The Rev. Dr. Robert **** Wilson of Princeton Theological Seminary notes that “in 184 cases where the names of kings are transliterated into the Hebrew, the task has been done accurately. This means that for 3900 years the names of these kings have been faithfully transmitted. There are about forty of these kings living from 2,000 B.C. to 400 B.C. Each appears in chronological order ‘with reference to the kings of the same country and with respect to the kings of other countries.... No stronger evidence for the substantial accuracy of the Old Testament records could possibly be imagined, than this collection of kings.’ Mathematically it is one chance in 750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 that this data would be correctly recorded.”
[Bernard Ramm, Protestant Christian Evidences, (Chicago: Moody Press, 1957), p. 24 citing R. D. Wilson, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament

The purpose of the sermon is not to impart knowledge but to influence behavior - not to inform but to transform. The goal is not to make listeners more educated but more Christlike. - Donald R. Sunukjian

The 𝐒𝐭. 𝐁𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐰'𝐬 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐞 took place beginning on 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟐𝟒, 𝟏𝟓𝟕𝟐, in Paris and spreading across France, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 30,000 French Huguenots.

The Third War of Religion in France between Roman Catholics and Protestant Huguenots had come to a negotiated end in 1570. Henry III of Navarre and Margaret of Valois were married in Paris on August 18, 1572, and consequently, a large number of leading French Huguenots were in the city for the event.

On August 22, while walking home, French Huguenot Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was shot in the street by an unknown assailant who escaped. He was severely injured, but recuperating at home when, at the instigation of Margaret's mother, Queen Catherine de' Medici (mother of King Charles IX), Henry, Duke of Guise and his men finished the job by stabbing Coligny and throwing him out of his window.

This led to a widespread, semi-organized wave of violence against French Huguenot leaders and citizens. Bodies were thrown into the River Seine (over 1000 washed ashore in the coming days). Petrus Ramus, the philosopher, was killed in Paris, and Claude Goudimel, the composer who played a major role in the production of the Genevan Psalter, was killed in Lyon. The severed head of Coligny was sent to the Pope (but apparently not delivered), and the Pope rejoiced in the slaughter of the Hugenots, celebrating with a gold medal created for the occasion, and ordering a Te Deum to be sung to God in thanksgiving for the event. When Philip I of Spain heard the news, he "laughed, for almost the only time on record."

English playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote a play to tell the story called 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑀𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑐𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑡 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑠 (1593), and the massacre has been retold in many other works of literature since. It was one of the most infamous atrocities ever perpetrated against Christians since the time of the Reformation.

COMMUNISTS EXECUTED THEM FOR THEIR FAITH. THEIR HIDDEN BABY SURVIVED IN A RICE BASKET.

John and Betty Stam met at Moody Bible Institute, both individually feeling called to serve as missionaries in China, and married there in 1933 through the China Inland Mission. In September 1934, their daughter Helen Priscilla was born, and just two months later, the young family settled into a new post in Anhui Province, in the small town of Jingde. Two weeks after arriving, Communist soldiers unexpectedly overran the town and took the entire family prisoner.

John wrote a letter to mission headquarters that night, informing them of the Communists' $20,000 ransom demand, knowing full well the mission's strict policy against ever paying ransoms. He closed the letter with the words, "The Lord bless and guide you, and as for us, may God be glorified whether by life or by death." The next morning, the couple was marched to a hill outside the nearby town of Miaoshou to be executed, a Chinese medicine seller who pleaded on his knees for their release, and who was later found to own a Bible and hymnbook, executed alongside them for his own faith.

Before the couple was led away, Betty found a way to hide their three month old daughter, tucking her into a sleeping bag with a change of clothes and money pinned inside her diaper. Two days later, a Chinese evangelist named Dr. Lo found baby Helen alive, concealed her in a rice basket, and carried her to safety, eventually delivering her to Betty's parents, who were still serving as missionaries elsewhere in China. Helen grew up, became a teacher, and raised her own family in the eastern United States. News of the Stams' deaths spread around the world and, in the decades since, has continued to inspire generations of believers to serve overseas despite the risk.

Do you think you could have found the peace John wrote about, in that same letter, facing what he faced?

*A Christian Home, School, and State are all good for the people.*

“One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. . . It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God."

Abraham Kuyper, 1897

“Christians have a mandate to promote a society characterized by justice. They recognize that God as Creator has moral authority over every creature and area of life; His will, reflecting His holiness, is an objective standard of right and wrong for all men in all ages. Accordingly, Christians will want to repudiate a dichotomy between a sacred realm of grace (or religion) where God’s revelation is followed and a secular realm of nature where autonomous standards of thought and behavior govern. All of life is religious.”

Greg L. Bahnsen

William Gurnall, on the necessity of imparting the knowledge of God and religion to our children:

“Every private family is as a little nursery to the church. If the nursery be not carefully planted, the orchard will soon decay. O could you be willing, Christians, that your children, when you are laid in the dust, should be turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine, and prove a generation that do not know God? Atheism needs not be planted; you do enough to make your children such, if you do not endeavour to plant religion in their minds. The very neglect of the gardener to sow and dress his garden, gives advantage enough to the weeds to come up. This is the difference between religion and atheism, Religion doth not grow without planting, but will die even where it is planted, without watering; atheism, irreligion, and profaneness are weeds [that] will grow without setting, but they will not die without plucking up. All care and means are little enough to stub them up. And therefore you that are parents, and do not teach your children, deal the more unrighteously with God, because you neglect the best season in their whole life for planting in them the knowledge of God, and plucking up the contrary weeds of atheism and irreligion. Young weeds come up with most ease. Simple ignorance in youth becomes wilful ignorance, yea, impudence in age; you will not instruct them when young, and they will scorn that their ministers should, when they are old.”

7 - CANONS OF PUBLIC PRAYER
C. H. Spurgeon

First, public prayer should be a matter of the heart.
A man must be really earnest in prayer. You can pardon a man’s familiarities and vulgarities too, when you clearly see that his inmost heart is speaking to his Master, and that it is only the man’s defects of education or experience which create his faults, and not any moral or spiritual vices of his heart. Cast your whole soul into the exercise of public prayer. So pray, that by a divine attraction, you draw the whole congregation up with you to the throne of God. So pray, that by the power of the Spirit, you express the desires and thoughts of every one present, and stand as the one voice for hundreds of beating hearts which are glowing with fervor before God’s throne.

Second, public prayer should be appropriate. There is no need to make the public prayer a gazette of the week’s events, or a register of the births, deaths, and marriage of your people, but the general movements that have taken place in the congregation should be noted by the minister’s careful heart. He should bring the joys and sorrows alike before the throne of grace.

Third, public prayer should not be long.
John Macdonald said, “If you are in the spirit of prayer, do not be long, because other people will not be able to keep pace with you in such unusual spirituality; and if you are not in the spirit of prayer, do not be long, because you will then be sure to weary the listeners.” Ten minutes is the limit to which our public prayer ought to be prolonged.

Fourth, do not use cant phrases.
Be done with these vile things altogether. There should be no grotesque mingling of Scripture texts, alterations of Scripture texts, or abuses of Scriptural truth in prayer. It ought always to be a point of honor among ministers always to quote Scripture directly. Make us of an expression fresh from your own mind, and it will be quite as acceptable to God as a scriptural phrase defaced or clipped. Vehemently strive against garblings and perversions of Scripture, and renounce forever all cant phrases, for the are the disfigurement of free prayer.

Five, vary the order, length, and current of your public prayers.
Vary the order of your prayers, then, for the sake of maintaining attention, and preventing people going through the whole thing as a clock runs on till the weights are down. Also vary the length of your prayers. Do you not think it would be much better if sometimes instead of giving three minutes to the first prayer and fifteen minutes to the second, you have nine minutes to each? Would it not be better sometimes to be longer in the first, and not so long in the second prayer? Finally, vary the current of your prayers. There are many topics which require your attention; the church in its weakness, its backslidings, its sorrows, and its comforts; the outside world, the neighborhood, unconverted hearers, the young people, the nation. Do not pray for all these every time, or otherwise your prayers will be long and probably uninteresting.

Six, keep from all attempts to work up spurious fervor in public devotion.
Do not labor to seem earnest. Pray as your heart dictates, under the leading of the Spirit of God, and if you are dull and heavy tell the Lord so. It will be no ill thing to confess your deadness, and bewail it, and cry for quickening; it will be real and acceptable prayer; but simulated ardor is a shameful form of lying.

Seventh, prepare your prayer.
Proper preparation means solemn consideration beforehand of the importance of prayer, meditation upon the needs of men’s souls, and a remembrance of the promises which we are to plead; and thus coming before the Lord with a petition written upon the fleshly tables of the heart. This is surely better than coming to God at random, rushing before the throne at haphazard, without a definite error or desire.

If we wanted to summarize the canons with adverbs we could say, “Spurgeon exhorts pastors to pray soulfully, appropriately, quickly, authentically, variously, and prepared-ly.”

Spugeon’s conclusion of the lecture is a most fitting place for this post to end:

Let your prayers be earnest, full of fire, vehemence, prevalence. I pray the Holy Ghost to instruct every student of this College so to offer public prayer, that God shall always be served of his best. Let your petitions be plain and heart-felt; and while your people may sometimes feel that the sermon was below the mark, may they also feel that the prayer compensated for all.

“If we will do God's work in God's way at God's time with God's power, we shall have God's blessing.”

Leonard Ravenhill | Why Revival Tarries

Dear Christian,

FEELING DISCOURAGED, DEPRESSED OR EVEN DESPAIRING?

Helen Howarth Lemmel experience the same when she was struck by a disease that caused her to go blind, and as a result was abandoned by her husband. Yet amidst her situation she turned to Jesus and wrote over 500 hymns of praise and worship! This beloved hymn came out in 1922.

"Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace."

So I pray,

Look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith!

“One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed. We have adopted the convenient theory that the Bible is a Book to be explained, whereas first and foremost it is a Book to be believed (and after that to be obeyed).”

Leonard Ravenhill | Why Revival Tarries

“I am a Catholic, and I wholeheartedly accept death for God. Had I a thousand lives, I would offer all of these to Him.”

~ St. Lorenzo Ruiz, Filipino, martyred by *tsurushi*.

*Tsurushi* (Japanese for “hole hanging”) involved cutting open a victim’s forehead, hanging him upside down, then lowering him headfirst into a pit filled with excrement until he either died or agreed to apostatize. The bleeding from the forehead ensured he didn’t die quickly from rising cranial blood pressure but as slowly & painfully as possible. He wasn’t suffocated or drowned in the excrement, just suspended in the fumes right above it. Death could take up to 13 days, as in the case of St. Magdalene of Nagasaki.

In the year AD 400:

St. Patrick was taken captive by pirates and taken to Ireland where he would be converted to Christ.
St. Augustine published his book Confessions in North Africa.
St. Jerome was finishing his Latin translation the Vulgate in a monastery in Bethlehem.
St. John Chrysostom was preaching a sermon series through the Book of Acts in Constantinople.

In a single year, from Britain to Ireland to Africa to Bethlehem to Turkey, Christ's Kingdom advances!

“The Church right now has more fashion than passion, is more pathetic than prophetic, is more superficial than supernatural.”

Leonard Ravenhill | Revival God's Way

"I have a question to offer you? It is contained in three words? DO YOU PRAY?
1. I ask whether you pray, because prayer is absolutely needful to a man's salvation.
2. I ask again whether you pray, because a habit of prayer is one of the surest marks of a true Christian.
3.I ask whether you pray, because there is no duty in religion so neglected as private prayer.
4. I ask whether you pray, because prayer is an act in religion to which there is great encouragement."
-J C Ryle

“𝖳𝗁𝖾 𝖢𝗁𝗋𝗂𝗌𝗍𝗂𝖺𝗇 𝗉𝗋𝖺𝗒𝗌 𝗐𝗁𝗂𝗅𝖾 𝗁𝖾 𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐬, 𝗐𝗁𝗂𝗅𝖾 𝗁𝖾 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐬, 𝗐𝗁𝗂𝗅𝖾 𝗁𝖾 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐬, 𝗐𝗁𝗂𝗅𝖾 𝗁𝖾 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝗈𝗋 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬: 𝖺𝗇𝖽, 𝗐𝗁𝖾𝗇 𝗁𝖾 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝖺𝗅𝗈𝗇𝖾 𝗂𝗇 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗌𝖾𝖼𝗋𝖾𝗍 𝗋𝖾𝗍𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗍 𝗈𝖿 𝗁𝗂𝗌 𝗈𝗐𝗇 𝗌𝗈𝗎𝗅, 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖼𝖺𝗅𝗅𝗌 𝗎𝗉𝗈𝗇 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖥𝖺𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋 𝗐𝗂𝗍𝗁 𝗀𝗋𝗈𝖺𝗇𝗌 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝖺𝗋𝖾 𝗇𝗈 𝗅𝖾𝗌𝗌 𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗅 𝖻𝖾𝖼𝖺𝗎𝗌𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗒 𝖺𝗋𝖾 𝗎𝗇𝗌𝗉𝗈𝗄𝖾𝗇, 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖥𝖺𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋 𝗇𝖾𝗏𝖾𝗋 𝖿𝖺𝗂𝗅𝗌 𝗍𝗈 𝖺𝗇𝗌𝗐𝖾𝗋 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖽𝗋𝖺𝗐 𝗇𝖾𝖺𝗋 𝗍𝗈 𝗁𝗂𝗆.” (𝖢𝗅𝖾𝗆𝖾𝗇𝗍 𝗈𝖿 𝖠𝗅𝖾𝗑𝖺𝗇𝖽𝗋𝗂𝖺)

"If the devil could have destroyed the Bible, he would have brought up the hottest coals from the centre of hell. He has not been able to destroy one single line."

— Charles Spurgeon

Pastoral Priorities IN ORDER:

1. I am a Person before God
2. I am a Partner to my Wife
3. I am a Parent for my Children
4. I am a Pastor for the Church

If the ministry is not #4 on the list, it won’t be long before you don’t have a ministry at all.

"Show yourself to be a member of Christ and a servant of God, not only in the general calling of a Christian, but also in the particular calling in which you are placed. It is not enough for a magistrate to be a Christian man, but he must also be a Christian magistrate. It is not enough for a master of a family to be a Christian man or a Christian in the church, but he must also be a Christian in his family and in the trade which he follows daily. Not everyone who is a common hearer of the Word and a frequenter of the Lord's Table is therefore a good Christian, unless his conversation in his private house and in his private affairs and dealings be suitable. There is a man to be seen what he is." — 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐦 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐬, 𝐴 𝐺𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑆𝑒𝑒𝑑, 𝑜𝑟, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑀𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐺𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼𝑠, 𝑜𝑟 𝐶𝑎𝑛 𝐵𝑒, 𝐸𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑡𝑜 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 in 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑠 8:656

The 2nd Largest Religion after Christianity in each State of the U.S.

He who waved the sceptre of heaven was spit upon and nailed to the cross. Ah, how it should provoke our hearts to gain revenge on sin! Sin has murdered the Lord of glory. It was good counsel one gave: 'Never let go out of your minds the thoughts of a crucified Christ.' Let this be meat and drink unto you; your sweetness and consolation, your honey and your desire, your reading and meditation, your life, death, and resurrection.
-Thomas Brooks English Preacher, Leader 1608-1680

“Oh, how precious is time, and how it pains me to see it slide away, while I do so little to any good purpose.”
-David Brainerd 1718-1747 American Minister + Missionary

“Spiritual and moral disobedience, always lead to physical or cultural disorder, dislocation, and displacement.”
Os Guinness