Articles

How a Christian behaves may open doors of opportunity, or it may slam them shut. Although reputation with the world should never come before love and fear of God, the New Testament clearly calls believers to lives of public repute—of humility and obedience that demonstrate the Gospel’s moral beauty and civic value to a watching world. Generally speaking, Scripture teaches that a faithful Christian is also a good neighbor and citizen.

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In running the Christian race, have you ever felt like quitting? Do you wonder if you’ll make it to the finish line at all? The fact is, many things stand in the way of our Christian progress. It’s “through many dangers, toils, and snares,”¹ John Newton famously wrote, that we enter the kingdom.

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Paul was no slacker. The apostle who wrote the majority of the books in the New Testament seems never to have done anything halfway. We see that profoundly in Philippians 3, where he describes the price he paid to follow Christ: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord … that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:8, 11). In his discipleship, he made an unmitigated commitment—and he stuck to it.

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Writing to the believers in Corinth, the apostle Paul reflected on the weighty task of proclaiming God’s Word:

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Among the many sayings in the book of Proverbs is one that pastor Charles Bridges called the polestar of the Christian life¹—that is, the fixed point in the sky by which one is able to navigate when no other landmark is in sight. In four lines, it reads as follows:

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Psalm 139 is a precious psalm, emphasizing the basics of God’s relationship to His children. In the first six verses, David says (to paraphrase), “God knows me intimately”; in verses 7–12, “God is with me constantly”; and in verses 13–18, “God has made me wonderfully.”

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The notion of self-defined morality has become entrenched in contemporary Western culture. The world often invites us to freedom on our own terms, and it has peddled that idea everywhere from Supreme Court decisions to viral Disney lyrics (“No right, no wrong, no rules for me; I’m free! Let it go!”)¹

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William Sangster, the twentieth-century Methodist preacher, began a volume on preaching with these words: “Preaching is in the shadows. The world does not believe in it.”¹ Today the situation is graver still. Despite its recovery in some pockets of the global church in recent decades, strong, healthy preaching largely remains in the shadows—but now it seems many churches do not believe in it.

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In certain traditional Scottish Presbyterian churches, a few minutes before a worship service begins, the parish official ascends the stairs of the pulpit carrying a large Bible. Laying the book in its place, he marks the passages for that morning with ribbon markers. After a brief pause, he then descends the stairs and disappears.

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In the late 1960s, Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave a series of lectures on preaching to the students at Westminster Seminary. Explaining why he traveled all the way from England to Philadelphia to teach on the subject, he said,

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