June–July 2011 Ordained Servant

From the Editor. The loftiest of the rights envisioned by the founders of our republic is the "pursuit of happiness." This is actually what the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, says. The fourteenth amendment of the Constitution concludes the famous trio with a more mundane third right, "life, liberty, and property." The self-evident, God-given, and "unalienable" right to the "pursuit of happiness," while uniquely embedded in these founding documents, is fundamental to our human aspirations because we are made in God's image—and yet because of sin, elusive, as Ecclesiastes teaches us. While the secular theorists who I review in "Exploring Happiness" ponder the nature of happiness, Larry Wilson's exposition of Psalm 1 leaves the Christian in no doubt about what happiness is and where it may be found. Closely linked to happiness is the subject of love. Jack Sawyer demonstrates that heaven's bliss begins here and now as we learn to love our fellow Christians, reminding us of Jonathan Edwards's famous sermon "Heaven, a World of Love."

Don't miss Kevin Kisler's review of Joel Beeke's and our own James LaBelle's jointly authored new book, Living by God's Promises, or this month's poem by Robert Frost.

Next month, having celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the OPC at our general assembly, OS will look at "The OPC at 75."

Blessings in the Lamb,
Gregory Edward Reynolds

Ordained Servant exists to help encourage, inform, and equip church officers for faithful, effective, and God glorifying ministry in the visible church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Its primary audience is ministers, elders, and deacons of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, as well as interested officers from other Presbyterian and Reformed churches. Through high quality editorials, articles, and book reviews we endeavor to stimulate clear thinking and the consistent practice of historic, confessional Presbyterianism.