We’ve added Robert Shaw’s commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. This is a great resource to use while reading and studying the WCF. He’s pretty thorough, but not overly verbose. In general, he can really help you understand a given article within just a few minutes.

Changelog

• We’ve added Robert Shaw’s Exposition of the Westminster Confession.
• To clarify, you can get to it a few ways:
  • Scrolling to the bottom of the library on the homepage and clicking on it, then clicking on a chapter number and an article number.
  • Typing ShawWCF and then a space and an article or chapter number into the Omnibar (case insensitive, e.g. you can just type shawwcf 28.4)
  • Go to the Westminster Confession, click the lightbulb icon for an article, then you’ll see this commentary in the Commentaries section.
  • Additionally, like all the resources we add, you will see this commentary content show up in the backlinks section when studying a Scripture passage, and in the Related Content section when studying content throughout the site. You can also search the resource by typing something like ShawWCF baptism.
• Other Fixes
  • Fixed spacing around the text in error pages.
  • Fixed some issues where "Try Even Harder" was throwing an error.
  • Made confessions show up in related content a bit more cleanly.

Discuss this update

We’ve added a new way to find related content and we’ve fixed a number of annoying bugs and annoyances. This is our 14th release in the year 2021 and we’re excited to try to beat that number of releases in 2022.

Changelog

• Verse references are now displayed in a more human-readable and consistent way, thanks to a third party library called the Bible Reference Formatter.
• When using a non-Bible resource with footnotes (like a catechism or confession), the verses will now be ordered a bit more correctly. Previously, if Psalm 2:1 through Psalm 12:11 were referenced, you’d get a bizarre behavior where they would be listed Psalm 2:1, Psalm 2:10, Psalm 2:11, Psalm 2:2 because of weird computer science-y things (waves hands).
  • This is actually part of a larger effort to get verse ranges to show as: Psalm 2:1–11 and to expand to open up to the first five verses in the range when clicked/tapped. This should be coming in a future release.
• Added support for next and previous buttons when you come to the end or beginning of a Bible book respectively. So when you are on Psalm 150, the next button will show and take you to Proverbs 1 if selected.Likewise, if you're in Proverbs 1 and tap Previous, you'll be taken to Psalm 150. This will be useful if you keep a Relight tab open in your browser for things like personal of family devotions.
• Fixed a bug where selecting an Omnibar autocomplete option added two spaces after the option, resulting in problems with quick navigation.
• Introduced a new Try Even Harder button to the Related Content area. This works by trying to find pieces of content that have similar words and expressions to what you’re currently reading. It currently works with all resources except commentaries and Scripture.
  • This feature is experimental and we need your feedback on it. If users find that it consistently provides useful results, the results will be added to the main list of Related Content and the button will be removed.

Please make sure to play with the Try Even Harder button and provide as much feedback as you can on the quality of the results.

Discuss this update

This release includes some bug-fixes and Matthew Poole’s English Annotations on the Bible! This is a really solid, helpful, and generally concise reformed commentary on the whole Bible.

Changelog

• Fixed an issue where typing the name of a book of the Bible wasn’t taking you to the first chapter of that book.
• Fixed an issue where the Omnibar would become unresponsive if you used your browsers back button.
• Added Matthew Poole’s English Annotations on the Bible.

Known Issues

• There are a lot of places where the title of a given section (like Genesis 3) is being used for things like Backlinks, which isn’t terribly useful. I’ll plan to fix that in the not-too-distant future.

Discuss this update

The Omnibar was originally written back before the front end rebuild earlier this year. I was able to bring over virtually all of the code, but given how it wasn’t built for the new system, that wasn’t optimal. I only did it because I really wanted to get the rewrite launched.

In this update, I went back through and rebuilt it using some of the newer frameworks. The great thing is that it’s about 60% of the code and a lot easier for me to work with—meaning adding new features in the future will be easier. But wait, there’s more! While I was in there, I added some new features.

Changelog

• The Omnibar doesn’t break when you enter a verse range (it just takes you to the first verse in the range).
• The Omnibar doesn’t rudely hiccup when you enter multiple verses (it just takes you to the first one).
• The Omnibar (finally) doesn’t require a colon after any of the shortcodes (so you can type wcf or henry without needing a colon).
• The Omnibar lets you search resources by typing something like: wcf covenant administration
  • Practically speaking, this means that—for example—if you are trying to get to that catechism question that goes: “What is sin?” but you don’t remember the question number, you can type: wsc what is sinand be taken straight to it in the search results. I don’t know about ya’ll all, but I expect I’ll be using this to impress people in Sunday school discussions quite a lot.
• The Omnibar doesn’t take me like an extra 25 minutes every time I add a resource to the library to wire it into the omnibar and test.
• This update contains a fix for a bug Safari on iOS 15.1 (currently in Release Candidate stage) that was causing the Omnibar to have a white background with white text. This fix isn’t ideal and I hope to remove it when Apple fixes their bug.

Discuss this update

This is an exciting update. We’re launching our first modern title: The Prayer of the Lord by Dr. R.C. Sproul. Honestly, we didn’t expect to be able to have a deal with an actual modern publisher this soon—and we weren’t even 100% sure we would want to if we could. But Ligonier Ministries is one of our favorite confessionally reformed resources. They’re one of the main reasons Sarah and I are reformed, and our congregation often makes use of their teaching resources. Given all of these factors, we were excited to publish something from Dr. R.C. Sproul.

Beyond that, Sarah and I think this book is quite helpful. There are a lot of books on prayer that completely ignore or even diminish Christ’s teaching on prayer. This book is firmly rooted in His teaching on prayer and truly helpful—especially because in our experience, many Christians feel like they should pray more, but also feel that they don’t know how.

Anyway, because this book is on the Lord’s Prayer, you’ll see it show up not just as a resource to be read, but because of Relight’s nifty database and features, you’ll see it as a commentary on many Bible passages about prayer—especially on Matthew 6:9–13. You should also see it show up in the backlinks section of resources that talk about prayer, like the Westminster Larger Catechism question 196.

Oh, and by the way, the book is free to read on Relight! You don’t need to create an account or buy anything. You can just go start reading right now.

Changelog

• Added The Prayer of the Lord by R.C. Sproul
  • You can quickly navigate to a chapter in this book by typing: SproulLordsPrayer and then some number, like 3.
  • You’ll also see this resource in the library.
  • Paragraphs from this resource should show up in the Backlinks section of any verse it references.
  • Where applicable, paragraphs from this resource should show up in Related Content.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused an incorrect URL when sharing from the Heidelberg Catechism.

Discuss this update

The Three Forms of Unity are reunited, and I hear it feels quite good.

Changelog

• Added The Canons of Dort
• Added article number to Confession displays (not sure when they disappeared or if I ever had them, but they’re there now).
• Fixed issues with sharing not correctly formatting/providing correct titles and links in some cases, especially for the Westminster Directory for Public Worship, and the related bug reported by @bakoind.

This one was surprisingly hard to add. The data structure of having articles and rejections made things difficult. If any of you are ever on the committee for a denomination drafting a confession of faith—by all means, argue for reformed theology, piety, and practice. But also argue for data uniformity and historically established best practices. Thanks.

Discuss this update

We remade our blog. Why? A few reasons:

• The old blog was hosted on Squarespace, which is a nice service, but is also a little expensive—especially since the new blog is free to host.
• When we made the blog, Relight’s branding wasn’t fully defined. This blog is much more in keeping with Relight’s look and feel.
• The new blog is based on some of the technologies behind Relight (like Nuxt and VueJS), so maintaining, updating it, or tweaking the theme won’t be a hassle for David.

Anyway, if you were using the RSS feed, it’s now located here.

Even if your church has its own directory for public worship, you might appreciate reading this because it really strives to only require what the Scripture requires, without adding anything or taking anything away.

• Added Westminster Directory for Public Worship.
• Fixed page titles on Henry’s WSC catechism.
• Added info about Relight message board to footer, FAQ, and about page.
• Fixed issues with share modal.
• Added noindex rule to development sites to improve the main site’s SEO. This should help people find Relight when searching for reformed resources on Google.
• Fixed font sizing issue on chapter commentary.
• The autocomplete options no longer hide the keyboard when you tap on them. So you can open the Omnibar, type ‘W,’ tap for the Westminster Shorter Catechism, then just type a number to get there (without having to tap the Omnibar again).

Discuss this update

We’ve added Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Westminster Shorter Catechism!

• To clarify, you can get to it a few ways:
  • Scrolling to the bottom of the library on the homepage and clicking on it, then clicking on a question number.
  • Typing Henry WSC: and then a question number into the Omnibar (case insensitive, and you don’t even need the space, e.g. henrywsc: 21)
  • Go to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, click the lightbulb icon for a question, then you’ll see this commentary in the Commentaries section.
• Additionally, like all the resources we add, you will see this commentary content show up in the backlinks section when studying a Scripture passage, and in the Related Content section when studying content throughout the site.
• Other changes:
  • Fixed some layout issues around commentaries.
  • Fixed an issue with commentaries in backlinks.

This should be really useful for family catechesis, since it’s not-too-short and not-too-long. We’re super excited about this release because it’s a big step toward Relight becoming a proper “Reformed Theology Study App.” Mind you, no one had ever really made one of those before, so we could have duct-taped an old motherboard to the back of a copy of Calvin’s Institutes and said we were done. But that would be silly. We wouldn’t do that.

For us, a reformed theology study app is an app that connects theology systematically and by reference. It lets you study the catechisms and confessions just like you would study a verse in a Bible study app.

Discuss this update

With this release, we have 2/3rds of the Three Forms of Unity! The Canons of Dort should come in the next few releases.

• We’ve added the Heidelberg Catechism.
• To clarify, you can get to it a few ways:
  • Scrolling to the bottom of the library on the homepage and clicking on it.
  • Typing Heidelberg into the Omnibar (case insensitive).
  • Typing Heidelberg and then a question number into the Omnibar (like heidelberg 21)
  • Typing Heidelberg LD (short for Lord’s Day), then a number between 1 and 52 into the Omnibar to navigate to the questions for a specific Lord’s Day—this should be useful for families who use this catechism on the Lord’s Day.
• Additionally, like all the resources we add, you will see Heidelberg content show up in the backlinks section when studying a Scripture passage, and in the Related Content section when studying content throughout the site.

Discuss this update

This update includes a pretty powerful new feature for finding very specific content.

• Created a new [[reference]] syntax for the Omnibar. This is a hard feature to explain, but very powerful—especially for topical studies or research. The idea is that you can wrap verse references in double brackets to find results that reference those verse references. IE, you can search for anything that references [[Matthew 28:19]] and contains the word “Godhead" or "trinity." Or you can search for anything that references [[John 3:16]] and uses the word “predestined.” Or you can search for anything that references both [[James 2:24 Romans 3:28]]. You can also write these lazily like [[gn 3 15, rm 16 20]] to filter results to things that references Genesis 3:15 and Romans 16:20.
• There is also a user interface around this [[references] syntax. Once you’ve done a search, you'll see a new filter on the left (or at the top on mobile) called "Required References.” You can enter a comma separated list of references in here to filter your results by Bible reference (the smart Omnibar tech for parsing hastily typed references applies here, too). If your search already has required references, you’ll see them listed here and you can click the X icon to stop requiring them.
• The usefulness of this feature is in refining your search topically. In the examples above, someone might be doing a paper or preaching a sermon on the Trinity—being able to filter commentary results about Matthew 28:19 to those that speak about the Trinity or the Godhead would be quite powerful. Similarly, someone might have read a commentary or two on James 2:24, but might want to dig deeper and find more resources that specifically contrast and harmonize the verse with Romans 3:28. Lastly, someone doing biblical-theological study might be interested to find commentary or other resources that speak about the relationship between Genesis 3:15 and Romans 16:20. This feature will grow more powerful the more resources we add.
• Fixed bug on commentary chapter pages where the first verse in the commentary for the chapter was not verse one (IE, when the commentary starts by commenting on verse six or three, as Calvin’s commentary on the synoptic gospels and the Geneva notes commonly do).