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Archive for October, 2026

God is Our Refuge and Strength

Posted in Psalmody, Recent Reading (Book Recommendations), WPE Editor on October 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The following is a book review of God Is Our Refuge and Strength: 150 Devotional through the Psalms, written by my good friend, Rob Ventura, and Bill Boekestein. Banner of Truth is publishing it, set to release this month.

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If you pick up a well-worn Bible from a serious Christian, you will often find a slightly darker band along the edge of the pages. Pretty much in the middle. Crack it open at that point, and you will find the Book of Psalms. And there’s good reason. In the library of Holy Scripture, the Psalms hold a prominent place in God’s self-revelation and strike the deepest chords in the heart of every believer. Bill Boekestein and Rob Ventura’s God is our Refuge and Strength: 150 Devotionals through the Psalms is a welcome offering for any reader of the Psalms.

This book is more a devotional than a commentary. And yet, it is a more dense devotional. Not that it is inaccessible, mind you. Hardly! I would hand this volume to a thoughtful high schooler. But by ‘more dense,’ I mean that Refuge and Strength is more intentional in dealing with the actual exegesis, or the historico-grammatical meaning of each psalm. Yet the density is anything dry or cumbersome; rather, it lets the psalm’s natural beauty and real devotional character breathe. You get biblical sentiment without sentimentality, romance without mush, piety without its sickly, saccharine look-alikes. This devotional flies much closer to the ground of the actual text—and thus to true religion!—with all its dread majesty, raw realism, self-abasing confession, and perplexity. But it does this all in manageable and engaging daily meditations.

Several other great features struck me in reading through the book. First, there is a refreshing honesty in coming to the text of the Psalms. “Many modern Christians have an uneasy relationship with the psalms. We believe that the psalms, as with all Scripture, are ‘breathed out by God and profitable’ (2 Tim. 3:16). Yet, reading and singing them can feel uncomfortable” (xix). That honesty of the reader fits with the very honesty of the Psalter itself. The “psalms are realistic. They provide a song for even mature believers who want to ‘be glad in the Lord’ (Psa. 32:11) but don’t always feel like it” (60; Psalm 42). The authenticity of the Psalter commends itself, especially to those who know something of the ‘dark night of the soul.’ “The writer is struggling. He feels trapped in darkness. He suffered from spiritual dehydration, stubborn sadness, and extreme uncertainty and pessimism. He feels trapped beneath the pounding torrent of God’s waterfall” (61; Psalm 42).

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Chalmers, “The Outward Business of the House of God”

Posted in Benevolence & the Diaconate, Chalmers Audio Library, Christendom, Free Church of Scotland, Thomas Chalmers on October 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Below is a sermon preached by Thomas Chalmers after the Disruption of 1843. Listen to the audio here; and a PDF of the sermon may be found below. Let confessional Presbyterians once again roll up their sleeves and build the walls of Zion!

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THE OUTWARD BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE OF GOD

Thomas Chalmers, D.D.

A sermon preached at the opening of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, holden at Glasgow, 17th October, 1843. Third edition. Glasgow: William Collins, South Frederick St., 1843.

Nehemiah xi. 16.

“And Shabbethai and Jozabad, of the chief of the Levites, had the oversight of the outward business of the house of God.”

The outward business of the house of God is of chief necessity and importance at the commencement of a Church, or at some of those great changes and enlargements which it is often made to undergo. At the outset of the Jewish Church, beside the regulations for the maintenance of the priesthood and distribution of the various offices, we read much of the time and labour expended on the structure of the tabernacle. The same thing might be observed on the occasion of great enlargements, or revivals, or deliverances—as at the rearing and successive great repairs of the temple in Jerusalem; and more noticeably still in the doings of Ezra and Nehemiah, on their return from their captivity, and the re-establishment both of their national and sacred polity. At the commencement, too, of the Christian Church, he who was the most gifted of its apostles—though pre-eminently a man of faith and prayer, and perhaps the most conversant among them in the vitalities of that high and hidden walk which constitutes the new obedience of the Gospel—still did he busy himself most of all with the matters of a mere external regulation, as journeys and collections, and the various questions of Church government and Church order. And descending from these primitive to later and uninspired times, where shall we find a more striking exemplification of the same union, than among the fathers of our own Church? We mean the devotedness of their piety as combined with the varied and profound wisdom of their economics. Had their conceptions all been realised, on the subject of schools and colleges, and a provision for the poor, as well as the various parts and offices of our great ecclesiastical institute, never, perhaps, was a more goodly apparatus devised, not for the Christian instruction alone, but for the moral, nay for the civil and secular well-being of the people in any land. Though these conceptions were not realised, though they were frustrated by the resistance of men in power, and by the unprincipled rapacity of the nobles in these days—this should not prevent us from doing homage to the conceptions themselves, as having been fraught with all the wisdom of experience, and of profoundest skill in the management, we could even say the philosophy of human affairs.

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