Reformation Theology Blog

Gospel Recovery Through Subverting False Narratives

One of the most urgent tasks facing evangelicals today is the recovery of the gospel. The crisis is real since many of those local churches we would have once considered conservative or doctrinally sound have genericised the gospel and could now be likened to multi site Starbucks franchises, with full-service branding for whatever your taste. Many of us who have jumped on this bandwagon have witnessed churches who have made doctrine and theology almost invisible to the naked eye.

Reformed Companion (app)

Check out Reformed Companion on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Your go-to source for your favorite Reformed catechisms, confessions, creeds, and more. The catechisms include proof texts from the ESV Bible translation, as well as a quiz feature to test your catechism knowledge. Very useful and edifying! Thank Clayton Larson for all the labor he put into making this.

This app has an intuitively designed graphic user interface. Very user friendly.

An Important Mark of a Sound Conversion

Puritan Joseph Alleine declared that in order to demonstrate a sound converion, "We turn from our own RIGHTEOUSNESS. Before conversion, man seeks to cover himself with his own fig-leaves, and to make himself acceptable with God, by his own duties. He is apt to trust in himself, and set up his own righteousness, and to reckon his pennies for gold, and not to submit to the righteousness of God. But conversion changes his mind; now he counts his own righteousness as filthy rags. He casts it off, as a man would the verminous tatters of a nasty beggar.

Did Christianity Spread Due of the Promise of Power?

Question from Visitor: Religions that tend to spread the best are those that have the promise of power looming behind them, most often the kind of power that comes either from the promise of associating oneself with a powerful outside culture, or else the power that comes from giving one hope against oppression. Notice that neither of these has anything to do intrinsically with the actual message of any given religion-- these are the function of most any religion.

I Thank God for You!

By Mark Webb

The following is a excerpt from a very helpful essay by Mark Webb. He goes through some Scriptural references that thank God for the faith of the saints, a practice which acknowledges God to be the source of all faith, not our natural ability, desires, will or affections.

Paul's Patterns

Answering a Critic of Reformed Theology

Pastor Jim McClarty – an ex-rocker, current preacher, saved by astounding grace (and my friend) provides very good (biblical) responses to a critic of Reformed theology:

Don't Be Stingy

In his book "A Generous Orthodoxy", when speaking of the doctrine of unconditional election, Brian McLaren in an attempt to redefine TULIP, asserts that anyone who believes in a God who elects some and not others to eternal life (1 Peter 1:2) must be so self-absorbed in their standing before God that they view themselves as having what he calls "exclusive privilege" over others.

Receiving Criticism

by Jonathan Edwards

"Be advised to consider what others say of you and improve it to this end, to know whether you do not live in some way of sin...And though the imputation may seem to us to be very groundless and we think that they, in charging us so, are influenced by no good spirit; yet if we act prudently, we shall take so much notice of it as to make an occasion of examining ourselves ... it is most imprudent as well as most unchristian, to take it amiss, and resent it, when we are thus told of our faults: we should rather rejoice in it, that we are shown our spots ...

John 3:16 (Revisited)

by R. C. Sproul

It is ironic that in the same chapter, indeed in the same context, in which our Lord teaches the utter necessity of rebirth to even see the kingdom, let alone choose it, non-Reformed views find one of their main proof texts to argue that fallen man retains a small island of ability to choose Christ. It is John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

"I Don't Want Free Will" by Martin Luther

"I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want "free-will" to be given me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavour after salvation; not merely because in face of so many dangers, and adversities and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground ; but because even were there no dangers.