Stealing a Good Idea from a Friend
A good friend of mine, Bob Wilkin, wrote a great book called, The Ten Most Misunderstood Words in the Bible. As the title suggests, the book takes ten words that Christians often refer to in an incorrect manner. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend that you do! I want to steal the […]
Beware of Confessing the Same Sin (1 John 1:9)
Shawn and I received this question from a friend named John: Need some help to answer a question. Talking to someone who is not battling with an on-going sin but rather a past sin that has been confessed and forgiven (1 John 1:9). This person keeps coming to Christ and re–confessing the same sin. I […]
Dinner Church Evangelism: Some Issues and Recommendations
I’ve been reading about different ways of doing church that try to adhere to how the first Christians met. One model is the “dinner church” model, which tries to recapture the fact that the early Christians met to eat meals together. For example: So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread […]
Biblical Meditation Is Meditation on the Bible
What does it mean to meditate? And what does Christian meditation look like? Over the centuries, unbiblical forms of meditation have been borrowed from other religious traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Worse, many of these meditative practices grew out of, and assumed, a gospel of salvation by works, and so, meditation became yet another […]
A Church Can Be Doctrinally Sound, But Unloving (Revelation 2:1-7)
Did you know that a church can be doctrinally sound and yet be without love? That’s not an idea I find easy to entertain, because I care so much about doctrine. But that is what Jesus said to the Ephesians: To the angel of the church of Ephesus write, ‘These things says He who holds […]
Sound Teaching Is Sometimes Hard to Accept (Mark 2:18)
Sometimes you find enemies in the strangest places. Recently, I was reading Mark 2 and encountered such a situation. In Mark 2:18 the reader is in the middle of five occasions in which Jesus is being opposed by those who disagree with Him. This is the third of those five occasions. Mark tells us who […]
Believers and Good Works
Someone who had seen a video that Shawn and I made emailed a question about four passages. In the video, we said that the sole condition of everlasting life is faith in Christ, but that if a believer does not live for God, he will reap the consequences both in this life and at the […]
Assured of the Promises
I was talking to a Presbyterian gentleman—a fellow admirer of Gordon Clark and John Robbins—about how Calvinists understood the nature of faith. When I asked his opinion as to whether they thought that assurance was of the essence of saving faith, he said they clearly did. “After all, when Jesus promised, ‘I go and prepare […]
Moses’ Indirect Proof of Eternal Security
“A job half done is as good as none.” Have you ever felt like a failure in your service to God? Have you ever counted the time that you wasted, thought about the things you’ve left undone, and wondered how that might affect your eternal standing with God? Moses surely felt that way. Although he […]
Eternal Rewards and Denying Christ
A pastor asked me about a blog we published back in October: I read your blog today and agree with most of it but would like a Scripture reference to prove that if you die denying Christ, you lose the opportunity to eat from the tree of life and wear overcomer clothes. Also, what is […]