Confession is so difficult a discipline for us partly because we view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We come to feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin. We could not bear to reveal our failures and shortcomings to others. We imagine that we are the only ones who have not stepped onto the high road to heaven. . . . But if we know that the people of God are first a fellowship of sinners we...

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Normal 0 0 1 43 250 Trinity Presbyterian Church 2 1 307 11.1287 0 0 0 The mercy and the sovereignty of God are the twin pillars of my life. They are the hope of my future, the energy of my service, the center of my theology, the bond of my marriage, the best medicine in all my sickness, and the remedy of all my discouragements.- John Piper, A Godward Life, vol. 2, p. 291.

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Charles Spurgeon: “How can a man be a Christian, and not love his offspring? How can a man be a believer in Jesus Christ, and yet have a cold and hard heart in the things of the kingdom towards his children?… It is our business to train up our children in the fear of the Lord; and though we cannot give them grace, it is ours to pray to the God who can give it; and in answer to our many supplications, he will not turn us away, but will be pleased to regard our sighs.” Let’s together keep seeking...

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Normal 0 0 1 163 930 Trinity Presbyterian Church 7 1 1142 11.1282 0 0 0 It was at a church service in Munich where I was speaking that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the so-called shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. With the other guards, he had often run his hands over naked bodies as they went by and responded callously to requests for help. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen after the war. And suddenly it was all there again—the heaps of...

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Normal 0 0 1 243 1386 Trinity Presbyterian Church 11 2 1702 11.1282 0 0 0 “It has charmed more griefs to rest than all the philosophy of the world. It has remanded to their dungeon more felon thoughts, more black doubts, more thieving sorrows than there are sands on the sea shore. It has comforted the noble host of the poor. It has sung courage to the army of the disappointed. It has poured balm and consolation into the heart of the sick, of captives in dungeons, of widows in their pinching griefs, of orphans in their loneliness. Dying...

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