[This is the 1 st  installment of Blake Johnson's walk-through of the book  The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment  by Jeremiah Burroughs.] I’ve started rereading Jeremiah Burrough’s book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment.  It is a treasure, and an important read. Not wishing to serve as a replacement for your reading it, I thought it would be a helpful thing for me to put out little summaries of the chapters from week to week. I will work to include some of the more

Having covered 1 Timothy 2:1–7, we’ll take time this Sunday to reflect more carefully on verse 4, where we’re told that God “desires all people to be saved.” The reality of hell and the persistence of unbelief prompt important questions about how we understand statements like this one—and as we’ll see, there are many such statements in Scripture. As I’ve prepared this week, I came across a poem written by John Ryland around the turn of the 19th century. It offers a rich and C

As your week draws to a close, allow me to pose a question for you to consider: What reality lays behind Paul's logic in 1 Timothy 3:6? He is describing necessary qualifications for a man who would lead as an Elder in God's church. Verse six gives this warning: 1 Tim. 3:6:  "He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil." What is it in a recent convert that would make one susceptible to conceit? Or conside

On Sunday we begin our walk through the book of 1 Timothy. Heads up: moving from Isaiah' prophecy to Paul's prose will mean a drastic  slowing down  for us. We will not be taking the same-sized bites that we did in our study of Isaiah. Peter famously called Paul's writing "hard to understand" (2 Pet. 3:16), and not in the "prophetic mystery" type of way that Isaiah was a challenge. Paul packs a tremendous amount of content into small spaces, and so we will do the work needed