fisher of men

 I like coffee. I’m drinking it right now. Hot and steaming, black and strong. Perfect. I have one very important rule for my coffee: don’t put anything in it! A good cup of coffee needs no help. Leave it alone. But, what if, unknown to me, someone had polluted my coffee with vile sugar. Reaching over to take a drink, I wouldn’t see the danger. It looks and smells just the same. Outwardly, everything is fine. But, the nature of the coffee, it’s very essence, has been changed…corrupted. Heresy. If you had asked me what I thought heresy was when I started writing this series, I probably would have given you an answer that sounded a lot like sugar in my coffee. The “coffee” is the essence of Christianity, it’s core beliefs and ideas about Jesus a...

The most important thing you can do for a child is to teach him or her the good news about how to be right with God, how to be forgiven of sin through the person and work of Christ. Over the years, many have asked me, “How can I explain the gospel to children in terms they understand without toning down the hard demands of Christ? Must a child understand Jesus’s lordship to be saved?”  Certainly children are limited in their ability to understand spiritual truth, but so are adults. Very few people intellectually understand all the gospel truth at the moment of salvation. Fortunately, the essential truths are basic enough that even a child can understand. Jesus Himself characterized saving faith as childlikeness (Mark 10:15). True belief is not a functi...

We have to have it. We are commanded to give it. Forgiveness. But do we ever pause to come to terms with what the word, the concept, means in God’s Word? What do you really know about forgiveness? There are many places in the Bible to learn more. Let me select one scriptural verse that I have spoken publicly at least once per month for the last three decades. 4 Healing Truths about Forgiveness from the Lord’s Supper “For this is My blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28 NKJV). When a believer comes forward to receive Holy Communion (the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper), the words of the institution recalibrate us back to the shed blood of Jesus. In fact, that is why this is not a one-time sacrament, like baptism. This is a continuing sacram...

You know music has power when it has you shivering while running in hundred-degree heat. Güngör’s Ghosts Upon the Earth is like that, though. From the opening track, the album screams its willingness to be and do something terribly different from most Christian music of the last quarter century. For one thing, this is an album, not just a collection of songs. For another, the musical skill on display here combines with a willingness to forge a new sound, rather than retread the same old pop-rock milieu one more time. Musical and lyrical unity in an album is a rarity today in any genre, but this album tells a story. Indeed, it tells the story. But back to those shivers. “Let There Be” is the first and only time to date that any piece of art in any ...

As a pastor I have the opportunity to see many people work through the pain, frustration, sorrow, and fear that comes with affliction. Some suffer from their own folly, some endure the hardship of disease, and others are hurt by the evil actions of wicked men. And in it all we are looking for some kind of answer, direction, or purpose. As I have been preaching through Habakkuk at redeemer we have been confronted with the same truth the prophet was hit with: our God is truly and completely sovereign, even over the sinful actions of wicked men. God tells the prophet that he is raising up, empowering, a wicked nation to do what they do best: conquer. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation,  who march through the breadth of the earth, t...

“The law was added so that the trespass might increase.  But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” Romans 5:20. How many Christians (never mind people who are not yet Christians) do you suppose misunderstand grace?  Surely there are tons. One problem, as I’ve heard it put, is that law is our native language.  We speak law fluently.  There exists a native tendency toward self-righteousness, toward punitive justice, toward dead external works.  Though the law should condemn us-and condemn us good!-we unwittingly believe ourselves able to rise up to the demands of the law.  Of course, we wo...

All these years later, and we can all probably still remember exactly where we were when we heard the tragic news of the terrorist attack of 9/11. Ironically, I sat in a speech class at Samford University. One minute we were discussing the components of an effective speech, the next minute we all found ourselves speechless. Sept. 11, 2001 will live in infamy; but many other days will keep it company. Infamy is, of course, the same word Franklin D. Roosevelt used in his presidential address to Congress on Dec. 8, 1941, one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dec. 7, he said, would live in infamy. I’m adding Sept. 11, 2001, to the list; and my assumption is that if we live long enough, we will see many other days make this list, as well. Sept. 11 was not the first tragic day in ...

As a seminary grad, I thought I was ready to have a job and do my part in taking Christ to the world through the local church. Six months passed and the only job offer I had was to work for four months as a secretary for a crusade in my city. I remember well the Lord whispering to me, “Do you have any other offers?” I reluctantly accepted the job and began to pour myself into the needed preparations. I knew I needed to be faithful with the small task I had been given. Looking back, I thank God for Jay Strack and Mike Ruth who saw my heart. They tolerated my non-clerical skills and took every opportunity to include and encourage me. It was during a women’s coffee for the crusade that my pastor’s wife, Uldine Bisagno, decided I could be of useful service coordinating the new ministry to wome...

It took me a moment to realize that he was a pastor and not a coach for a sports team or some sort of motivational speaker/CEO type. I met Bill at a conference for pastors. He explained that he was a coach for his clients, seeking to guide them through their story. I probably had the confused dog look on my face, like when you ask your dog a question and he just cocks his head and advances a blank stare. I thought we were at a pastor’s conference and now this guy with a client base is waxing on about directing people in some vague story. I finally figured out that “coach” was his way of saying pastor and that the “story” he was directing was somehow a metaphor for life. Confusing? What about his “clients”? Those, he explained, are the members of the congregation. Some pastors unwittingly e...

Some of what we do with Scripture is comical. We have this inevitable way of overlooking the biblical context and reading our own spins into passages. Some of our most treasured principles don’t even come close to the point being offered by the biblical author. Many Bible-believing Christians would be shocked to know that some of our more treasured cliché’s are the result of shoddy hermeneutics and not the Holy Spirit. Certain convictions now engrained in our evangelical psyche have nothing at all to do with the passages that we blame them on. As a result, we go around proclaiming as biblical (or Christian) a lot of stuff that God never said. All this is perpetuated and approved by popular American Christianity. Catchy over-spiritualized/over-principlized sound bites are catnip for suburba...

[embedded content] Was Jesus Ever Married? Transcribed from the video above, Bryan Chapell discusses whether Jesus was ever married: There is no evidence that Jesus was married in the books that give us the history of his life. So anything that would suggest that Jesus was married is pure conjecture, and we would say usually being articulated by people who have some agenda to undo the biblical record and add something to it. So anybody who’s saying that Jesus was married is just making that up. There is no record of that in any historical account or any biblical account. Now we want to be careful we don’t go too far to say that because Jesus was not married, marriage or sexuality are automatically evil in some way. Jesus disciples did marry. Jesus was at a stage of life where h...

  When you meet someone for the first time, you form some opinion of them. You can’t help it. How they look, what they say, when they laugh, it all shapes your inner picture of them. The same is true in stories. The first time an author introduces a new character, pay attention. They’ll often give you little clues about that character’s personality and how they fit into the story. And sometimes, they just skip the clues and come right out and tell you something important. “Let us create man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). There it is. The very first thing the Bible tells us about the human person. That’s our first impression. But what does it mean? What is an “image”? How can an invisible God have an image anyway? And why don’t the other creatures get to be images? I...