Ever since the earliest days of the church, she has faced the threat of false teachers who love to see God’s people deviate into error. The short, one-chapter book of Jude addresses this problem in the first century, and there are abiding principles we need to grasp and practice in the twenty-first century. Contemporary American…
Are God, the church building, the Bible, a piece of cross-shaped jewelry Christian “good-luck charms”? Preposterous, you say? Think about it, especially in light of the attitude displayed by Micah (not the prophet!) in Judges 17. These are crazy days in Israel’s history—everyone doing what’s right in his own eyes. The spirit of idolatry has…
To the scribes of Jesus’ day, His powerful displays of healing and casting out demons were most frustrating. These made it difficult to convince people that Jesus was an imposter, a charlatan, who was simply attempting to drum up a following for personal aggrandizement. More offensive than that, though, was Jesus’ declaration of someone’s sins…
Surely our sensibilities are shocked, our hearts grieved, with the images, video footage, and expressions of outrage we see on the news and various social media outlets. One gets the sense that this isn’t a protest; it’s war. This reality struck me seeing the image of an armed “occupier” at the so-called “autonomous zone” in…
Have you ever given in to the temptation to use one of those penny-morphing machines? Surely you’ve seen them at a tourist attraction, haven’t you? Over the years, we have encountered them at Disney World, Great America, Sea World, Niagara Falls, the Cog Railway at Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, and many more places, I’m…
How’s your IRA doing these days? One of the ways you can keep track of it—though as I understand it, it’s not a great idea—is to keep your eye on the daily stock market report with all of its ups & downs. Probably a better method is to pay attention to those quarterly reports you…
I recently came across a very contemporary sermon preached by the late D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, pastor of London’s Westminster Chapel until 1968. Lloyd-Jones died 35 years ago; the sermon I read is from a series on Isaiah 40 entitled The All-Sufficient God that he preached in 1954. While all the sermons in the series are…