How Jonathan Edwards Can Help Churches Today
Occasionally, churches must answer questions about passing fads. But most of the time they need to answer the more fundamental questions of life.
One of the most basic of them all is this: What is the nature of true religion? Or to state the question another way, How do we recognize a genuine work of the Spirit of God from its many counterfeits?
The importance of answering fundamental questions well cannot be overemphasized. At stake is our ability to distinguish between saving faith and dead faith and from true converts and false.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards. He thought long and hard about these questions for many years. His answers have proven both Biblical and useful to churches today.
What follows is a summary of Edwards’s life, an explanation of how he arrived at his conclusions, and a few examples of the ways his insights can shape life and ministry today.
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Brandon James Crawford is pastor of Grace Baptist Church, Marshall, Mich., and a contributor to the forthcoming Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (Thomas Nelson).
