Different Levels of Faithfulness (2 Tim 4:10-11)
I love neat summaries. For example, the Bible sometimes will give a succinct principle, with examples, in a few verses. From these examples we can see how the principle works out in the lives of individuals. One such occurrence is found in 2 Tim 4:10-11. These verses come at the end of the book, as […]
Romans and Perseverance of the Saints
A reader recently wrote GES asking for comments on an article found online. The article deals with Romans 5-8. Click here for the article. In Romans 5-8, Paul deals with the Christian life. The main point of the article is that in these chapters Paul is saying that a productive Christian life is inevitable in […]
Don’t Overlook the Power of Little Things We Do
At the national conference I met a young man we will call Steve who came to the Free Grace position from a strong Lordship Salvation (LS) background. He was in a strong LS church. Steve decided that if he were going to serve the Lord, he was going to do so with gusto. For him […]
Just Let Him Go: Luther on How to Respond to Atheists
I love apologetics. I started witnessing a couple of months after I became a Christian at the age of seventeen. The first group I went to was the local Muslim student association. I remember they gave me a tract alleging that Christians believe in three gods. “We do?” I said. From that moment on, I […]
Don’t Listen to Your Prophets (Jeremiah 23:16; 27:9, 14, 16, 17)
“Therefore do not listen to your prophets…” (Jer 27:9). “Therefore do not listen to the words of the prophets…” (Jer 23:16; 27:14, 16). “Do not listen to them” (Jer 27:17). Did you know that God sometimes told Israel not to listen to her prophets? During the last days of Israel in the land before seventy […]
2019 National Conference Report
The conference ended two and a half hours ago. I’m sitting at my desk in the office, reflecting. Here are some of the highlights as I remember them: We covered every verse in Ephesians over the four days. The plenary messages and the workshops were very well received. J. B. got a free Christian mug […]
Repentance and Salvation in the Old Testament
Introduction The English word repent is only found ten times in the OT, and one of those ten (Num 23:19) is a statement that God does not repent. In the remaining nine places, the underlying Hebrew word is shuv (or the noun teshuvah), which is most often translated as turn. The noun repentance is not […]
Assurance and Ongoing Faith
Shawn Lazar, Ken Yates, and I received the following question via email: I read the affirmations of faith on the website (https://new.faithalone.org/beliefs) and saw a line that seems out of sort with what I have heard from GES teaching: “That is, as long as a person believes in Jesus for everlasting life, he knows he […]
Update on Sharon’s Battle with Cancer
On December 19, 2018, Sharon, my wife of 42 years, went in for a fairly routine surgery to remove a football-size benign ovarian cyst. It turns out that the cyst was filled with cancer. And then the cyst burst and spread the cancer. Since then Sharon has had five chemo treatments. The first four lasted […]
The Difference Between Backsliding and Apostasy
Free Grace people are united in saying that born again people are not immune to backsliding. Even Lordship Salvation people agree, though they would say that backsliding can’t last too long (but they don’t know how long is too long). But Free Grace people are not quite united on the question of apostasy. Do born […]