Stepping Down
This past Sunday, I announced I was stepping down from pastoring the contemporary service at Gateway United Baptist Church. I started serving as an experiment. It was an experiment for the church to see if there was a demand for a contemporary service. The average age of the church was about seventy. They needed to […]
Suffering Opened Job’s Eyes
Job’s three friends had a very legalistic view of the world and of God. They thought everything worked according to a clear and simple law of moral cause and effect—of reward and punishment—in which good people are blessed, and bad people suffer. So when they saw Job suffering, the only explanation for it, given their […]
Three Ways to Comfort a Suffering Friend (Job 2:11-13)
By Shawn Lazar I was reading an article by a woman who lost her brother, sister, and her sister’s children in a car crash. Horrific. She was in shock. For days, she walked around as if in a fog, unable to think clearly. Of course, friends offered to help. Several said, “Let me know if […]
Asa Mahan’s Assurance
By Shawn Lazar Asa Mahan (1799-1889) was an Arminian philosopher and theologian. He was Presbyterian at a time when many Presbyterians were becoming Arminian (following the so-called “New Haven Theology”). Mahan was also the first president of Oberlin College when it was a revivalist school and not the ultra-liberal place it is today. He was […]
J. Dwight Pentecost on Eternal Security and the Promise of Life
Here is a great quote from J. Dwight Pentecost, writing in 1965, on why the promise of eternal life implies eternal security: The promise of God is a basis for our security. We go into a familiar passage such as John 3:16 where it is made so clear: “…God so loved the world, that he […]
J. Dwight Pentecost on Salvation
I’m writing a journal article on what Dallas Theological Seminary professors taught about salvation to the general public, from 1965-1995. I’m looking at books by DTS professors, aimed at a general reading audience. I want to know whether they leaned Free Grace or Lordship. (Be sure to subscribe to the journal to get these longer […]
What Are Some Free Grace Distinctives?
Someone on Facebook asked what were some Free Grace distinctives. Here are ten things that I think make Free Grace distinct from other traditions. There are different schools of thought within the Free Grace movement. These ten things reflect our corner of the movement: 1) Saving faith is persuasion that the saving message is true, […]
Can Legalistic Thinking Explain All Suffering? (Job 3-14)
Kūmāré is a 2011 documentary about a New Jersey man who pretends to be a guru from India—complete with accent—to see if he can get a following. The documentary is painful to watch because he does gather a following, and the people are totally convinced that Kūmāré is a spiritual man, with spiritual powers, who […]
We’re All Barabbas
One of my favorite novels is Barabbas by Par Lagerkvist, winner of the Nobel prize for literature. The novel imagines what happened to Barabbas after he was released: “He was about thirty, powerfully built, with a sallow complexion, a reddish beard and black hair. His eyebrows also were black, his eyes too deep-set, as though […]
A Is for “Able to Believe”
Bob and I wrote an article called “TULIP or ASSURE?” in which we briefly outlined what we thought was the Biblical alternative to the Five Points of Calvinism (and Arminianism). Our thinking has grown since then. Previously, we defined “A” as “All have sinned.” That was too general a statement. I now prefer “Able to […]