Tune and Prepare!

Jonathan Edwards: “We ought not to limit God where He has not limited himself!” "Expanding our Expectations of what God might do through His Church" Article by Lex Loizides There’s a somewhat tired caricature of the Reformed believer as an overly religious and narrow-minded fundamentalist. Such a person supposedly takes solace in the Sovereignty of God in light of the failure of the message he proclaims. After all, it is supposed, not many are being converted because it’s ‘not the will of God’…so goes the caricature. But actually, as we have seen already from the writing of Jonathan Edwards*, an affectionate love for the doctrines of grace not only expands our view of the majesty of God (in His transcendence), but also includes real, passionate, personal experiences of God (in His immanence, His closeness). And a Biblical view of the nature of God both as the One who graciously forgives us and as the mighty Head of the Church, will enable us...

by Lex Loizides A number of factors helped the somewhat surprising spread of the Christian Faith across the Roman world which began in the first century. 1. The political unity of the Roman Empire did produce a certain economic and political stability, notwithstanding its many faults. This encouraged trade between large cities and regions. 2. The military and trade routes meant relatively easy access to large numbers of people (both by land and sea). Joel Kotkin writes, ‘Rome allowed considerable self-government to individual cities; the empire itself, notes the historian Robert Lopez, functioned as a ‘confederation of urban cells.’ Europe would not again see such a proliferation of secure, and well-peopled cities until well into the nineteenth century. People, products, and ideas traveled quickly through the vast archipelago of ‘urban cells’ over secure sea-lanes and fifty-one thousand miles of paved roads stretching from Jerusalem to Boulogne… Christianity’s rapid...