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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An Eternal Kingdom, 1 Kings 16:8-34 INTRODUCTION Reading 1-2 Kings from beginning to end might give the impression that the book is about the unfaithfulness of Israel. It tells the story of Solomon?s rise and fall, the division of the kingdom, the deterioration of Israel and Judah, and the beginning…
Alessandro Baricco, Without Blood . Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 97 pages. Without Blood , Alessandro Baricco’s fifth book, begins in horror. Four-year-old Nina Roca hides beneath a trap door in an old farmhouse listening as several men murder her father and brother.…
Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things (Basic Books, 2004), 257 pp. When Israeli scientist Noam Tractinsky first heard of studies in Japan that ATM machines with an attractive arrangement of buttons were perceived as functioning better than machines with an unattractive arrangement, he was…
Psalm 107:22 We saw in the sermon that song accompanies the ascension offering in the worship of the tabernacle. A sacrifice of praise is a means of ascent to God, calling on Him to draw near in glory and responding to His glory as He draws near. Through song, our…
God created a world with three environments. At the center of the world was a garden, the sanctuary where Adam and Eve were to worship their Creator. Surrounding the sanctuary was the land of Eden, and outside the land of Eden were other lands like Havilah, Cush, and Assyria. We…
Luke 14:21-24 The parable of the wedding feast is a parable about the kingdom, where the kingdom is envisioned, as it often is in Jesus?Eteaching, as a dinner, a banquet, a wedding feast. The key point in this particular parable is about who is invited to the wedding feast. First…
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