Cornelius Plantinga

When we practice good deeds based on the virtues of Christ, we express our gratitude to God for our salvation. How so? We show we are enthusiastic about God’s purposes in the world and want to make them our own.

The grace we celebrate as Christians and as children of the Reformation is free, undeserved favor which is lavish, uncalculating, and surprising in its loveliness.

This Lent, embrace the silence—your own, and God’s.

“How do we thank God for forgiving our sin when we won’t talk about sin?  How would that go? “Amazing Grace” is the all-time most popular Christian hymn and it has me confess that such grace is for “a wretch like me.”  How could this classic hymn fit in churches that throw a furniture blanket over the topic of sin and move it out of the sanctuary?”

“God’s presence is not just an acknowledged fact. It is an experienced reality that surrounds, envelopes, and blesses. God always fills the room.”

What if you passed a super magnet over human history and lifted up all the justice, love, and beauty that have been influenced by Jesus Christ? Let’s say you’d need quite a magnet and that you’d leave quite a hole in history. 

God is “almighty,” says the Confession, but also “completely good,” in fact “the overflowing source of all good.” In fact, all of God’s mighty acts double as demonstrations of God’s goodness. Jesus didn’t heal diseases to show off. He did it to show mercy to suffering human beings.

In trinitarian worship when we offer prayer to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are deeply aware that we do not have a single listener. We are praying into a threefold society of listeners. Moreover, as Romans 8 reveals, when we pray into the triune life, we are praying into a center of hospitality. As we pray the Spirit intercedes for us. As we pray, Jesus Christ intercedes for us. The triune God makes room for us in this wonderful way.

What does it mean to have business with God, to engage with the creator of the universe, the Holy One, in life and worship? In this blog Dr. Cornelius Plantinga unpacks that question with the aid of John Calvin’s writing on negotium cum Deo, our business is with God.

“In one of the most famous texts of the Bible, Jesus says that we need to be "born again" (John 3: 3). To enter the Kingdom of God, people need to be conceived by the Holy Spirit and  "born from above." But here a big question comes up: If this wonderful event happened to us, how would we know? What would be the sign?” That is the question that Dr. Cornelius Plantinga ponders this month in his series“Speaking with a Reformed Accent”.

This is the second blog in a series of monthly blogs on “Speaking with a Reformed Accent”. In this blog Dr. Cornelius Plantinga reflects on how the law can be a form of God’s grace, something John Calvin referred to as the third use of the law.

“Many of us speak mere Christianity with a Reformed accent. Following such great reformers as John Calvin and John Knox, we do practice mainstream Christianity. We are not cultists. But we have our own pattern of emphases. When we preach, teach, or speak the faith we sound more like Calvin than like Martin Luther or Thomas Aquinas.” But what does that accent sound like in worship? In this monthly blog series Cornelius Plantinga will examine “points of emphasis in the Reformed tradition and how they show up in worship.”