All Articles For Miersma, Thomas C

God gave us the book of Ecclesiastes to instruct us in spiritual wisdom as those living in a world fallen in sin and under the curse. He gave it by one who was old and endued not only with the wisdom of age and experience, but with the wisdom that only the Spirit of God can give. The Preacher searches the life of man under the sun, giving us to see with spiritual understanding the way of that life and its value and meaning in a world subject to vanity because of sin. In many ways the book addresses especially...

Previous article in this series: May 1, 2011, p. 346. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven”. Eccl. 3:1 Having pointed us to the transitory character of life and its vanity under the sun, Solomon turns to the seeming pattern of life in the world. The text presents a series of contrasts that embrace the bearing of children and birth, death and dying, planting and rooting up, and killing and healing. The contrasts encompass the circumstances and affairs of life or “purposes under heaven,” both of joy and sorrow, activity and labor, gain...

Rev. Miersma is Western Home Missionary of the Protestant Reformed Churches stationed in Spokane, Washington. The work in Spokane, Washington began with contacts made in the early 1990s. An independent congregation, Sovereign Grace Reformed Church, held conferences in Spokane on the doctrine of the covenant, with lectures given by Professor H. Hanko and Rev. C. Terpstra in 1992. I attended this conference as part of my vacation while pastor in Edmonton, Alberta and spoke at a second conference on preaching and the offer in 1993, along with Rev. C. Haak and Rev. A. denHartog. Members of our Immanuel PRC in...

Rev. Miersma is home missionary of the Protestant Reformed Churches. It has sometimes been said by the advocates of the offer that as Protestant Reformed Churches we cannot do mission work or preach the gospel in evangelism. Not only is this false, but, as I want to point out, the opposite is in fact true. It is my contention that it is those who hold the offer who have truncated the gospel, subverting its power and the word of grace. It is they who cripple mission work and debilitate the preaching of the gospel. The so-called free or well-meant offer...

Rev. Miersma is home missionary of the Protestant Reformed Churches. The San Luis Valley is one of the largest alpine valleys in the world. Located at seven thousand feet in southwestern Colorado, it is surrounded by mountains. While its climate is that of the southeastern desert in the U.S.A., it has deep sources of water underground, waters which once formed a lake after the Flood and which have since sunk below the surface. Through the valley flows the beginnings of the Rio Grande River as it makes its way southward to the Mexican border. It is a thinly populated area...

Rev. Miersma is home missionary of the Protestant Reformed Churches. In the previous portion of this article, October 1, 1997, I touched on the Reformed doctrine of preaching, something which has also been addressed in recent articles on Reformed worship. I also discussed the historical roots of the well-meant offer in the attempt in the past to marry the Reformed and Arminian doctrines of election and the atonement within the history of Reformed and Presbyterian doctrine. It is in that historical context that this article now returns to the subject under discussion. The well-meant offer, or free offer, and the...

Rev. Miersma is home missionary of the Protestant Reformed Churches. One of our principle concerns, as churches, over the past few years, though a happy concern, has been our mission work. This has dominated our synods and is reflected in our budgets for both foreign and domestic missions. This has been reflected also in past Standard Bearer articles on such topics as a home missionary- at-large. As the mission work of our churches will probably dominate this year’s Synod also, it may be profitable to reflect upon our current approach to mission work, specifically home mission work. Moreover, we have...

Rev. Miersma is home missionary of the Protestant Reformed Churches. The Word of God in Mark 16:15 calls us to “preach the gospel to every creature,” that is, to proclaim the gospel to all who will hear without distinction, wherever God is pleased to send His Word. We are called to reach the nations with the gospel of grace. This calling we seek to carry out both here in North America and abroad as God gives us the means and opportunity, both by local church extension and as a denomination of churches through our mission work. When we think of...

Rev. Miersma is pastor of First Protestant Reformed Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. God is a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This truth is set before us, as has been shown, in all the works of God, in all His revelation to us, and in the very language or terminology of Scripture itself. This doctrine is not founded upon one or two texts of Scripture but belongs to the whole fabric of God’s self-revelation. Distinct Personal Properties and Relations According to this revelation of God we distinguish not only three persons; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost within the...

Rev. Miersma is pastor of First Protestant Reformed Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In the modern age in which we live it is perhaps difficult to understand the wonder of that direct access we have to God through Jesus Christ, which was brought again to light by the Reformation. We live in an age where the opposite tendency; to humanize God, to bring Him down to our level, so pervades the church that the remoteness of God and of Christ which dominated the church at the time of the Reformation is almost wholly foreign to our thinking. The church at...