‘Exalt
the Lord our God... Make a joyful noise to the Lord’(Psalm 99:5,9;
Psalm 98:4,6; Psalm 100:1). We are to worship the Lord with joy. We are
to glorify God. We are to enjoy Him. In our worship, we must never
forget the holiness of God: ‘He is holy!... The Lord our God is holy!’(Psalm 99:5,9). In our worship, we rejoice in the love of
God: ‘His steadfast love endures for ever... He has done marvellous
things!’(Psalm 100:5; Psalm 98:1). The God of ‘awesome purity’ loves us
with the most perfect love of all: ‘No earthly father loves like
Thee...’. Let us worship Him with holy fear and heartfelt love: ‘O how I
fear Thee, living God, with deepest, tenderest fears... with trembling
hope and penitential tears! Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord, Almighty as
Thou art, for Thou hast stooped to ask of me the love of my poor
heart’(Church Hymnary, 356).
A response to a comment by G. R. Osborne on Berkouwer’s understanding of the doctrine of final perseverance
In his contribution to Clark Pinnock (editor), Grace Unlimited (1975), G. R. Osborne states that Berkouwer, in Faith and Perseverance, pp. 9-10, “speaks of the time less ness of the doctrine of final perseverance, founded on ‘the richness and abidingness of salvation” (p. 188, emphasis mine). This single-sentence comment on Berkouwer’s view hardly gives a fair indication of the type of thinking found in Chapter 1 of Berkouwer’s Faith and Perseverance - “Time li ness and Relevance” (pp. 9-14, emphasis mine). Berkouwer insists that “the living preaching of the Scriptures, which offer no metaphysical and theoretical views about … ‘permanency’ as an independent theme in itself, does nothing to encourage ‘a continuity which is … opposed in any way to the living nature of faith” (p. 13). Berkouwer stresses that “The perseverance of the saints is not primarily a theoretical problem but a confession of faith” (p. 14) and that “The perseverance of the saints is unbreakably connected wi...
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