Vander Zee on the frequency of receiving the supper, “If God feeds and confirms our faith in the sacrament, then we deprive ourselves of the fullness of his grace when we sit around the table only once in a while. We need every nourishment that God provides, and to miss the meal not only snubs […]

Vander Zee efficiently lays out God’s effective working of the redemption of His creation. “Biblically speaking, God does not hand the treasures of salvation in Christ over to the church to distribute and control. Neither does God have his Son die and rise again only to offer a ‘deal’ to humankind. and then wait around […]

Vander Zee again, “Through baptism God redefines us, telling us who we are, and making us who we are.”

Vander Zee emphasizes that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper “are gospel sacraments. They are signs and seals of the salvation we have in Christ. If one believes, for example, that this salvation is mediated through the apostolic authority of the church, then sacraments become ways in which that grace is controlled and distributed by the […]

Vander Zee again, quoting author Frank Gavin, “A sound Christian definition of sacrament proceeds from the characteristically Jewish premise that the material world is not evil, but good – since God made it and saw that it was good.”