The Tulip Driven Life

By: Thomas F. Booher The difference between Bible college and seminary is deep and wide, for me at least. There are many reasons for this, but the fundamental difference is that I am now preparing to be a minister of the Word of God. Better, I am now being prepared to be a minister of the Word of God. This is not the case at Bible college. Here are some challenges I have found peculiar to seminary: 1.) Private Worship: No, it's not like you shouldn't do personal devotions and family worship before seminary. The point is, if you do not develop good habits of doing that now, you never will. And if you can't read the Word yourself devotionally and be regular in prayer at seminary, you simply aren't called to be a pastor, at least not yet. I am learning more and more the importance of reading the Word and communing with God. Studying passages for a class or report doesn't replace private, devotional worship. If you think it does, you will suffer. You need a re...

By: Thomas F. Booher 2 Corinthians 13:5 is an exhortation for Christians to examine themselves to see if they are in the faith. It says that Jesus Christ is in you, unless you fail the test. This is not because failing the test takes Christ from you, nor does the passage mean that passing this test is how you came into union with Christ in the first place. No, the reality is that passing this test is evidence that Christ is in you, because Christ works in believers both to will and to do His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). This test is a working out of your salvation with fear and trembling (2:12). It is a check on how well you are putting to death the deeds of the flesh by the power of the Spirit. In my experience, and taking the temperature as best I can of American reformed preaching and teaching today, it seems right to say that we are no longer preaching the necessity of sanctification in order to obtain final salvation. Put another way, it seems to me we do not really teach, ...

By: Jesse Stiemann ​ You have heard it said, “I came to Christ,”  but God  say s  to you, “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing; it is a gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one should boast.  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we might walk in them.”  The overall emphasis in Scripture is not that which we as corrupt humanity bring to the table,  or what we did to get us there,  but that God Himself saved us when we could not save ourselves. There is truth in the phrase, “I came to Christ,”  but only if that phrase  is preceded by the  fact that God worked in our hearts to bring us near . There are many problems with  A rminianism . These problems, however, are  not what will be addressed. ​ We as the Reformed , who hold to these doctrines of grace so  tightly and dogmatically, have many problems ...

By: Thomas C. Booher Time passed quickly as Dandy and Brutus talked about a variety of things. The magnerail raced along at 137.6 miles per hour. It slowed down several times as it passed through smaller towns that had no station.  For an observer from the outside, the magnerail looked like a purplish tubular rocket that glided ten feet off the ground above a set of three thick iron rails. One rail was directly beneath the bottom of the tube and the other two were about four feet on either side of the middle rail and about seven feet off the ground.  The outer rails were broad, concave iron strips oriented in such a way that if the magnerail were to stop and rest, the round bottom of the tube would fit almost perfectly into them. The rail beneath the tube provided the power while the outer rails provided stability and direction.  The sun had gone down, and three full moons shone brightly against a sky that was a deep reddish-blue with only a few of th...

By: Thomas Clayton Booher Here is a previous post in this series:  Here If one is going to write about three youngsters who are summoned from planet Earth to another planet in a galaxy not that far away (only 2.5 million light years), they have to have a way to get there. How far is 2.5 million light years, anyway? Matt, one of the three siblings of the novel, the youngest to be exact, was roused from his sleep their first night on the planet because Caleb, his older brother, left a desk lamp on. Matt was pretty dreary. After all they had had a longer than usual day (literally) and a late night of it. He would have called out to Caleb to take care of the little problem, but Caleb was snoring away, which apparently signaled there was nothing that would awaken him short of a not so gentle shake. Matt might have thought of throwing his pillow, but if that didn’t work, he’d have to get up for sure, just to get his pillow back. It might have been worth the try, but I su...

By: Thomas F. Booher As we were going through our class on the WCF and catechisms, our professor commented on chapter XV of the confession. He said there were those during the time of the Westminster divines and the writing of the WCF that would preach the positive side of salvation, of faith in Christ, but not the negative, repentance. This chapter in the confession emphasizes the need to continually preach repentance, and not just faith. That was a problem then, and it is a serious problem of our day as well. Below is a brief paper I wrote on the need for ongoing repentance.  Faith and repentance are inseparably connected by the Lord Jesus Christ in Scripture (Mk. 1:15). They are like two sides of the same coin. It would be concerning, then, if ministers of the Word and parishioners pitted faith against repentance. My concern is that this has happened, and I would like to refute this sentiment particularly as it is expressed in the following form: For the believer, f...

By: Thomas F. Booher I took an art appreciation class a few years back in college. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned a lot about paintings, sculptures, carvings, and the artists themselves. I even learned, in some generic sense, how to interpret the paintings, and why they were painted the way they were. Perhaps I even gained a rudimentary understanding of how to make art as well. The farthest thing from my mind, however, was learning how to paint in art appreciation class. No, I wanted to understand art and the artist, to see something of its skill and worth, its beauty. But be an artist? Try and practice what I learned from art appreciation class? Perish the thought! In a sense, I think this strikes close to what is wrong with our churches today. We view church, Bible conferences, the whole Christian life even, as theology appreciation class. We want to know something of God's Word, we want to grasp Jesus Christ with our mind. We want to see what He has done for us, and...