Archives for June 2021

Yesterday was a blessed and humbling day. Mary and I drove to East Lansing where I was grateful for the opportunity to preach twice for the University Reformed Church (especially since the first sermon didn’t go so well for me, but at the second service I had more freedom in preaching). The church has lots of children and young people—and when school is on, lots of university students. We enjoyed visiting afterward with a family that has twelve children—from ages 2 to 20! We were surprised to meet two other couples from the area whom we have known for years—one has 18 children and the other 11! The church was previously pastored by our friend, Kevin DeYoung, who is now serving in North Carolina; presently it is being pastored by another friend, Jason Helopoulos. Two of our own church families in the past that have moved to Lansing have settled in this church.

Then, in the evening, we had an installation service in our own church in Grand Rapids for office-bearers—five elders and five deacons. All of the elders and two of the deacons have served in the past, but the three new deacons are all young men in the upper-20s or early-30s, which is great to see. God continues to keep covenant with His church to a thousand generations! And one of the three is our son-in-law James (pictured below with me). With our son Calvin serving as another deacon and our other son-in-law Isaac entering his last year of seminary studies at PRTS, it made for a humbling evening to realize that God is now using all three of our sons in the service of His blood-bought church in official ways. I certainly don’t feel worthy of that. Pray for these ten men that they will serve the church well by God’s grace and be used for its upbuilding and the tearing down of the strongholds of Satan.

39 Plymouth Christian high-schoolers graduated last night. Pray that God will work savingly and abundantly in all of their hearts and lives in Christ Jesus by His Spirit, enabling them to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33), so that their lives might be exceedingly useful and fruitful to His glory.

After pecking away on editing this excellent book on the Lord’s Supper by a great Puritan author of twenty books, John Shower (1657-1715), for more than three years, I am excited that RHB finally has it in print. Not only are Shower’s sermons preached before and after the Supper’s administration superlative, but his answers to questions about salvation and assurance in relation to the Lord’s Supper are invaluable. If you want to understand the Lord’s Supper better, experience its encouragements more profoundly, and exercises its duties more faithfully, you’ll want to feast on this 400-page masterpiece! It is hard for me to believe that this hidden gem has not been reprinted for 319 years!

https://www.heritagebooks.org/products/the-lords-supper-doctrines-encouragements-and-duties-shower.html

Yesterday evening we commemorated my in-laws’ 65th anniversary—Henry and Lena Kamp and 40+ of their children (including in-laws—see picture above), grand children, and great-grandchildren. We missed those who couldn’t join us, but we had a great time having dinner together, then singing psalms and hymns and reminiscing about the mercies of God and some nostalgia about our dear parents’ past lives. We are so blessed to have God-fearing parents who have set the bar high for living godly in Christ Jesus by their own example, and we are deeply humbled that both of them are doing so well physically as well, and enjoy living together in their own home in their upper 80s. God is good!

Naphtali Press and Reformation Heritage Books have just co-published and released vol. 2 of 3 of James Durham’s (1622-1658) magisterial commentary on Revelation, covering chapters 4 through 11, as well as ten substantive theological discourses, which alone are worth the price of the book (e.g., the nature of Christ’s death, the extent of the merit of Christ’s death, Christ’s intercession, the constitution of true Reformation churches, etc.). This is a new critical edition edited by Chris Coldwell, with additional material from a 1653 manuscript that contains an early form of the lectures.

https://www.heritagebooks.org/products/a-commentary-upon-the-book-of-the-revelation-volume-2-lectures-on-chapters-4-11-durham.html

We’re grateful to announce that Lucas Boeken in the Netherlands just released the first two volumes of our Christian Biographies for Young Readers by Simonetta Carr, ably translated into Dutch by Jan Zeeman—one on John Bunyan and one on Jonathan Edwards.

You can purchase them directly from the publisher here: https://lucasboeken.nl/webshop/categorie/jeugd-en-kinderboeken/

Many more volumes hope to follow in the near future.

Nick Thompson and I are very excited about the arrival of the first volume of a major nine-volume series that we are writing for family worship for 5 to 12-year-old children (though the whole family can profit), running from Genesis to Revelation. The Lord willing, we hope to complete this project in five years.

This first volume provides 92 family worship sessions on the book of Genesis—hence the title: “Beginning: Family Worship in Genesis” (Reformation Heritage Books, 200 pages). Each daily family worship entry includes four sections: Review (questions from the previous day’s lesson); Read (Scripture reading with questions); Reflect (teaching on the passage read, with questions for today); Request (a main prayer idea or two flowing from the passage read).

Pray with us that God will bless this guide to tens of thousands of families around the world as they engage in family worship with their dear children.

https://www.heritagebooks.org/products/beginning-family-worship-in-genesis-beeke-and-thompson.html?mc_cid=b1346b0d81&mc_eid=3da70bbcaa

This afternoon I gave a funeral message on Psalm 31:14-15a—focusing on “My times are in Thy hands” for Dianne Arnoudse, a lifelong, seventy-year-old member of our church. My colleague, Dr. Maarten Kuivenhoven, spoke a committal message on Psalm 71:20-21 at the graveside. Diane struggled through many illnesses throughout her life (we did not think that she would make “the age of the strong”), but she was able to confess that Christ was her only hope. What an incredible change it is for a true believer to be led through fire and water in this life and then be brought into a wealthy place instantly and forever where sin and infirmity never enter, and where perfect utopian marriage with Christ lasts forever! Pray for the family as they mourn Dianne’s loss, and for all of us that we may be prepared to meet the Lord, being able to confess in truth: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain!”