Sublime

If God has freed his people from the guilt and power of sin, then preachers have no right to put believers back under the weight Jesus bore.31 For many preachers, this is a particularly difficult imperative because in their own experience they have been so motivated by unrelenting guilt or by subtle appeal to greed that they have no real concept of

Starting with the sinfulness of humans and the wrath of God against sin, he moves on to tell of God’s grace in salvation, which comes to us through God-given faith and not our works.

All you have to do is tell people they were created by God and have forsaken Him, that they stand under His righteous wrath and need to trust in the sinless life, substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection of Jesus in order to be saved, and you should have people’s attention. It is difficult to be more controversial than that in our day.

The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

If both logic and Scripture make it apparent that motivations of selfish fear and gain are a menace to holiness,35 why does the debate persist over whether a divine threat of retaliation or a promise of grace better stimulates holiness? The simple answer is that preachers feel the need for a corrective. We wonder how we can compel others, or even o

God used the Apostle Paul mightily, and he is a lesson of God’s grace. Paul himself reminds us, “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man; but I obtained mercy” (1 Tim. 1:13). This was the Paul whom God had set apart. Just like Paul, we have been delivered from our former sins in Christ, and God calls us into His service for t

His message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people. He recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them. “To revile because one has been re