This is one of my very favorite hymns. I love its true and moving words. It is a glorious and realistic and emphatically Christian and spiritual meditation on God’s providence. This one is worth memorizing. “It was composed in 1641 with the heading ‘A Song of Comfort. God will care for and help everyone in His own time,’ under the text Psalm 55:22. The author was robbed by highwaymen near Magdeburg as a student and left destitute with no prospect of earning a living. At last he unexpectedly received an appointment as tutor in the…Sunday Song: If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee
This is one of my very favorite hymns. I love its true and moving words. It is a glorious and realistic and emphatically Christian and spiritual meditation on God’s providence. This one is worth memorizing. “It was composed in 1641 with the heading ‘A Song of Comfort. God will care for and help everyone in His own time,’ under the text Psalm 55:22. The author was robbed by highwaymen near Magdeburg as a student and left destitute with no prospect of earning a living. At last he unexpectedly received an appointment as tutor in the…
Sometimes reverence and joy are viewed as mutually exclusive in the worship of the church. I have friends who suspect “reverence” is a code word for austere, cold, somber and dour. So, when they hear someone talking about the need for reverence in worship, they want to have none of it. On the other hand, I have friends who are suspicious of calls for “joyfulness” in worship, as if this necessarily entailed emotional manipulation and superficial sanguinity. In some churches, there is such an emotional display in worship…
Christian worship is all about God. And a biblical congregational worship service should reflect that. It is all about God. It is not all about us. Or all about the preacher. Or all about the choir or praise team. Or all about the building. Or all about any of a million other things. It is all about God. God, the triune God who has revealed himself in his word, is the object of our worship, the focus of our worship. We gather as a congregation, not to seek an experience but to meet with God and give him praise. The whom of worship is central…
“As the first Protestant missionary to China, Robert Morrison laid a foundation for what would become the imposing edifice of today’s Chinese church. Morrison was quite conscious of his role, and worked deliberately to prepare for others,…
Robert Morrison, Anglo-Scottish evangelist and first Protestant missionary to China “on July 16, 1814, at a spot on the steep hills and gullies along the shore of Macao, a place seldom reached by crowds of people, . . . baptized Cai Gao, who…
Christian congregational worship is Spirit-gathered, Spirit-dependent, Spirit-engendered, and Spirit-empowered, because left to ourselves we will not worship the right object, according to the right standard, for the right motivation(s), through the…
Dr. David L. Wykes, BSc (Dunelm), PhD (Leicester), FRHistS, is Director of Dr Williams’s Library, and Co-Director of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. He gave the second plenary of the Matthew Henry tercentenary (being…
Christian public worship ought to be simple. It should not seek to add to the elements warranted by Scripture or to elaborate forms not endorsed by the word. This is just the faithful application of the general biblical principle that we have nothing…
What qualities should a public worship service evidence? What ought to be its essential characteristics? With the principles in mind that we have already articulated, let us consider a non-exhaustive list of qualities that we aspire to in…