Do not love the world or the things in the world. (1 John 2:15a) All of us have been the butt of a joke at sometime. Many times, it is all in good fun. I remember when I was in the military and was new to a unit, I became the butt of a very

On September 6 one of my seminary professors, Dr. Stan Toussaint, died. I have many fond memories of him. About five years ago he spoke at our annual conference. His big idea was this: “The kingdom is not now and the kingdom is not now.” He said that multiple times. He specifically was rejecting the

The Role of Suffering in Preceding Glory Today I received an irenic email from someone, we will call him Frank, who agrees that everlasting life is absolutely free. However, he also thinks that in order to get that free gift you must deny yourself. Here is what Frank wrote: I’d like to offer my opinion

Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. James 4:4 What emerges from the epistle is a portrait of Christian readers many of whom are materialistic in outlook, cultivating connections with

There are two standards for evaluating a logical argument. First, is it true? And second, is it valid ? When an argument has true premises and is deductively valid, it is called sound. According to the first standard, in order for a logical argument to be true, the premises must be true. That’s common sense.

Matthew Hennessey reported on a Pew study for The Wall Street Journal. Here is an interesting statistic: “Catholics aren’t the only ones dealing with religious illiteracy. Pew found that 53% of American Protestants couldn’t identify Martin Luther as the man who inspired the Reformation. (Oddly, Jews, atheists, and Mormons were more familiar with Luther.) Fewer

Recently, in a Sunday School class I was teaching, we were going through the parable of the minas in Luke 19:11-27. In the parable there are three servants of the Lord that give an account of how they served Him while they waited for His return. It is clear that all three servants are believers.

A favorite Bible story for many is the healing of ten lepers. It is found in Luke 17. These ten lepers, evidently somewhere in Galilee (Luke 17:11), but including Jews and at least one Samaritan, saw the Lord and cried out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” (Luke 17:13). The miracle is told in surprisingly

­­­Almost all of us have faced something that was unpleasant but needed to be done. For those who have served in the military, an example of that would be basic training. Usually around six weeks long, we knew that it was going to be physically and mentally challenging. For most of us it was the

Recently, my daughter and I attended a Bible conference. We attended it because they had a high view of the inspiration of the Bible and were premillennialists. Since we those things in common we thought it would be a constructive time. Unfortunately, the conference did not spend a great deal of time on either inerrancy