One Thing I Wish I Could Tell My Generation
God’s commands don’t always make sense to us. They may never make sense to us. The wrong conclusion to reach is that you will refuse to obey them until they do.
Read MoreEverything Is More Than It Seems: The Bible, Metaphor, and How the World Teaches Us About God
Time and time again throughout Scripture, the elements of nature are used in order to describe God or how we are to relate to Him. God utilizes His own creation to give object lessons and to paint word pictures for us, His people, in order that we might begin to grasp who He is.
Don’t misunderstand: He intended all of this from the beginning. He began to create with all of these metaphorical lessons already in mind. He deliberately created real things with the intention of revealing deep spiritual truths about even realer things.
Read MoreWhat Faith Is Not
Absolute certainty is the antithesis of faith. Knowing something beyond the shadow of a doubt negates your ability to have faith in it. And, since faith is necessary to please God (Hebrews 11:6), Christians can know that absolute certainty of the reality of God and the veracity of His promises is not the goal of faith.
Read MoreWhat Faith Is
Seeing how often we Christians find ourselves at a loss when asked to define exactly what we mean by the word and that it is a supremely important part of Christianity to begin with, it seems incumbent and vital to come up an appropriate working definition of what the Bible means by “faith”. And while “faith" is certainly a loaded word that carries an understandable amount of weight, the actual concept behind it is not hard at all.
Read MoreThe Entire New Testament Is Red Letter
The authority of the Apostles functions in much the same way as the authority Christ Himself had received from God the Father. It’s just like when a diplomat speaks for the chief executive of their country back home: the words of the diplomat function as the words of the executive, regardless of who literally says them. Christ spoke for God, and the Apostles spoke for Christ.
If you reject the teachings of the Apostles as somehow not having the same authority as those of Christ, you essentially reject Christ and God the Father.
Read More