Author: S&P

Regular preachers need to be more like starters than bench players. The bench player is a specialist. A southpaw might take the mound to pitch to one player. A sharp shooter enters the game to knock down threes to spark a comeback. But the starters need to do everything well. These are the triple-threat basketball players, athletes who can shoot, pass, or drive to the basket. These are the five-to...

I was sitting on a ledge two hundred feet above the Judean wilderness. A lifeless and virtually unending sea of sand dunes was below me. It’s one of those visuals you never quite get your head around. A network of sandy spines reaches out to the horizon and then disappears. This is where things in this region go to die. Ironically, it’s a beautiful place. The scale alone is spectacular. And when t...

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (David C. Cook, October 2013) I was sixteen when my parents kicked me out of the house. What started out as run-of-the-mill adolescent rebellion in my early teens had, over the course of a few short years, blossomed into a black hole of disrespect and self-centeredness that was consuming the entir...

The days I wake up and make a list of items I want to accomplish for that day are typically great days. I feel accomplished. I’ve completed my tasks and there is peace. Those days when I don’t have my to-do list can seem chaotic. I can stare at the clock anxiously wondering what to do next. I enjoy schedules because they give me a framework and rules to go by through the day. Rules provide comfort...

When Van Halen’s album 1984 hit the record stores, many a young lad, myself included, signed up for piano lessons. This was because the great guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, learned to play piano and proceeded to compose the hit single of that album—one still played at many NBA tip-offs—“Jump.” In six short lessons I learned how to master this melody, which in those days was enough to impress friends,...

Many books extol the wonders of music. Leonard Bernstein wrote The Joy of Music. Igor Stravinsky helped us see The Poetics of Music. Aaron Copeland instructed us on What to Listen for in Music. Aided by the recent advances in neuroscience, Oliver Sacks wrote Musicophilia and Daniel Levitan offered The Science of a Human Obsession. Duke Ellington even boasted that ...

Westboro Baptist Church has made a name for itself by protesting funerals, naming their website godhatesfags.com, and telling lots of different people that God hates them and is going to send them to hell. Rob Bell has made a name for a himself by taking the traditional doctrine of hell and making it more palatable. In his highly controversial book Love Wins, Bell essentially said that e...

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Current controversy over the nature of Christ’s atonement for sin points to a truth many younger evangelicals may not know, i.e., the substitutionary nature of Christ’s death on the cross was a major issue in the Conservative Resurgence that took place within the Southern Baptist Convention in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The issue of biblical inerrancy stood at the forefro...

I returned yesterday from Frank Turek’s CrossExamined Instructor’s Academy (CIA) in North Carolina. CIA is an intense three-day program that teaches students how to present I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, a four part apologetics presentation based on Frank’s iconic book of the same title. Students spend three days on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary learning how to present t...

If you’re a Christian, then the life and death issues that have shaped the struggles and joys of Christians for 2000 years matter to you. Dr. Timothy Paul Jones makes the story of God’s people come alive in “Christian History Made Easy” (Rose Publishing). Originally published August 16, 2013.

Even the legendarily left-leaning Huffington Post called it “provocative.” A new study claims that religious people are less intelligent than atheists. The “study” is actually a review of 63 studies of intelligence and religion conducted over the past century (1928-2012). The “meta-analysis” apparently shows that in 53 of the studies there was an inverse relationship between having religious belie...