We recommend Training Hearts, Teaching Minds as a text for family devotions! The readings are short and concise for each day with a scripture reading to discuss. This is an excellent resource for teaching your children (and entire family) how to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

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Communion's Book Club meets on the third Tuesday of each month with an open invitation to all to join if you're reading it or not!

Here is our current text:

"Faith is trusting and resting upon something with all of your intellectual weight. But faith also has a personal component, because we never trust in machines or in bridges, we trust in the persons who made these things. In the same way, Machen points out that anyone's faith is a matter of personal relationship. So to define a proper Christian faith, it must be done by properly knowing the person of Jesus Christ."

Our past texts:

Here are some good quotes:

"It is impossible to say that one can be justified and yet still remain 'dead in trespasses and sins.' 'The natural person,' not the believer, rejects 'the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.'" Everyone who is buried with Christ in the likeness of his death is raised with him in the likeness of his resurrection. Returning to spiritual blindness and death is an impossibility for those who are in Christ. It is in this light that we can say that only those who are being sanctified will be glorified. That inward holiness that God requires is not to be confused with justification, but it also cannot be separated from it. Those who are justified will enter heaven with new hearts that delight in God's law, and none who despises God's law will enter its sacred precincts" (p.184).

"Everything that God requires in this covenant is also given by God!...The salvation that he promises and provides is total, leaving nothing for us to achieve through our own strength" (pg. 185).

"So now a condition such as 'all who persevere to the end shall be saved' can come to us not as a threat--a condition that somehow we have to meet if we ever hope to attain our own salvation--but rather as a condition that we know God himself will work out for us and within us according to his own good pleasure" (p.185).

"Yet not everyone who belongs to the covenant community will persevere to the end. Some are weeds sown among the wheat, seeds that fell on rocky soil or that is choked by the weeds. Some branches do not bear fruit and are broken off. Again, this should be threatening only to those who in fact do fall away, those who like Esau forfeit their birthright for a paltry alternative" (p.185).

"It is not the faithful who gather together to participate in the weekly covenant renewal ceremony who should be threatened by a final excommunication on the last day, but those who are unrepentant and unbelieving among us" (p.185).

"If you are living in open rebellion against the promises of God and do not delight in his law inwardly, then the inheritance does not belong to you even if you have been incorporated visibly into the covenant community. The gospel is greater than we ever imagined, and the judgment is severe for those who reject the realities it brings into our lives" (p.192-193).

"God's law, we find, provides the direction but not the power, and a panoply of spiritual technologies are available to substitute. We think that by reading this book or going to that conference or following this plan for spiritual victory or these steps for overcoming sin in our life, we can get the boat going in the right direction again" (p. 193).

"What you really need is to be told all over again about who God is and what he has done to save you, and about the new world that awaits you because of his faithfulness to unfaithful sailors. This alone will fill your sails so that you can get safely back to the harbor when the gales blow hard" (p.194).

"Our whole life as Christians is a process of sailing confidently into the open seas, dying down in exhaustion, and having our sails filled again with God's precious promises. We are never at any moment simply under full sail or dead in the water, but move back and forth throughout the Christian life" (p.194).


Great Quotes from this book: (read it online here)

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers... in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.

A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society. It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free... In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.

For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence) -- to us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and, the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar (A curved sword) in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

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Our monthly women's meeting held on the last Saturday of each month is known as Women of the Word. Presently this group meets for fellowship, prayer and Bible devotions. Currently, our ladies are studying the New Testament book of Philippians. They meet on the last Saturday of every month in the city of Irvine. Please see our "Newsletter" for updates.