Come Down, Lord!

The following article was originally posted on our church blog in 2018. As a pastor I am always reading commentaries and theological works, so it is important for me to keep the Sabbath somehow different.  Here is a day of worship, and I have sought, then, to read material that will bring me into worship.  To that end I generally confine my Sunday reading to sermons.    There are, of course, other books appropriate for the day.  I think, for example, of Octavius Winslow's  Personal Declension and Revival of Religion in the Soul  or some of the great Christian biographies (M'Cheyne, Bonar, Nettleton, Whitefield, Lloyd-Jones, Elias, Harris, Burns, Dabney, etc.) or histories of revival or any of the great books on the person of Christ listed in an earlier post. In this post, however, I will offer just 8 books - the best 8 that I am aware of - which contain sermons suitable for this day which ought to be for the Christian a kind of heaven on earth.  ...

A friend asked me the other day, "do you regret it?"  He had heard that my open letter to the Church had stirred up controversy and that I might be in trouble.  My answer was immediate.  No , I didn't regret it.  I believed (and still believe) it needed to be said.   In fact, as time has passed and I have prayed over the matter my feelings and my resolve have grown stronger not weaker.   God has tried us to see what is in us, and we have been found out.  We aren't the lion hearts we thought we were.  We are strong on theology and confessions and ecclesiastical procedure, but we aren't so strong in the day of adversity (Proverbs 24:10). But my friend's question raises an interesting question.   First, why would I  regret what I had written?   My friend was assuming that the events that had transpired since the letter was first written had somehow changed my mind.  He was wondering if maybe the trial had...