“I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him I will trust’” (Ps 91:2). It has been said that if the enemy isn’t bothering you, you mustn’t be doing anything worth bothering. Well, Nehemiah noticed that those walls were certainly bothering “Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arab, and the rest […]
CHRIST the FINISHER: “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb 12:2). The Lord Jesus will finish in us what He began (Php 1:6). On September 4, 1869, at age 37, Hudson Taylor found a letter waiting for him from John McCarthy, a fellow missionary. His life was transformed by the truth […]
“Help me, O Lord my God! Oh, save me according to Your mercy” (Ps 109:26). My father’s family lived in coal mining country in Lanarkshire, Scotland. My great-grandfather often brought the gospel into the mines by volunteering to work a shift for one of the miners who was unable to work. I heard of one […]
Sanctification comes from the same root meaning as holiness. In its primary sense, it means to be different, then to be set apart, then to be wholly for God, and finally that process by which those who have been declared right shall be made right. “By that will we have been sanctified through the offering […]
Is there a God-honoring objective? A plan to take you there? A commitment to follow through? The issue at hand was too serious to leave to their whims. Nehemiah wanted their verbal agreement memorialized in a vow. “Then I called the priests, and required an oath from them that they would do according to this promise” (Neh […]
CHRIST the DELIVERER: “The Deliverer will come out of Zion, and He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; for this is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins” (Rom 11:26-27). The Lord Jesus did not agonize at Calvary to save us from the sins we find distasteful and inconvenient. He “gave Himself […]
“And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory […]
The Reason Why, a gospel booklet written in 1913 by Robert Laidlaw, a New Zealand businessman, 50 years later had reached a worldwide circulation of 16 million copies in 30 languages. Thousands of letters poured into his office from around the world, letters like: “Have read your booklet. Your booklet has given me rebirth. As […]
In the life of faith, it’s impossible to enrich others without ourselves becoming soul-enriched. Hard to believe, some of the “Jewish brethren” (Neh 5:1) were using the crisis in Jerusalem to enrich their pockets and impoverish their souls. When Nehemiah heard, he “became very angry” (v 6). But Scripture warns, “Be angry, and do not sin: do not let the […]