Author Archives: adminjohnshields

‘Grace tried is better than grace, and it is more than grace; it is glory in its infancy.’ (Samuel Rutherford) ‘You will never find Jesus so precious as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then He is like a rose blooming in the midst of the desolation, – a rock rising above the […]

I have been a missionary doctor in Mozambique for many years, and an unusual way to spread the knowledge of the Christian faith has developed here, that of a Scripture memory catechism class. There are 21 men from various churches and backgrounds who meet together on Saturdays to check out on Scripture memory they have […]

Masab, son of Palestinian West Bank Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, glances at the friend who has accompanied him to the restaurant where we met. They whisper a few words and say grace, thanking God and Jesus for putting food on their plates. It takes a few seconds to digest this sight: the son of […]

The Christian life is to be a life of constant, unhindered joy – or at least, so says the apostle Paul: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!’ According to Paul, joy is not to be an occasional feature in the believer’s life, it is to be a constant reality, a […]

Jeremy Brooks is the recently appointed Director of Ministries at the Protestant Truth Society, for whom I work on a part-time basis. We discuss his new role and matters of Protestant interest. GD: Hello Jeremy Brooks and welcome to ‘Exiled Preacher’. Please tell us a little about yourself. JB: Hi Guy, and thank you for […]

‘All have sinned’, Paul reminds us (Rom. 6:23). Because of our fall in Adam, we are all coming short of the glory of God; there is never a moment in our lives when we meet God’s demands for perfect obedience to his law. While we remain in a state of nature, our sin leaves us […]

I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2) Charles Hodge and Henry Ward Beecher were 19th century contemporaries and both were leaders in the church of Christ at the time. Both also were reared in God-centred, Christ-exalting homes. One remained faithful to his biblical heritage and the […]

The Banner of Truth has published Let Christ Be Magnified: Calvin’s Teaching for Today by J H Merle d’Aubigné1. A preface by the publisher introduces Merle d’Aubigné (1794-1872), the author of an extensive, thorough and eminently-readable history of the Reformation. He was greatly influenced by Robert Haldane in Geneva at a time when the theology […]

The Tyranny and Necessity of Narrowness The story is told of a Puritan who was asked, ‘Why are you so precise?’ He replied: ‘Because I follow a precise God.’ I very much like the old Puritan’s answer. The God of the Bible, the living God, is indeed a precise God. When the Lord instructed Moses […]

The Banner of Truth has reprinted the Letters of Thomas Chalmers, edited by William Hanna, with an introduction by Iain H Murray.1 Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) preached and practised the graceless and Christless morality of the Moderates until his conversion after several years in the ministry. He later became the acknowledged leader of the Evangelical party […]

Editoria Fiel is the organization that runs the Fiel Conference each year, which was begun twenty-four years ago by Richard Denham, Sr., an American missionary to Brazil, for the purpose of edifying ministers and promoting Reformed literature in Portuguese-speaking countries. Eighty attended the first conference which has now grown to 1,300 attendees this year, including […]

Anyone who will make a careful examination of the state of our churches will be astonished at the low degree of spirituality which they manifest. This is owing, among other causes, to the laxity which they display in church discipline, and the leniency with which they regard the errors of those who lay themselves open […]

Are altar calls biblical? If they aren’t, then why are so many evangelical churches doing them? The altar is mentioned often in the Scriptures, but there’s no mention of an altar call. Then again, we’re not told that the 3,000 who were saved on the day of Pentecost came forward to some sort of ‘altar’ […]

The year 1968 was a momentous year for me revolution was in the air. I was a freshman architectural student in Boston. Having been raised with generally conservative morality in a liberal Congregational church there was nothing to prevent me from being radicalized. I soon joined the Boston Resistance and felt sure that I was […]

Of all the Christian authors whose works have blessed me, Iain H. Murray’s biographical writings come top of the list. Murray’s books are written in a beautifully unadorned prose, with a respectfulness of tone for their subject which is refreshing in a world of hero destroying literature. I also love the fact that Iain H. […]

On Saturday 4th October the twelfth Salisbury Conference took place at Emmanuel Church. Over 150 people attended to hear Richard Barcellos of the Midwest Center for Theological Studies in Owensboro, Kentucky. Dr Barcellos’ first study was on John Calvin and the Decalogue. Why should this Genevan Reformer be studied? He had a great impact on […]

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Bavinck’s Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the appearance in English of the final volume of his four-volumed Reformed Dogmatics1. The time is ripe, therefore, to get (re)acquainted with Bavinck. Bavinck’s Early Life and Education Herman Bavinck was born in Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, on December 13, […]

Although the name of Herman Bavinck may be unfamiliar to some readers, his labours have probably affected all those reading these lines. Bavinck’s legacy to the Reformed world, like that of his contemporary, Abraham Kuyper, was disproportionate to the size of his native Netherlands. I write these lines on the eighty-seventh anniversary of Bavinck’s death […]

Behold, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes, so that he will not walk about naked and men will not see his shame. (Revelation 16:15) Midori Ito, the great Japanese figure skater, who was favoured to win the gold medal at the 1992 Winter Olympics […]

Cipriano de Valera was instrumental in giving Spaniards the Scriptures in their own language at the time of the Reformation, so much so that his name still adorns the spine of many Spanish Bibles today (along with that of Casiodoro de Reina). But for the last twenty-two years the name of Cipriano de Valera has […]

So it’s broken and won’t be working until next spring at the earliest. First there was ‘a glitch with one of the 30-tonne transformers which caused an initial delay of a few days’, then ‘a quench leaked a tonne of helium coolant into one of the tunnels, forcing a further shutdown while repairs could be […]

When I was a young minister, a man who never attended church (though formally a member) died unexpectedly. Some time later I was visiting with one of his sons and the son’s wife. During our conversation the young man said to me, ‘My Daddy believed that the Second Coming was near and would occur, if […]

John the Baptist, incarcerated in the prison of Machaerus east of the Dead Sea, sent some of his disciples to Jesus with a question, which Luke reports twice. So it must be a question to which Luke wants to draw our attention. It is the most momentous question that should exercise minds now as it […]

Introduction Teresa of Avila calls for our consideration on several counts: 1. Her writings are increasingly popular amongst unconverted but professing Protestants who find her ‘mystical spirituality’ attractive in their own ‘pursuit of God.’ We are thus alerted to a dangerous ‘enemy within the gates.’ 2. She is revered by Romanists as ‘a quintessential Catholic’, […]

From the ‘one flesh’ teaching about marriage (Eph. 5:22-33) Paul draws out the wonder and the glory of Christ’s relationship with the church. In verse 28 Paul is exhorting husbands to love their own wives as they love their own bodies. It would hardly please a wife to hear her husband say that he loves […]