Becoming a Man of the Book

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Are you an elder? Do you hope to become one? Are you trying to raise them up in your church? If so, Donald Norbie has some practical advice.  In his booklet, Shepherd the Flock, Norbie summarizes the qualifications and functions of the elder. One qualification is being “able to teach” (1 Tim 3:2). Teach what?  The Bible.
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Doctrinal Emotive Behavior Therapy in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

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On Sunday morning, I had “house church” with the kids. They liked it. We gathered together, sang a Psalm; Daphne read the Scripture (Luke 12:32-34), and we started discussing it.  The kids had been fighting over toys recently, so we discussed the reason why. Why do they find it so hard to share their toys? Why do they get so upset when someone else is playing with
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Doctrinal Emotive Behavior Therapy in 1 Thessalonians 3:1-5

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In an earlier post, I talked about what I call Doctrinal Emotive Behavior Therapy (DEBT). It is similar to Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), but with a Biblical basis. REBT treats patients with emotional disturbances by challenging their irrational beliefs and convincing the patient to adopt more rational beliefs. That should lead to greater emotional stability.  REBT has a simple ABCDE method of
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A Free Grace Evening in Arkansas

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I recently spent a whirlwind day driving to Siloam Springs, in Northwest Arkansas for our first “Free Grace Evening”—basically, a mini-regional.  We do one national conference a year in Dallas and have been doing anywhere between three to four regionals a year, involving multiple speakers (for future events, see here). Organizing a regional takes a lot of preparation and organization and money. We only do it in
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How Jesus Received Hospitality

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What does an authentic Christian spirituality look like?  Recently I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Biblical commands concerning hospitality. To my surprise, I discovered that it is a major Biblical theme and an important part of what it means to follow Christ. We’re called to love our neighbors, and that means showing them hospitality. And yet,
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What Edward Fudge Can’t Believe about The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31)

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Now that our revised The Grace New Testament Commentary is out, I can go back to finishing up two or three book projects, such as on the “atonement” and “hell.”  My book on hell will, so far (I can still be convinced of a different view), defend eternal conscious torment (ECT)—though not the ECT of Augustine, Dante, and the Roman Catholic
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Six Raptures?

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Do you believe in the Rapture? I do. But not everyone does. The very idea of the Rapture is regularly denounced as nonsense by non-Dispensational Christian theologians (see here).  But is the idea of the rapture Biblical?  I was perusing this conservative Mennonite commentary/study guide on Revelation. I haven’t read through it yet, but I liked a chart on p. 12 that describes six
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Bye Bye Netflix

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Since having kids, my wife and I have time to watch maybe one show a night. It often takes two or three nights to finish a movie. But over the last four or five years, finding things to watch has become increasingly difficult. We’ve had to tune out more and more shows because of their
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