days, Satan was deceiving all the nations except the one nation God was undeceiving in His mercy. On the day of Pentecost, the crowd that gathered was analogous to the crowd that gathered to build the Tower of Babel in an attempt to pull God down. God judged the nations at Babel and committed them to the deception of Satan. But from the day of Pentecost onwards, the nations are being undeceived by the preaching of the gospel. That is symbolized by the gatherings of the people at Pentecost and has now been experienced for two thousand years.

This is just another way of saying that we always need to look at the context in which phrases are used. We don’t just see a phrase and then make up ourselves what it means. In specific ways, the Scriptures help us to see these statements within a particular grid and context. So, when the Scriptures say that Satan is the god of this age, we realize that those who are not Christians are living in this age. However, the end of the ages has dawned on believers, and the preaching of the gospel continues to invade this age to bring people into the new age, which will continue until the Lord comes. And then, whatever your eschatology, comes the end.

I was seventeen in 1965, a first-year student at university, and I encountered the first reprints of John Owen’s works. They were big—six hundred pages per volume, and there were twenty-four volumes. I was able to buy them for fifteen shillings a volume, which is about eighty cents or something like that. When you are Scottish and young and you can get six hundred pages for under a dollar, you buy it. Of course, I’m being humorous. But when I started to read him, I realized this was a different order of teaching altogether. Owen’s works were so theologically rich and spiritually profound that they made some of the other things I was reading seem very superficial. So, that was how I started reading John Owen, and I have kept reading him ever since.

If somebody asked me, “Which theologian taught you to think?” I would say John Calvin because I bought his Institutes when I was a teenager as well.

BINGHAM: Was it expensive or cheap?

FERGUSON: I got them cheap. However, they were more per volume than John Owen. I probably got my first set of Calvin’s Institutes for about $4.50. But Owen helped me to apply theology and to see the way biblical theology flows out into the experience of the church and the Christian life.

Some of Owen’s books in particular helped me, and the one I have treasured most is his book Communion with God, which focuses on communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are also helpful volumes in his complete works. He talks about Christ in volume one, sin in volume six, and justification in volumes four and five. There are twenty-four volumes. I go back to reading him and sometimes think, “Why do I bother reading anybody else?” It is so rich. He is not an easy read, but it’s worth persevering.

The world takes confidence in all sorts of things. It takes confidence in its own accomplishments. It takes confidence in the various ways it avoids having to think about reality. It’s sometimes prideful. Sometimes it’s just indifferent. Christian confidence, on the other hand, is attuned to the Word of God, the promises of God, and the assurance of what God has said.

Recently, I was talking to some friends about a dear saint in our church who is on her deathbed. They reported that she is full of confidence that Jesus has eternal life for her and that death is not the end. It is critical that we have confidence like hers as we face the struggles, difficulties, and from our limited perspective, uncertainties of life. We can have confidence that God’s promises that will prove true.

Machen was a brilliant scholar. He had a bachelor’s from Johns Hopkins, was Princeton-trained, and then became a Princeton professor. Machen lived during the time of modernism in American culture, as the twentieth century was a time of optimism and growth. Of course, it had World War I, but that influenced Europe far more than it did America because it took place on European soil. France lost 2 million people in World War I, while America lost 170,000 soldiers, which is terrible, but the differences are known. But it was still a time of modernism, and Machen lived during the “Roaring Twenties,” as we call it. It was a culture that was ready to move away from God. That’s modernism: “We don’t need God anymore. We built skyscrapers, and He is holding us back.”

Much of the church didn’t want culture to keep moving past them, so they said: “Hold on, you don’t have to leave just yet. We’ll make our doctrines a little more palatable. If you don’t like sinful man, let’s say that humanity is basically good. If you don’t like the idea that Christ had to die and you must have a substitute, let’s turn Christ’s death into just an example that you are empowered to follow every day. Isn’t that beautiful?” That’s liberalism. It compromised the doctrines that actually define Christianity in order to stay at the “cool table” of culture.

Along came Machen, and he wrote a book, Christianity and Liberalism. He essentially said: “This is not Christianity. This is a Christianity without a cross, which is not Christianity. Christianity without the message of sin is not Christianity. Christianity without an authoritative Bible standing over us that we are accountable to is not Christianity. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have Christianity. You are American. You are free to believe whatever you want to believe. We love liberty, but you can’t believe something that’s the total opposite of Christianity and call it Christianity.” Machen took a bold stand.

I mention all of this because I think it’s true of the story of American Christianity, which is a tale of two cities. We love our culture in America. Sometimes, we want to be a part of it so much so that we’ll compromise our convictions. It has happened. We all saw it. It’s happening right now. Whole denominations are selling their birthright to keep up with culture. That’s one city. Or, we can be a church of conviction that says, “No, we are going to follow God’s Word.” Machen is a good example of being a Christian of conviction.

So, that is one incident I find interesting and informative.

Later on, I used a different pattern and then I started using the kind of “Through the Bible in a Year” type pattern and there are various forms of that. I have used one that was written by Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Scottish minister in the nineteenth century that is very well known. You read four chapters a day from Old Testament, New Testament. You get through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice in the year. And so, getting through the whole Bible each year I think is a helpful practice.

I’ve also, in addition to that, focused from time to time on certain books and given them more concentrated study. The material I actually recommend, I think I find myself recommending most, is actually Tabletalk, Nathan, for two reasons. One is because it does give you that help of a disciplined program of Bible reading. It gives you help in the notes that help you to expound and understand and apply the text, and there are also some great articles that go along with it. And it’s a terrific bargain. So, product placement is Tabletalk.

I know people who have used the same pattern all their lives. I have tended to vary the patterns I’ve used just because knowing the way I’m wired, that’s what I’ve found most helpful. And then, I have surrounded that with various things. You know sometimes I’ll have used some kind of prayer book just to help me, you know, to get the engine started. Sometimes I would sing.

Last year I did something I had never done before. I’m a speed reader and I felt I was speed reading instead of meditating, and so I started chanting the Psalms to myself, now not quite in the old Anglican way, but what I found in the English Standard Version was I could slow myself down by chanting out loud. And one of the things, I think, both my wife and myself have found is that speaking the Bible out loud is a very good help to Bible study because it was actually written to be heard and not just to be read.

So, those are some of the things that I have found helpful.

For those who want to pretend that God doesn’t exist and want to act as if He doesn’t and claim that He doesn’t, I still say to begin with Him. At the end of the day, people are not converted by the way in which we evangelize but rather by God who works in their hearts. So, objectively, begin with God. Begin with His standard, His character, who He is, and what He demands.

At the same time, I would also say that it depends on the conversation. I am engaged in conversations with non-Christians all the time, whether at restaurants, where I am in the community, at the gym, and so on, and it’s fascinating to me: people are incurably religious. They are religious at the very core of their being. Even people who don’t go to church, who are not a part of any organized religion, are religious. We see it every Sunday: clubs, communities, people coming together, being spiritual, being people of faith, whatever they are. So, start wherever they are. In one sense, you can meet people where they are. If they’re thinking about their children, if they’re thinking about their situation, if they’re worried about things, if they have guilt, if they feel the pressures and the anxieties of life, start there.

I would also say this: engage in conversations with them as human beings in a genuine and authentic way because you actually care about them. Yes, you want to communicate and proclaim the gospel to them—but communicate with them because you care about them.

That’s one of the things we see Jesus doing in His ministry. We see the Apostles doing that in their ministries. They have a love for people and a care for human beings. It’s true that their love for God and their desire to glorify God exceeds all of that, but they actually do care about people. They engage with people because they care about them. They care about their souls.

We evangelize not so that we can tell our Christian friends that we have evangelized; we evangelize for the glory of God and for the sake of the souls of those to whom we speak.