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Sacrificial Love

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By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little
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The Fund Raising Faith Barrier

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For a short time early in my Christian life I followed Bill Gothard’s teaching that even adult children are to obey the wishes of their parents. As a result, when I graduated from college, I sought my parent’s permission to go on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ. They said no. They wanted me to
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Keep the Big Picture in Church Ministry

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A good friend of mine—we’ll call him Steve—graduated from seminary 40 years ago. He pastored at a church in Colorado for four years, then left the ministry, never to pastor again. Instead he went into secular work. While he enjoyed that career, I’ve often wondered what might have been. This man is a genius and
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Triune Love

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Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. he who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:7-8 (NKJV) The prominent Roman Catholic theologian, Hans urs von Balthasar, was once asked why there was a
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Why We Should be Wary of Adding Extra-Biblical Rituals to our Worship

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by Philippe Sterling1, originally published in the Jan/Feb, 2010 edition of Grace in Focus as “Return to Ritual, Pt 2”2 What are some reasons for not returning to the rituals of historic Christianity? A. MOST LITURGICAL PRACTICES ARE NOT DERIVED FROM APOSTOLIC TEACHING. The return to liturgy from the “historical church” may be inconsistent with
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2006: A Tough Year for Assurance

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By Bob Wilkin Over the course of ten years, our annual conference had been growing dramatically. Our first conference had 35 attendees. In 2006, our 11thconference, we had 350, a tenfold increase. One year later, at the 2007 annual GES conference, we had 160 attendees. In the ten years since then our attendance has ranged
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How to Persevere Through Trials

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In February of 1982 I was hired to be the pastor of a very small (25 people) Bible church in the Dallas area. I pastored that church as I finished the master’s program at DTS and then during my doctoral work. Sharon and I went to Arkansas for a week of vacation the last week
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Why You Need Basic Bible Knowledge

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I was speaking about John’s Gospel to a man who was a life-long Baptist and had attended Church for over fifty years. At the time, we were discussing John the Baptist’s Aaronic heritage and how that fit into the meaning of John 1, when I casually mentioned that John was killed before the end of
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Not Impressed?

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For most of us, there is a tendency to be impressed when we meet people of accomplishment. The world certainly has its ways of measuring the greatness of individuals. The same thing is true in the Christian world. When we speak of pastors, for example, we often measure greatness by the size of that pastor’s
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When Compromise is Destructive

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For many people, there is a strong desire for compromise. We all find ourselves in situations where we do not see eye to eye with others around us. In many of these instances, the other people involved are people with whom we want to have some kind of relationship. Compromise is the way to bring
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