Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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A student, Luke Nieuwsma, pointed out several references to Ahab in the prophecy of Micah. Micah 2:1-2 condemns those who covet fields and take them by violence, as Ahab did to Naboth; 6:15 is an explicit allusion to Omri and Ahab; and the “she” who is trampled like mud sounds…
INTRODUCTION Modern Christians instinctively spiritualize the story of the gospel. When Jesus is called “King of the Jews,” we think that refers to His “spiritual” kingdom. Herod didn’t think so. Herod knew that Jesus’ birth was a threat to his power. THE TEXT “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem…
Psalm 23:1: The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. At Jesus’ birth, shepherds come to worship Him because He is the chief Shepherd. He is Shepherd Yahweh in human flesh. He is the Shepherd of Israel. He is the Davidic king who will shepherd His people with skillful…
As we’ll see in the sermon this morning, in the Bible a “shepherd” is a king. Shepherds lead, guide, rule, control, feed, discipline, and judge their sheep. To say that Jesus is the Good Shepherd is to say He’s king of His people, king of all. Jesus’ kingship is not…
Terry Eagleton puts it this way: “for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense…
Terry Eagleton puts it this way: “for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense…
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