All Articles For Eriks, Garry

Rev. Eriks is pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church of Hudsonville, Michigan. This section of the Standard Bearer has been and continues to be written for the young people in the church. The title, “The Strength of Youth,” emphasizes the spiritual strength that God has given to our young people. This spiritual strength is renewed through the study of God’s Word. God has given the Scriptures to be our faithful guide in life. To encourage you young people in the study of God’s Word, I plan to write my articles so that they can be used for meditation on the Word of...

Rev. Eriks is pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church of Hudsonville, Michigan. Are you growing spiritually? Are you growing in your resistance of sin? Are you growing in faith so that more and more you are trusting in God? These questions are so important that elders often will ask them at family visitation. Even if they don’t ask the questions, this is one of their chief concerns, because they are responsible to care for your souls. Faithful husbands and fathers are concerned with the spiritual growth of their wife and children. As an individual, you should be asking yourself if...

I challenge you to think about some radical questions. What does the world say today about the teenage life? Is what the world says about this life right? Have you and your parents bought into this lie in some areas of your lives? How does God call you to live in your teenage years? Maybe when you read these questions you do not want to face them because this does not sound like much fun. These are some serious questions that require you to do some soul searching. I am writing about this, not to make your life more miserable,...

The young people who attended the 2010 young people’s convention may recognize the content of this article, because it is based on the speech I gave there. After receiving some encouragement to put the speech into writing, I decided I would write on the subject of sin’s bondage. The difficult part of writing this article is that I cannot use the visual aid that I used at the convention. So please picture in your minds as you read the article a little goldfish, named Sidney, swimming around in a bowl of water. Christians are captives set free from sin. This...

No matter what you do or where you go, there is one thing you do every day. You talk. From the time you get up in the morning until you lay your head on your pillow at night, you talk. Your life is filled with communication. In the kitchen, the family room, the car, the classroom, the hallways of school, on the basketball court or baseball field, you talk. In our techy society, you have many ways to communicate: texting, Facebook, email, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. Yet the primary way of communicating is talking. God has given to man the...

Rev. Eriks is pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church of Hudsonville, Michigan. This is the text of the speech given on September 24, 2009 at the annual meeting of the RFPA. Do you read good, Reformed books? Do you read the Standard Bearer and the books published by the RFPA? In your home do you teach your children to read? Do you model this in your home? If you are doing this, my desire is that you be encouraged to continue reading good, Reformed material. If you are struggling to read, may you be inspired to read good, Reformed (RFPA)...