The Importance of Preaching God’s Severity According to John Owen

“There are some sins or degrees in sinning that neither the holiness, nor majesty, nor wisdom of God can so bear withal, as to suffer them to pass unpunished or unremarked on in this world. In such cases is God said to exercise his “severity.” And he does so, in extraordinary outward judgments upon open, profligate sinners, especially the enemies of his church and glory.”

The Discipline of Joy

“In all this wrestling, as I have tried to drill down on what Christian joy truly is, I have found joy is a practice which takes discipline. It’s a promised fruit of the Spirit, but one that requires intention. It’s a conscious and oftentimes daily decision to believe the promises of God, allowing those promises to buoy hope.”

We don’t have to admit evangelistic defeat before we have started

“So often, we go into the work of evangelism and mission already defeated. The view is often that the culture is increasingly secular or even anti-Christian, the church is in decline, ears and minds are entirely closed to the gospel. Evangelism is often embarked on with the underlying sense that we’ve got work that Jesus has given us to do so we better get on with it even though it’ll probably be unfruitful.”