New West Community Church

Samuel Miller (1769-1850) was one of the three first Presbyterian professors at Princeton (alongside Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge), which was originally founded as a seminary for training pastors. He was a man of letters and learning who wrote on a wide variety of subjects. His sermon on fasting, The Duty, the Benefits, and the Proper Methods of Religious Fasting (1831) is exceedingly helpful, and as we are in our Spring week of prayer and fasting, I want to outline the sermon for you. His sermon text was Daniel 9:3, which says, “Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes.” Although he mentions several contextual details about Daniel in the introduction, the sermon is, for the most part, topical upon the subject of fasting. He first lays out the duty of fasting under three headings. The Light of Nature teaches the duty. And here he points to the fact that many pagans practice fasting as a means of consecreation or propitiation. Of course, he also writes that our our practices as Christians are different and inward, not merely outward. The Examples in Scripture. He mentions...Continue reading→

In the sermon Sunday, we noted that Joshua was very old, and he needed to pass down the work of fighting to a younger generation. We don’t know Joshua’s precise age, but it seems like that he was at least as old as Caleb, who was at this time eighty-five (Josh 14:10). Because every man of fighting age (twenty years or older) had died in the desert wanderings over forty years, there was a gap of at least twenty years between the oldest men in Israel and Joshua and Caleb. Joshua had been their commander throughout the taking of Canaan, but it was now time for the tribes to rely on God and move forward and take what was left of the land. We see here a call for older saints to pass on skills, responsibility, and authority, to the coming generation. We see this principle several times in the New Testament. The apostle Paul mentored young Timothy and then told him to do the same to others. “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who...Continue reading→