God means to fulfill the Great Commission through local churches.How did the apostles and the churches of the New Testament obey the Great Commission? By gathering Christians together in churches. The church is God’s plan for evangelism, discipleship, and the Great Commission. This connection between the Great Commission and the church dramatically impacts how both leaders and members should think about their work of making disciples. We do it together.

Who leads a church? Why is this important to God?God cares about his glory, and he means to display his glory through the church. For this very end, God has established elders and deacons, members, and congregational authority. This primer on church structure connects the different offices of the church to one another and to the glory of God.

The revised edition of A Theology for the Church retains its original structure, organized under these traditional theological categories: revelation, God, humanity, Christ, the Holy Spirit, salvation, the church, and last things.Each chapter within these sections contains answers to the following four questions: What does the Bible say? What has the church believed? How does it all fit together? How does this doctrine impact the church today?Contributions from lea...

Everyone is looking for power. Political campaigns play to the power of fear and hope; advertising agencies rely on the power of appetite, both wielding power by the means of words.But churches have something different and better. Churches have the gospel. Though we live in the world, we must not wage war like the world, or fight with its weapons. On the contrary, we have divine power to demolish strongholds.The gospel consists merely of words, but those words have the unex...

Burning pyres, nuns on the run, stirring courage, and comic relief: the Protestant Reformation is a gripping tale, packed with drama. But what motivated the Reformers? And what were they really like?The Unquenchable Flame, a lively, accessible, and fully informative introduction to the Reformation by Michael Reeves, brings to life the movement’s most colorful characters (Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, The Puritans, etc.), examines their ideas,...

Ours is an anti-polity age, perhaps more than any other time in the history of the church. Yet polity remains as important now as it was in the New Testament.What then is a right or biblical polity? The contributors to this volume make an exegetical and theological case for a Baptist polity. Right polity, they argue, is congregationalism, elder leadership, diaconal service, regenerate church membership, church discipline, and a Baptist approach to the ordinances.Each sectio...

Fully grasp how every part of Scripture fits together to point to and reveal the glory of Christ Jesus.From beginning to end, the Bible reveals the glory of Jesus. But for many Bible readers, it doesn't seem that simple. We're often unsure how the Bible's many stories, characters, events relate together and connect to Jesus. Some are tempted to force the pieces of the Bible together, making superficial jumps to him. Others give up trying to understand the Bible alt...

Perspectives on Christian Worship presents in counterpoint form five basic common beliefs on Christian worship that have developed over the course of church history with a view toward determining which is most faithful to Scripture. Each chapter is written by a prominent person within each tradition, and each writer has the opportunity to respond to each differing view.

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” —1 Peter 5:5A battle rages within every one of us every day. It’s the clash between our sense of stubborn self-sufficiency and God’s call to recognize that we’re really nothing without Him. It’s pride versus humility. And it’s a fight we can’t win without looking repeatedly to Christ and the cross. C. J. Mahaney raises a battle cry to daily, diligently, and deliberately weaken our greatest enemy (pride) and cul...

The Bible has a way of shocking us. If Americans could still blush, we might blush at the words, "Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love" (Proverbs 5:18-19).But, of course, sin always tries to trash God's gifts. So we can't just celebrate sex for what God made it to be; we have to fight what sin turned it into. The contributors to this unique volume encourage you to do b...

Christians face lots of practical questions when it comes to life in the local church: How is the gospel displayed in our lives together? What are we supposed to do and believe? Different followers answer differently—even as they preach the same gospel! What should we think about such differences?A church’s life, doctrine, worship, and even polity are important issues. Yet they are so rarely addressed. The Church is Mark Dever’s primer on the doctrine of the church for all...

Mark Dever, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks, is widely respected for his efforts to build biblically faithful churches in America that will impact the nations. In this book about one of the practical distinctives of that work, Dever and his former student Greg Gilbert offer a theological and practical guide emphasizing the centrality of expositional preaching -- sermons intentionally rooted in a specific Bible text.Dever and G...