A common pastoral struggle is the work of reminding Christians that they rest upon Christ and his finished work alone for their assurance of salvation. The necessity of regularly preaching the gospel partially flows from a sin-induced, immature forgetfulness. The child of God forgets, or doubts, why the Father has adopted them into his family. A nagging pride can leave some convinced that they merited their salvation. Or fear can convince the Christian that Jesus’ work was not enough, and that there needs to be more: more faithfulness, less sin, on the Christian’s part, in order to be accepted. Sometimes sheer ignorance, or confusion, is the source of the error…
“Then he brought them out and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ And they said, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…'” – Acts 16:30-31.
The Philippian jailer’s exchange with Paul and Silas presents one of the easiest and best scriptural summaries of what we must do to be saved: just believe. Faith in what Jesus has done, and trust in nothing else, is all we bring. We merely respond to what Christ has accomplished.
The clarity and simplicity of this exchange have also been used as part of evangelicalism’s problem of mere Christianity…
Ephesians 6:1-4 communicates several things about the nature of scripture, preaching, and worship. Growing up, my experience was that this passage was typically used as a way of instructing parents on instructing their kids. Yet Paul is not addressing parents until 6:4. In 6:1-3 Paul is directly addressing children, and the assumption held by the text is that the children of the church are present for the reading of the letter (see Colossians 4:16). The expectation of the letter is that when it is read and preached in worship that the people to whom it is addressed are present. To put it plainly, the expectation is that children are present in the worship service, not just for singing, but for the ministry of the word…
Iceland must be pleased that it is close to success in its program of genocide, but before congratulating that nation on its final solution to the Down syndrome problem… Now, before Iceland becomes snippy about the description of what it…
From Wikipedia on the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk tests (emphasis added), The brothers flew the glider for only a few days in the early autumn of 1900 at Kitty Hawk. In the first tests, probably on October 3, Wilbur was…
