Can the book of Revelation be understood? Yes, it can. Its message can be summarized by one sentence: God rules history and will bring it to its consummation in Christ.

Vern S. Poythress, The Returning King: A Guide to the Book of Revelation, 11.

Henderson did speak of liberty versus tyranny, but with liturgical and eschatological qualifications. . . . It is important to keep Henderson’s arguments against episcopacy anchored in his struggle against idolatry. If not, his arguments can be easily transformed into some kind of appeal for political ends, or a historian can place them in a context relevant to his or her personal situation.

L. Charles Jackson, Riots, Revolutions, and the Scottish Covenanters: The Work of Alexander Henderson, 169.

[T]he Scots encouraged the habit of listening to the preacher. People were expected to be able to repeat the main points of the preacher’s sermon to a master or parents. Those who heard the word preached were under a divine obligation to meditate on it and to recall it to their hearts. Henderson said: “Therefore pray to the Lord, that whenever ye come to hear the word, ye may understand what is spoken to you and lay it up in your heart, that ye may have faith to believe, that ye may keep it into your memory, and the Spirit may bring it to your remembrance and that ye may have the word of promise also into your mouths to bring it out there as need is.” Henderson warned his listeners about the pitiful problem that sometimes neither the preachers nor hearers have faith as they deliver and listen to preaching.

L. Charles Jackson, Riots, Revolutions, and the Scottish Covenanters: The Work of Alexander Henderson, 116.

One element of Henderson’s success as a preacher may be related to his self-conscious instruction to his hearers regarding their obligations in what might be called godly listening. “In the hearing of the word,” said Henderson, “let us not only take heed what we hear, but let us also take heed to how we hear.” According to Henderson, the godly listener bears a responsibility to be an active hearer of the preaching of God’s word. Henderson’s exhortation to active or pious listening became a virtual plank in what could be called a Puritan theology of preaching.

L. Charles Jackson, Riots, Revolutions, and the Scottish Covenanters: The Work of Alexander Henderson, 115.

[Alexander] Henderson argued that a minister should not ignore human learning and the original languages, but he also argued that such learning should be put to the practical use of teaching or instructing the listeners with simplicity. Calderwood had accused the bishops of filling their sermons with unnecessary and arrogant displays of rhetorical flourishes that did little more than flaunt their learning. Such parades of learning may have impressed a listener with the speaker’s eloquence, but, according to Henderson, they had little power to inflict wounds to heal the soul, which was one of the primary purposes of godly preaching.

By simplicity Henderson did not mean that preaching should be dull in content, but that it need not be decorated with unnecessary rhetoric or showy displays of learning that might distract the humble listener from plucking the fruit of the sermon. Simplicity for Henderson did not mean that sermons were empty of good illustrations or rhetorical devices. In fact, when teaching his listeners with simplicity, Henderson used several useful rhetorical devices such as illustrations to exhort them further, saying: “The test it is the tree, the interpretation is the fruit that grows upon the tree, the application thereof is the hand whereby the fruit is plucked aff [sic] the tree.” He believed that preachers should use sermons to persuade God’s people to respond to God’s word in active faithfulness, and sermons were God’s primary instrument for such persuasion.

L. Charles Jackson, Riots, Revolutions, and the Scottish Covenanters: The Work of Alexander Henderson, 112-113.

It is the great truth, embedded in the Old Testament as well as in the New, that love is the fulfilling of the law, and that on two commandments, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ and ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’, hang all the law and the prophets (cf. Romans 13:10; Matthew 22:37-40). Among students of Christian ethics no datum is more universally admitted or regarded as more incontrovertibly established than this, that love is the fulfilling of the law.

John Murray, Principles of Conduct, 21.

Will mere prudence, without a divine right, be a sufficient basis to erect the whole frame of church-government upon (as some concede)? Prudentials according to general rules of Scripture may be of use in circumstantials, but will bare prudentials in substantials also satsify either our God, our covenant, our consciences, or our end in this great work of reformation?

Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, ed. Chris Coldwell, 41.

It is not enough to be born and raised in the church and receive the benefit of Christian education. A covenant child still needs the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. . . . They need the internal saving essence of the covenant, which is the regeneration by the Holy Spirit and union with Christ. If we do not understand and emphasize this, we will end up producing little Pharisees who say, “We are covenant children, so we are saved”; rebels who abandon everything and plunge back into the world; or nominal Christians who warm pews for eighty years and die, never having brought forth the fruits of salvation. Of them, Scripture says, “And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done: this is also vanity” (Eccl. 8:10).

Joel R. Beeke, Parenting by God’s Promises, 24.

The knowledge that we, too, are sinners should make us more understanding and more compassionate toward our erring children.

In acknowledging that our children are sinners, we must reckon with the seriousness of sin. Sin must be dealt with. As parents, we must maintain a precarious balance between seeing sin as sin and yet being gracious in dealing with it. The delicate balance we seek is that of God Himself.

Joel R. Beeke, Parenting by God’s Promises, 16.

While we swim in a sea of “Christian” things, Christ is increasingly reduced to a mascot or symbol of a subculture and the industries that feed it. Just as you don’t really need Jesus Christ in order to have T-shirts and coffee mugs, it is unclear to me why he is necessary for most of the things I hear a lot of pastors and Christians talking about in church these days.

Michael Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church, 22).