The earliest engagement of the gospel was in a Jewish context and the Apostles and other disciples tried to show how the good news about Jesus Christ was entirely in accord with the scriptures and with Jewish expectations. However, they developed a different approach to Gentile cultures.
Read moreIt is to the permanent honor of this college that it was founded, almost 180 years ago, by Free Will Baptists who were committed to the abolition of slavery. Hillsdale's founders were on the right side of the most compelling moral debate of the nineteenth century--and it is worth remarking that the leadership of this college today finds itself on the right side of the most pressing ethical argument of our time--namely, the protection of the unborn.
Read moreGrowing up, boys started to bully me badly. It was totally not my fault that my face was full of gross acne and my body barely triggering the indicator of the weighing scale. My body had become my greatest enemy. Unfortunately, it felt like a curse I couldn't escape. Worse was that I was seeing it everyday. "If I was a female", I'd say," life would be much easier. Make-up can easily cover this messed-up face and many females like their bodies very slim!"
Read moreI've lived long enough to see that my denomination is hardly different when it comes to morally compromised people making a hasty comeback. Still, what sticks out to me is not the literal reality of this man's statement so much as the metaphor of it all--a metaphor that explains a good bit of what's going on in our current American social crisis.
Read moreCSE [Comprehensive Sexuality Education], Kids and Us: A revolution in progress. Part 1.
I am entering a minefield of complex, multi-faceted, highly-emotive and with, at times, contradictory strands, which I can only begin to unpack. Others may have different experiences and come to different conclusions, which is fair enough. More in Part 2.
Read moreWhen we fail to fulfill its demands because the bar is way too high for our human striving, we are not told to "do more!" and "try harder!"; but rather we are shown that Jesus came, not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it perfectly for us (Matt 5:17).
The Law diagnoses sinners: condemned and dead in their sin (Gal 3:19). It's purpose is to amplify sin and to silence every self-justifying argument before God.
Read moreBut here is the problem. If a person rejects that church affiliation, and abandons the religious community, how long can they maintain that solitary or non-affiliated religious practice before it dies altogether? Ten years? Thirty? And can that attenuated practice be passed on to the next generation? When does "no religious affiliation" transform into a simple "No religion at all, seriously, and I mean it"?
Read moreTo be sure, the main problem is not that Cruz deems the Ugandan laws too strict. That is a reasonable stance for conservatives to take. The issue here is Cruz's full-throated embrace of an outdated conservatism that idolizes individual autonomy at the expense of the culture's moral and spiritual health. By paying lip service to the powerful gay lobby, which seeks to annihilate traditional values, Cruz is just another symptom of the moral compromise that pervades today's conservatism.
Read moreIt's not a simple question. That's why I took so long to work it through. It actually isn't a simple question, as so many people who are committed to the cause of the gospel and the authority of the Scriptures show because they remain in structures like that.
Read moreWarnings come to us all -- not only in these exceptional circumstances, but also during times when all seems normal and safe. Some years ago, I was the rector of a seaside parish church in a suburb of Richards Bay, a port city on the east coast of South Africa. Between our suburb and the town centre was a lake that flowed into an estuary via a canal. A bridge over the canal carried the access road from our suburb into town.
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