Growth in Grace

Create in Me a Clean Heart by Matthew Boswell

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Repentance is one of those Christian words we use often enough to forget how difficult it is. We know sin must be confessed, but we can still be unsure what genuine repentance looks like—or whether we are approaching God with honest contrition or merely managing our guilt. In Create in Me a Clean Heart: Experiencing God’s Abundant Mercy in Psalm 51, Matthew Boswell turns to David’s great prayer of repentance to answer those questions. His central claim is that Psalm 51 is not merely the record of one king’s response to one terrible sin. It gives believers a pattern for returning to God, and the pattern begins not with the strength of our sorrow but with the abundance of God’s mercy.

Classical Theology for the Modern Mind by Carl Trueman

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:31:00 +0000

Ask a Reformed pastor whether he affirms the Westminster Confession’s teaching about God and he will probably say yes without hesitation. Ask him what it means for God to be “without body, parts, or passions,” or why the confession says the Son is “eternally begotten” rather than made, and the confidence may fade. Carl Trueman’s Classical Theology for the Modern Mind begins with that gap. His argument is not that confessional Protestants need to import something foreign called classical theism. It is that they already claim to believe these doctrines in the confessions they sign—Trinity, divine simplicity, immutability, impassibility—but many have lost sight of what those commitments actually mean.

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:47:00 +0000

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing — Jonathan Gibson (Crossway)

“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” Robert Robinson wrote those words in 1758, and they have left congregations struck by how uncomfortably accurate it describes our experience. Jonathan Gibson takes that line as his starting point in Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, and in doing so gives this devotional liturgy something rarer than good content: a theological rationale.

The Value of General Revelation

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

We live in a world suspended between beauty and decay. We see the brilliance of human culture and are confronted, in the same afternoon, by violence and moral collapse. It’s tempting, when we’re fixed on the saving grace of Christ, to write off the ordinary grace that keeps the world from tearing itself apart — to treat culture, conscience, and civic order as spiritually beside the point. It’s just as tempting to go the other way: to fall so hard for the good, the true, and the beautiful in the natural world that we quietly stop needing a Savior. In the fourth chapter of The Wonderful Works of God, Herman Bavinck sets out to hold both temptations at bay at once. General revelation, he argues, cannot save anyone. But it is the scaffolding that keeps the whole human project standing long enough for salvation to reach it.

General Revelation

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:16:00 +0000

We are surrounded by a world we did not make, yet we often live as if we are the masters of it. We study the stars, harness the wind, and dissect the atom, pushing nature to reveal its secrets. Yet when we turn our gaze toward the Creator of all these things, our tools fail us. We cannot put God under a microscope or force Him to disclose His character. In the third chapter of The Wonderful Works of God, Herman Bavinck addresses this reality: all true knowledge of God begins with His sovereign decision to speak. If God did not voluntarily make Himself known, we would be left in absolute silence.

The Knowledge of God

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:17:00 +0000

To know someone is fundamentally different from knowing facts about them. We can study a person’s biography, memorize their habits, and list their achievements without ever having met them or experienced the warmth of their presence. When it comes to God, we are prone to the same mistake. We easily swap a collection of theological doctrines—information about Him—for a personal, living communion with Him. In the second chapter of The Wonderful Works of God, Herman Bavinck addresses this crucial distinction. He shows us that the knowledge of God is not an intellectual trophy we win, but a covenant relationship into which we are graciously drawn.

Man's Highest Good

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:31:00 +0000

We feel a persistent pull toward something beyond ourselves, an insatiable itch that the material world cannot scratch. We chase comfort, status, and experience, yet the satisfaction we seek remains just out of reach. This tension is the starting point for Herman Bavinck as he begins The Wonderful Works of God. He sets before us a foundational truth: God, and God alone, is man’s highest good (our summum bonum). While God is the source of being and life for every creature, only humanity has the capacity to recognize, enjoy, and find rest in Him.

Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 01:27:00 +0000

Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West — Andrew Wilson

In the summer of 1776, laid up with gout, Benjamin Franklin made a small edit to a draft he’d been handed. Thomas Jefferson had written that certain truths about human equality were “sacred and undeniable.” Franklin crossed out the last two words and wrote “self-evident.” It’s a throwaway moment in most retellings of the founding, the kind of copyediting detail that gets a footnote if it gets anything. Andrew Wilson builds an entire argument out of it, and by the time you reach the end of Remaking the World, you understand why. The edit is a perfect miniature of what Wilson thinks happened to the whole Western world in and around that single year: a set of convictions that were originally theological got rebranded as rational, and two and a half centuries later we’ve largely forgotten there was ever a rebranding at all.

About Growth in Grace

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Growth is a central command of the Christian life, yet it is a work of God’s grace. Growth in Grace exists to equip Christians to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).

Through this blog, I share resources designed for your edification, including:

Biblical reflections
Theological studies
Literary recommendations

Feedback and suggestions are welcome. Reach out at scott@growthingrace.org.