We often pray the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer after sinning. We should learn to pray the sixth petition before similarly sinning again, remembering, ye have not because ye ask not (James 4:2). The essence of the sixth petition,…
If all your paperwork rolled like a sea over your desk, you’d struggle to navigate and prepare your tax returns. If you blanketed your computer’s desktop with all your digital files, you’d smother the writing of a departmental report. So…
In this series, we are examining how the Lord’s prayer shapes our prayer life. In this post, we want to apply the phrase “…Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…” How does this statement in the Lord’s prayer…
The 17th century minister and Scotsman, Alexander Nisbet said, “the most dangerous heretics have many followers; every error they introduce turns out to be a friend to some lust in the heart of man.” Case in point: Several years ago,…
As an earlier post from Jeff Stivason made clear, this current installment of “Theology for Everyone” was inspired by Martin Luther’s fantastic little book on prayer entitled A Simple Way to Pray. In the spirit of truly offering theology to…
In her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert,[1] Dr. Rosaria Butterfield compares her Christian conversion experience to “an alien abduction or a train wreck.” As she shares about her very public Christian “coming out” while a tenured university English…
On January 1 1519, Ulrich Zwingli became the pastor of the principal church of Zurich, Switzerland. When he preached through the New Testament from the Greek, the Reformation began in that city. Zwingli taught salvation by grace and justification by…
The surging waves of the sexual revolution continue to crash on the shores of our culture and threaten to wash the Christian church, supporting institutions, and believing individuals and their families out to sea. This is not really new. While…
When I was in high school, I heard my Bible teacher say “To pray ‘Your kingdom come’ is to pray for judgment.” He excitedly told us how the Israelites had found a legitimate red heifer that might allow them to…
Although for many churches, the celebration of Christ’s Nativity is over for another year, for many others it is yet to come. They will celebrate the Feast of Epiphany on January 6th and on into the Sunday that follows. In…
