“If a poor child be capable of being thus transformed, how it should move the heart of a city philanthropist, when he thinks of the amazing extent of raw material, for this moral and spiritual manufacture that is on every side of him—when he thinks, that in going forth on some Christian enterprise among a population, he is, in truth, walking among the rudiments of a state that is to be everlasting—that out of the most loathsome and unseemly abodes, a glory can be extracted, which will weather all the storms, and all the vicissitudes of this world’s history—that in the filth and raggedness of a hovel, that is to be found, on which all the worth of heaven, as well as all the endurance of heaven, can be imprinted—that he is, in a word, dealing in embryo with the elements of a great and future empire, which is to rise, indestructible and eternal, on the ruins of all that is earthly, and every member of which shall be a king and a priest for evermore.”
XXII. For if, he says, I leave everything else alone, and consider myself and the whole nature and constitution of man, and how we are mingled, and what is our movement, and how the mortal was compounded with the immortal, and how it is that I flow downwards, and yet am borne upwards, and how the soul is circumscribed; and how it gives life and shares in feelings; and how the mind is at once circumscribed and unlimited, abiding in us and yet travelling over the Universe in swift motion and flow; how it is both received and imparted by word, and passes through air, and enters with all things; how it shares in sense, and enshrouds itself away from sense. And even before these questions — what was our first moulding and composition in the workshop of nature, and what is our last formation and completion? What is the desire for and imparting of nourishment, and who brought us spontaneously to those first springs and sources of life? How is the body nourished by food, and the soul by reason? What is the drawing of nature, and the mutual relation between parents and children, that it should be held together by a spell of love? How is it that species are permanent, and are different in their characteristics, although there are so many that their individual marks cannot be described? How is it that the same animal is both mortal and immortal, the one by decease, the other by coming into being? For one departs, and another takes its place, just like the flow of a river, which is never still, yet ever constant. And you might discuss many more points concerning men’s members and parts, and their mutual adaptation both for use and beauty, and how some are connected and others disjoined, some are more excellent and others less comely, some are united and others divided, some contain and others are contained, according to the law and reason of Nature. Much too might be said about voices and ears. How is it that the voice is carried by the vocal organs, and received by the ears, and both are joined by the smiting and resounding of the medium of the air? Much too of the eyes, which have an indescribable communion with visible objects, and which are moved by the will alone, and that together, and are affected exactly as is the mind. For with equal speed the mind is joined to the objects of thought, the eye to those of sight. Much too concerning the other senses, not objects of the research of reason. And much concerning our rest in sleep, and the figments of dreams, and of memory and remembrance; of calculation, and anger, and desire; and in a word, all by which this little world called Man is swayed.
This is the third episode of the West Port Experiment podcast, featuring the Rev. D. Douglas Gebbie, minister of the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Chesley, Ontario. In this episode, we introduce and discuss Alexander Henderson, one of the greats of the Scottish Second Reformation and a crucial figure in the 17th century Kirk. For further study, listen to a recording of Thomas M’Crie’s life of Henderson. The next two episodes of WPE will continue the discussion on Henderson, looking at his Government and Order of the Church of Scotland, followed by his sermon before parliament on John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
About the WPE podcast. I have completed the first ten episodes before releasing any to make sure I wasn’t overcommitting or underperforming. But I’m hoping that this podcast fills a niche in a crowded digital area. While this site’s theme is about “parish missions, the care of souls, and all things reformed,” the first season is dedicated specifically to the Scottish Presbyterian tradition to which my denomination is devoted. God willing, I’ll continue to focus mainly in this area. But if it continues, I may branch off into other related areas, especially my great interest in Thomas Chalmers and the theory of practice of parish missions.
The church in Leuchars where Henderson served for 25 years. [source]
For now, the episodes focus on a text or texts for discussion with various friends as conversation partners from within and beyond my presbytery. In this first season, we are dealing with John Willison, Samuel Rutherford, Hugh Binning, Alexander Henderson, David Dickson & the Stewarton Revival, James Guthrie, and Thomas Boston. I hope to release them about once per month.
If you would like to be kept updated about WPE podcast releases, subscribe to this site at the right, just under the banner. If any links are broken, please drop me a note at michael@reformedparish.com.
[Instrumental music in podcast courtesy of Ernst Stolz. ]
This video was very good and hits the nail on the head for the basics of corrective discipline or spanking our younger children. Slightly more “produced,” shall we say. But very worth your time.
And as they reference Ted Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, I can’t commend this highly enough. See also here. I only wish I had read this and especially the chapter, “Embracing Biblical Methods: the Rod,” earlier than I did. But I sure am thankful that we did read and implement its principles, however imperfectly. I know my children are the better and much happier for it! Parents, read this book together.
Here’s a selection, to encourage you to pick it up. Responding to the objection that spanking “doesn’t work,” Tripp writes:
This objection requires further examination of a parent’s specific practice. Years of pastoral experience have persuaded me that cases of the rod not working can be summarized as follows:
A) The primary reason spanking can be ineffective is spanking in anger. Children will not willingly submit themselves to the authority of an angry, out-of-control parent. There is an innate sense of justice in a child; they will inwardly resist submitting their hearts to a parent who bullies them. They may cower. They may even respond to punishment out of fear, but they will not willingly place themselves under the authority of a parent who disciplines in unholy anger.
B) Inconsistent use of the rod. The child never knew what would elicit a spanking. Therefore, he was always testing the parent.
C) Failure to persist. Some folks never try anything long enough for it to work. They give the rod a couple of days. Their children are not transformed overnight. They give up in discouragement.
D) Failure to be effective. I have witnessed spanking administered through a double layer of diapers to a child who never stopped moving long enough to know he had been spanked. The spanking was ineffective because the parents never made the rod felt.
Ouch, and ouch again! God spanked me some years back with each of these four swats. But what a gracious, loving heavenly Father, who disciplines His own children perfectly—and uses them to raise up their seed to be “disciples” under Jesus’ easy yoke and light burden!
A striking sermon preached by Free Church of Scotland great, Robert Buchanan on discerning the “signs of the times.” Listen here, or read the entire sermon below. Here are a couple of choice passages:
“Our Saviour charged it as a sin against the Jews, that while they could ‘discern the face of the sky and of the earth,’ they did not discern that eventful time. May not a like condemnation be justly pronounced against the men of our own day? Out of the multitudes who so closely watch every indication of change that appears on the ever shifting horizon of the commercial and political world, how small, comparatively speaking, is the number of those whose hearts and minds are similarly exercised as to the signs and prospects of the kingdom of God. For the thousands and tens of thousands everywhere, whose eyes are intently turned to the discussions of senates, the deliberations of statesmen, the councils of kings, to gather some intelligence bearing on the security of property and the interests of trade, there is but one here and another there tremulously alive to the safety of the ark of God, and putting forth in deep solicitude the inquiry of our text, ‘Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?'”
“. . . It is to the Lord we must turn, if we desire to know what is in the womb of time, and say to his inspired seers, in the words of the text—’Watchman, what of the night?—Watchman, what of the night?'”
The following extract is taken from Jonathan Edwards’ magisterial History of the Work of Redemption.
* * * *
IV. That the state of things which is attained by the events of this period, is what is so often called the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God. We very often read in the New Testament of the kingdom of heaven. John the Baptist preached, that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, and so did Christ, and his disciples after him, referring to something that the Jews in those days expected, and very much talked of, which they called by that name. They seem to have taken their expectation and the name chiefly from that prophecy of Daniel in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Daniel 2:44, “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom,” together with that in Daniel 7:13-14.
Now this kingdom of heaven is that evangelical state of things in his church, and in the world, wherein consists the success of Christ’s redemption in this period. There had been often great kingdoms set up before, which were earthly kingdoms, as the Babylonian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman monarchies. But Christ came to set up the last kingdom, which is not an earthly kingdom, but an heavenly, and so is the kingdom of heaven, John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world.” This is the kingdom of which Christ speaks, Luke 22:29, “My Father hath appointed to me a kingdom.” This kingdom began soon after Christ’s resurrection, and was accomplished in various steps from that time to the end of the world. Sometimes by the kingdom or heaven, is meant that spiritual state of the church which began soon after Christ’s resurrection. Sometimes that more perfect state of the church which shall obtain after the downfall of Antichrist. And sometimes that glorious and blessed state to which the church shall be received at the day of judgment, 1 Corinthians 15:50, the apostle, speaking of the resurrection, says, “This I say, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”
The following article appeared at First Things, written by Carmel Richardson.
When I heard the price the retired man was asking for his home, a full $80,000 over online estimates of its value, I flinched. The market is hot in our small town, and the location was good, but was it that good? More importantly, would the bank appraise it so high? Just seven years ago, this seller had purchased the home for less than half the price he wanted for it in 2026.
My husband and I were in a spot familiar to many in our generation: trying to scrape together enough cash to buy a house from an older couple, who neither needed nor wanted the space, yet priced it extraordinarily high. Another retiree in our neighborhood recently listed his home, a three-bedroom house with a modest yard, at $100,000 over its estimated value. A third home in town has been relisted at least twice, as the retired woman selling it refuses to lower the price, despite knowing the home needs thousands of dollars in mold remediation and electrical updates. When we offered a number below her asking price, and above the home’s estimated value, she accused us of trying to fleece an older woman. It has since remained on the market for more than a hundred days, but she’s not in a hurry. She owns the home outright.
In a couple of passages Paul seems to have colored the word “day” forming part of the phrase with the (not-purely chronological), but likewise physical-pictorial association of the element of “light.” “Light” belongs to the day as its characteristic, the opposite of the darkness that pertains to the night. Hence “the day of the Lord” can be visualized as a day of deliverance, joy and blessedness. There is perhaps no figure more pregnant in its religious associations than the figure of “light.” In the sphere of the emotions (no less than in that of the intellect for knowledge) it is made to render service as a physical analogon for spiritual rejoicing. The two main passages inviting to this, as at least a partial interpretation interwoven with the preceding usage, are Rom. 13:11–14 and 1 Thess. 5:1–8. According to the former the world-night is a time of wickedness, characterized, as the night-time in the pagan world usually is, by such things as revelling, drunkenness, chambering, wantonness, strife, jealousy, because the publicity inseparated from daylight holds these and other things under restraint, vs. 13. Moreover, for the wicked as well as the good, the night is the period of sleep, vs. 11. Of this world-night the Apostle further affirms the nearness of the end: it is far spent; the emergency, therefore, demands watchfulness (“waking out of sleep”) and abstinence from all forms of pagan immorality, through the consciousness of the imminence of the crisis: it is high time; salvation, eschatological salvation, is relatively at hand. Believers must put on the “armor of light,” vs. 12. Besides the usual warning attached to the thought of the approaching moment of the judgment, there is here an allusion to the ushering in of the future state as a state of light, and salvation, a day in the literal (not merely chronological) sense; the day has become a qualitative conception, by reason of its association with light; the word has received ethico-religious import bono sensu, it is a day and not a night. And, through its contrast with “the night which is far spent,” it has also ceased to be the mere marking of a point in the eschatological process; this day so quickly to ensue is quantitatively stretched out to a period of extended duration. As the night had a course of which a “being far spent” could be predicated, so the day has its extension and means more, to speak in terms of the same figure, than the break of day, or the morning.
Our family watched this with great edification some time back. God is even greater than unnatural affections, and He still makes trophies of rejects and outcasts. Not Reformed, but close enough for Reformed folk to appreciate. “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11).
“If a poor child be capable of being thus transformed, how it should move the heart of a city philanthropist, when he thinks of the amazing extent of raw material, for this moral and spiritual manufacture that is on every side of him—when he thinks, that in going forth on some Christian enterprise among a population, he is, in truth, walking among the rudiments of a state that is to be everlasting—that out of the most loathsome and unseemly abodes, a glory can be extracted, which will weather all the storms, and all the vicissitudes of this world’s history—that in the filth and raggedness of a hovel, that is to be found, on which all the worth of heaven, as well as all the endurance of heaven, can be imprinted—that he is, in a word, dealing in embryo with the elements of a great and future empire, which is to rise, indestructible and eternal, on the ruins of all that is earthly, and every member of which shall be a king and a priest for evermore.”
West Port Experiment 