"In every marriage is an issue, a belief, a habit, a heart idolatry—indeed, many of them—that can lead easily and naturally to the complete destruction of the union. The world, the flesh, and the devil are all committed to the destruction of marriage, and each of those enemies brings its own evil seeds. The question is not whether those seeds are or will be present in a marriage, but what we will do with them." —Tim Challies from his weekend devotional "The Seed of Divorce" in this month's Tabletalk Magazine
"If preachers do not preach sin, wrath, death, and hell, their supposed preaching of the gospel is practically useless. If they do not preach what we’re saved from, then their message of what we’re saved to is worthless." —Burk Parsons from "Real Love Wins" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
"A true faith in Jesus Christ will not suffer us to be idle. No, it is an active, lively, restless principle; it fills the heart, so that it cannot be easy till it is doing something for Jesus Christ." —George Whitefield
"Man’s failure to give to God 'the glory due his name' (ps. 29:2) is an infinite evil deserving infinite punishment, and as in hell there is no opportunity or inclination to repent, God’s justice requires that it go on forever." —John Blanchard from "Hell on Trial" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
Coram Deo: The Bible is clear that until we are glorified, we will always fail at some level to practice what we preach. Non-Christians will take advantage of this and always use our failures as cause to blaspheme the Lord, and there is not much we can do about it. However, if we are open about our failures and are careful to never promise sinlessness in this life, we can render their criticisms wholly illegitimate. Christians are not free of hypocrisy, but we should be free of impenitent hypocrisy.
"The created world travels towards its destination, towards its consummation, when it will reveal the glory of God even more marvelously than at its beginning. The beginning had only one man and one woman in a garden. The end has a multitude of humanity in a city." —Vern Poythress from "The Reversal of the Curse" in the March 2004 issue of Tabletalk Magazine
Coram Deo: Most of us are unlikely to think that we will automatically make it to heaven if we have been circumcised. However, professing Christians are prone to think they are right before God because they go to church, and they might believe that their children are guaranteed a place in heaven as long as they are raised in a Christian home. We cannot trust in any of these things. None of us is saved unless personal trust in Christ resides in our hearts.
"The Great Commission is not only to teach people God’s commands, but to teach them to 'observe' or 'obey' all that He commanded. There is a world of difference between teaching someone everything the Lord commanded and teaching them to obey everything " —Brad Waller from "Discipling Every Age" in this month's Tabletalk Magazine
"The future punishment of the wicked is a significant theme in Scripture. Jesus teaches it, and so does every New Testament author. This punishment is deserved, consists of suffering, and is eternal." —Christopher W. Morgan from "The Biblical Evidence for Hell" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
"In the day you entered into a covenant with God, and he with you, you entered into the most impregnable rock and fortress, and covered yourself in a castle of defence, where you may (modestly) defy all adverse powers of earth or hell." —Richard Baxter
"The Bible’s story does not end by saying, 'and in the end all persons will be gathered into the love of God and be saved.' Rather, when God brings His story to a close, His people rejoice in endless bliss with Him on the new earth. But the wicked will endure never-ending torment in the lake of fire and be shut out of the Holy City." —Robert A. Peterson from "Annihilation or Eternal Punishment?" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
Coram Deo: Do you belong to the Lord Jesus Christ as one of His sheep, or are you counted among the goats who serve another master? If you trust in Jesus alone, then you can be sure that He will receive you into the bliss of His eternal kingdom at your death. But if you do not believe in Christ, your reward will be eternal destruction. Today may be the last opportunity you have to trust Jesus, so do not delay in bowing to Him as Lord.
"Traditionally, the aged have been protected, revered, and prized as a society’s most cherished citizens. However, to our great shame, such cannot be said for most societies today." —Burk Parsons from "Ancient Wisdom" in the February 2007 issue of Tabletalk Magazine
"To understand the identity of Jesus, we can do no better than to read, digest, memorize, and believe with all our hearts the answer to the question concerning the identity of Jesus as found in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (a. 21). In that very condensed yet biblically grounded answer, we are informed that 'the only Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the eternal son of God, became man, and so was, and continues to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, forever.” —Albert Martin from his weekend devotional "The Unique Person of Jesus" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
Coram Deo: At the root of all sin is the arrogant attempt of creatures to judge their Creator, to believe that we know better than He does and to go our own way or to deny what He has said about Himself. True faith believes what the Lord has revealed about Himself and seeks to please Him in all things. If we find ourselves questioning fundamental truths about God—such as the fact that He is perfectly just—let us repent immediately for such blasphemous thinking.
Just imagine for a moment a single-person god. Having been alone for eternity, would it want fellowship with us? It seems most unlikely. Would it even know what fellowship was? Almost certainly not." —Michael Reeves from "Delighting in the Trinity" from this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
Coram Deo: To be under sin is to have sin as one’s master and to suffer under the verdict of guilt before the bar of God’s justice. Christians have Christ as their master and have been pronounced righteous in Him, so we are not “under sin” in the same way that a non-christian is. However, sin’s influence does remain until we see the Lord face-to-face, and we should never underestimate it. Through daily repentance we can mortify this sin by the Holy Spirit and become more like our Savior.
"Preachers must not shrink away from proclaiming the righteous anger of God toward hell-deserving sinners. God has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness (Acts 17:31). That day is looming on the horizon." —Steven Lawson from "Preaching the Wrath of God" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
"As Christians, we may be required to tolerate ungodly behavior, but the moment we begin to endorse it, we too become suppressors of the truth. You cannot love your neighbor and want to see them excluded from the kingdom of Christ (eph. 5:5)." —Joe Carter from "Defining Marriage" in this month's issue of Tabletalk Magazine
"Do you live by faith? What were your thoughts this morning? What was your heart's nourishment? Were entertainment and food of greater joy than your heavenly meditation? Have you spent half an hour, or 15 minutes in exercising your faith? Recover yourself before you go to your heavenly home." —Samuel Ward
"What do we expect from preaching? Do we crave cute stories about ourselves, or a gripping encounter with the glory of God and His all-sufficient gospel? Do we want to hear stories about the preacher or the story of the One who sent him to proclaim God’s glory? The more we come to church longing to catch a glimpse of the glory of God, the better our response will be to the preaching of God’s glorious Word." —Eric Watkins from his weekend devotional "The Glory of Preaching" in this month's Tabletalk Magazine
As the only man who never sinned (1 Peter 2:22), Jesus is the supreme example of what it means to be a man, and all men would do well to live after the pattern of His life, relying upon the power of the Holy Spirit to have Scripture define godly masculinity. Men are well-served by developing close relationships with other men in their congregations, and wives should be doing all they can to support this so that their husbands might learn from other godly men.
Coram Deo: Proclaiming that no human being in Adam—including the most outwardly pious—has the fear of the Lord before his eyes is unlikely to win us any more friends than it did the Apostle Paul and the other early Christians. That does not mean we should shy away from this proclamation. And we should expect it to find a hearing among some, for no matter how much they deny it, all people know that they have not feared the Lord as they ought.
Coram Deo: Dr. R.C. Sproul writes in his commentary on Romans: “If we are paying attention to the law, we know it will not justify us. We know we will never be able to get into heaven on the basis of our works, because the law reveals to us our infirmities.” The question for us is whether we really believe that no work of ours is good enough to save us. If we do not believe that, we do not believe the gospel.
"The person not reconciled to God in Christ and living in disobedience does not want Scripture’s claim that God has a full and final claim on his life to be true. He wants to get rid of the book as fast as he can." —R.C. Sproul from "The Spirit's Internal Witness" in this month's Tabletalk Magazine
Hell’s primary purpose is to punish sinners. While that does not apply to believers, there are still at least two reasons to study the doctrine. First, the better we grasp the horrors of hell the more we appreciate God’s grace. Second, such an understanding should motivate us to seek the lost. Make that a priority in your life.
"We live in a culture where death is looked upon as an option to be delayed. Exercise, diets, surgeries, cosmetics, and Photoshop are the tools of our trade by which we avert our eyes from the truth that we are dying." —R.C. Sproul Jr. from "What Are You Worried About?" from the February 2014 issue of Tabletalk Magazine
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