Ray Ortlund

“Whenever a change occurs in the religious opinions of a community, it is always preceded by a change in their religious feelings. The natural expression of the feelings of true piety is the doctrines of the Bible. As long as these feelings are retained, these doctrines will be retained; but should they be lost, the doctrines are either held for...

“In Kiev, where I found myself on a Sunday morning, on an impulse I turned into a church where a service was in progress.  It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar whence I could survey the congregation and look up at the altar.  Young and old, peasants and townsmen, parents and children, even a...

“What is the indelible mark of the Shorter Catechism? We have the following bit of personal experience from a general officer of the United States army. He was in a great western city at a time of intense excitement and violent rioting. The streets were overrun daily by a dangerous crowd. One day he observed approaching him a man of...

“The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us [nor, I would add today, postmodernism or materialistic consumerism or visceral sensualism or whatever]. All these are dangerous but not the...

In explaining what makes a great story, C. S. Lewis notes one category: “Another very large class of stories turns on fulfilled prophecies — the story of Oedipus, or The Man Who Would Be King, or The Hobbit. In most of them the very steps taken to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy actually bring it about. . . ....

“In all our efforts to cure the disorders of the mind, or what is the same thing, to produce or promote a revival of religion, we are to depend chiefly on the means which God himself has appointed.” W. B. Sprague, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Edinburgh, 1978), page 117. Italics added. I will not take time to qualify Sprague’s...

We are the peacemakers, the true sons of God.

“I have calmed and quieted my soul.”  Psalm 131:2 How did David get into that quiet place before God? He forsook ambition. “My eyes are not raised too high,” he wrote in Psalm 131. He checked that restless impulse of ingratitude and the itch of attention-seeking. He settled into the role and place God had assigned to him (2 Corinthians...

“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’ This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than...

The Countess of Huntingdon recalled the funeral service of Rev. Howell Harris in 1773: “On the day Mr. Harris was interred we had some special seasons of Divine influence both upon converted and unconverted. It was a day never to be forgotten, but I think ought to be remembered with holy wonder and gratitude by all who were present. ....

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Psalm 32:3-4 We hate owning up. Maybe nothing is more painful than facing ourselves and admitting the ugly truth God shows us. We’d rather...

Blighted is the man who doesn’t stick his neck out, doesn’t think for himself, doesn’t revere anything. But he laughs on cue while watching TV day and night. He is like everybody else. In all that he does, he gets by. The believers are not so, they don’t move with the times. Therefore, the godly will not stand in the...

In 1851 a group of British missionaries to Tierra del Fuego was forced to winter in the bitter cold while they waited for their supply ship to arrive. It came too late. They all died of cold and starvation. On Good Friday, April 18th, Richard Williams, a surgeon and Methodist lay preacher, wrote in his journal, “Poor and weak though...