Bible

Before I had come to truly embrace the doctrines of grace, I remember being incredibly hung up on the idea of the perseverance of the saints. I simply could not understand how it was remotely possible that a Christian could be saved and then would never need to fear losing their salvation. After...

It’s a plot fit for a Hallmark Christmas movie. A young widow follows her mother-in-law to a small town where she is considered an outcast. She catches the eye of a kind and wealthy bachelor, who makes a grand gesture to redeem her as his wife and gives her an inheritance and a son. Yet the well-...

Josiah is introduced in 2 Kings 22 as the new king of Judah who is merely eight years old. As a young boy growing up in church, this story intrigued me. Later in elementary school in writing for an assignment asking what person in the Bible would I most like to spend one day with and what would we...

Do you remember show and tell when you were in school? I don’t recall what I took to show my classmates, but I remember that my classmates and I could bring in items that were meaningful to us in one way or another. We didn’t bring things that we didn’t like, or things that weren’t important to us...

Two summers ago, I preached through the book of Jonah. It remains one of the biblical narratives that I identify with most personally. Like Jonah, I once ran from God’s call on my life. The story of Jonah is straightforward, but its depths are profound, particularly in how it points us to Jesus...

When was the last time you considered your spiritual gifts? When you think about them, are you quick to recognize they were given to you by Christ for the edification, equipping and encouragement of the church, or were you tempted to think you somehow earned your spiritual gifts by way of education...

George Schmidt, Magdalena, and the Bible Beneath the Pear Tree When the Moravian missionary George Schmidt left South Africa in 1744, he left behind a few converts, a copy of the Dutch New Testament, and a few trees he had planted, including a pear tree that had grown to provide some shade to his...

We often see ourselves as the heroes of the stories we read. We identify with noble characters like Atticus Finch, Elizabeth Bennett, and Frodo Baggins—rarely do we align ourselves with flawed figures like Bob Ewell, Mary Bennett, or Gollum. This tendency extends to how we view the early church in...

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was not composed in order to take its place on the mantel. The drafters of this statement intended for it to be used in the life of the church and that desire is clearly put on display in the final article, Article 19. Consider the Affirmation, We affirm...

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant” (Heb. 12:11). We don’t like discipline—in our personal lives, in the family, or at church—because it hurts. No balanced person enjoys giving or receiving corrective instruction. Correction wounds our pride and threatens our imagined...