Colossians 3:1-4, Acts 2 and 3; The verses that we have just read form a test for the true Church of Jesus Christ. If our focus is on the things of this earth, we will fail miserably in God's eyes. We will fail to please Christ because we will fail to understand who Jesus Christ, God incarnate, truly is, and what He truly requires of us as His servants. We will fail to lay hold of the great resources that are ours in the heavenlies because of Christ, resources that are not to be found on this earth. Our minds will be corrupted by the things of earth. The church will be corrupted by the world.

ANOTHER difficult question that shrouds the doctrine of predestination is the question of how our sinful nature can be inherited from Adam. If we are born with a fallen nature, if we are born in sin, if we are born in a state of moral inability, how can God hold us responsible for our sins?

TIME, like an ever-running stream, is perpetually gliding on, and hurrying each of us into the boundless ocean of eternity! We are now entering upon one of those imaginary lines of division, which men have drawn to measure out TIME for their own convenience; and, while we stand upon the threshold of a new year, it befits us to make a solemn contemplative pause; though time can make no pause—but rushes on with its usual velocity. Let us take some suitable reviews and prospects of time past and future, and indulge such reflections as our transition from year to year naturally tends to suggest.

The grand and leading reflection is that in the text, with which I present you as a New-Year's Gift: ”Knowing the time—that it is now high time to awake out of sleep!”

The connection of our text is this—The apostle, having enjoined sundry duties of religion and morality, subjoins this consideration, namely—that the time remarkably required them, as (...)

“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in him, purifleth himself even as He is pure.” (I John III: v. 2, 3).

Literally there are two ways in which we may enjoy membership in a family. The one is by birth and the other is by adoption. By human law it is, of course, unnecessary to be adopted into the family into which we are born. Our birth into the family entitles us to the privileges which belong to it. But within the family of God both are necessary. God in His Word declares that without a new spiritual birth we can have no place within this family. This is one of the great requirements of Heaven.

James 3:1-12 contains the single most sustained discussion in the New Testament on the use of the tongue. I take the author of this little book to have been James, the half-brother of our Lord Jesus. It is clear that he is steeped in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament Scriptures and also in the teaching of the Lord Jesus, to which his own teaching has many parallels. Both the book of Proverbs and our Lord Jesus spoke with searching clarity about the nature and use of the tongue. James walks in their footprints. Much of what he says is a powerful exposé of the sin and failure that mar our speech.

In this way James’s words exemplify the central purposes of the teaching and preaching of God’s Word. The resulting effect will be to “reprove, rebuke, and exhort” (2 Timothy 4:2). But James’s message also exemplifies what Paul calls the profitability or usefulness of sacred Scripture: “teaching . . . correction . . . [child-]training.”

In a word, the immediate (...)