The Tulip Driven Life

By: Thomas Fletcher Booher The Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16). Those who crucified Jesus were cut to the heart after Peter told them that Jesus was Lord and Christ, which prompted them to ask Peter what they should do, to which he replied, "repent" (Acts 2:37-38). When we were saved, it was because we heard the gospel, and understood that we were sinners, and we felt guilt and shame. We saw the sinfulness of ourselves, and we didn't want the stain of sin any longer, so we received the good news of the gospel with gladness and trusted in Christ for salvation.  My question is one of sanctification. If we are saved by first responding to the gospel with conviction of sin, with feelings of guilt and shame, only to have it all washed away by Christ, shouldn't we return to this again and again in order to grow as believers? Surely the more we feel in our hearts the sins our hands commit and our minds conceive the more we w...

By: Thomas Clayton Booher The Protestant Reformation and the Doctrine of Justification Our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), has its theological roots in the Protestant Reformation of the 16 th century, which essentially began when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses (points of dispute) on the castle church door in Wittenberg , Germany on October 31, 1517. It was common to post such notices for public viewing. Luther’s theses were directed primarily against the Church’s practice to sell indulgences for the dead. An indulgence , it was said, satisfied the temporary punishment of purgatory [1] so that a departed loved one could be released and enter the glory of heaven. The sale of indulgences was actually a scheme to fill the coffers of the church to fund lavish building projects. Pope Leo X (1475-1521) needed money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome . The Pope made John Tetzel the commissioner of indulgences for Germany . Tetzel’s marketi...