Você pode confiar na salvação simples?
“Não existe almoço grátis.” “Se é bom demais para ser verdade, provavelmente é.” “Nada é tão simples quanto parece.” Todos esses são provérbios americanos comuns que refletem nossa sabedoria coletiva sobre ofertas duvidosas. No entanto, essas também são as idéias que levam muitas pessoas a duvidar da promessa da vida eterna, porque também parece boa […]
Do Not Bite One Another (Galatians 5:15)
In a classic scene from The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Inspector Clouseau walks into a German hotel and notices a small dog by the counter. “Does your dog bite?” he asks the hotelier. “No,” the old man answers. When Clouseau goes to pet the dog, it viciously attacks him and tries to chew off his […]
Jesus nunca deixará você
Comecei a ler a autobiografia de Jack Deere, Even in Our Darkness. Sua história até agora tem sido muito sombria. Mas acho que você vai gostar de como ele passou a ter fé em Jesus. Ele diz o seguinte: “Não tenho certeza do que me motivou, mas em 18 de dezembro de 1965, às 2 […]
Will There Be Atheists in Heaven?
Q: As I understand your premise in Grace in Focus, you believe that if a person makes a sincere profession of faith but later became an apostate that he/she is still saved. If that is true, will there be non-believers in heaven? ~D.T. A: So, to clarify—a sincere profession of faith is not enough to […]
Breaking Bread: The Centrality of Eating to New Testament Church Life
Shawn Lazar Associate Editor Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society What role did eating play in the NT church? While that may not seem like a particularly interesting question, my growing conviction is that theology should emphasize what the Bible emphasizes, and there are at least eight important connections between eating and a healthy NT […]
The House Church in the Writings of Paul
The House Church in the Writings of Paul. By Vincent Branick. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1989, 2012). 144 pp. Paper, $20.00. Where and how did the early churches meet? In this slim volume, Vincent Branick summarizes the academic literature on house churches in Paul’s writings. Along the way, he also explains the many different […]
The Lord’s Supper as It Was
By Shawn Lazar Here is the eminently readable William Barclay describing how the Lord’s Supper was originally celebrated: It is not in doubt that the Lord’s Supper began as a family meal or a meal of friends in a private house…It was like the Jewish Passover which is a family festival and at which the […]
Não confie em políticos
Você já notou que o Novo Testamento mal menciona os nomes ou ações das autoridades governantes da época? Por exemplo, durante a época de Jesus, César Augusto estava liderando a República Romana em sua transformação que marcou época no Império Romano. Humanamente falando, esse foi um dos eventos mais importantes da história, e César Augusto […]
Wash One Another’s Feet, Part 2 (John 13:14)
The New Testament has about 58 “one another” commands that describe what a normal Christian church life can be. It’s the kind of community I want to—need to!—experience. But what does that church life look like? The second example of these commands is to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14). In the previous post, we […]
Wash One Another’s Feet, Part 1 (John 13:14)
Living the normal Christian life requires living a normal church life because God designed discipleship with a strong corporate character. When I say “corporate,” I’m not talking about the business world but the fact that God created you to belong to a group. Scripture pictures that group life as a family (Gal 6:10; Rom 8:16) […]