salvation

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, woo girls, and justify the expense of ten-dollar lessons. My performance at the junior high talent show was enough to bestow upon me that prestigious adjective-noun combination—rock star. I entered the stage. The spotlight moved across my face and fingers. Cameras flashed. A sixth grade girl fainted. Wearing black dress pants, a white shirt, one glove, cool sunglasses, and (yes!) a skinny piano tie...

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 Music is My Mistress. The list goes on. And why not? Music moves us in ways that no other art form can. At bare minimum we observe that music involves our minds, our emotions, and our physical bodies. For those of us who employ music in our worship, we experience unique modes of connection that differ from reading, studying, listening to sermons, and fellowship. (Note: I am not saying that m...

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 everyone will end up in heaven, even those who reject Jesus Christ during this life. According to Bell, God’s love will win over everything else. Westboro Baptist commits the error of saying everybody and everything is wrong, evil, and doomed to hell. Rob Bell makes the error of taking hard truth and bending it so it becomes more palatable. And the reality is, we too can fall into both errors. When...

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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 forefront of Southern Baptist debates during those years of conflict and controversy, but other issues drew major concern. Moderates and conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention were divided over controversial issues, including abortion rights, the exclusivity of the Gospel, and the nature of the atonement. As might be expected, most of these debates followed the same or very similar lines of div...

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 the case for truth, God, miracles and the New Testament. They make their own presentations as well and learn how to answer questions about these topics in a hostile environment. I participated as an instructor this year, along with Frank, Ted Wright, Greg Koukl, Richard Howe, Brett Kunkle and Larry Blythe. It was a powerful (and busy) three days, and I highly commend the experience to anyone who is...

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 beliefs (and/or performing religious rituals) and intelligence. In other words, non-believers scored higher than religious people on intelligence tests. Some smelled raw meat, jumping immediately to the conclusion that “religious beliefs are irrational, not anchored in science, not testable and, therefore, unappealing to intelligent people who ‘know better.’” Actually, no. Study co-author Jordan Silber...

One of the ways that children sometimes try to deepen their relationship with their parents is to travel back to where their father or mother grew up. They might visit historical societies, read archives, and gather newspaper stories and artifacts from old friends. Doing so, they build a bigger and better picture of their father or mother and experience a deeper sense of connection with them and love for them. In a similar way, Christians go back to the Old Testament to build a bigger and better picture of Jesus Christ. By connecting with His past, we connect better with Him and deepen our love for Him. The Old Testament connects us with Jesus’ past in the following ways: 1. We are reading Jesus’ Bible: The 39 books of the Old Testament are the Scriptures He heard and read. These are the v...

Evangelical Christians have been especially attentive to worship in recent years, sparking a renaissance of thought and conversation on what worship really is and how it should be done. Even if this renewed interest has unfortunately resulted in what some have called the “worship wars” in some churches, it seems that what A.W. Tozer once called the “missing jewel” of evangelical worship is being recovered. Nevertheless, if most evangelicals would quickly agree that worship is central to the life of the church, there would be no consensus to an unavoidable question: What is central to Christian worship? Historically, the more liturgical churches have argued that the sacraments form the heart of Christian worship. These churches argue that the elements of the Lord’s Supper and the water of b...

People often project confidence when they have no reason to. Some do this out of defiance and others out of ignorance. An example of defiant confidence would be Saddam Hussein. You may recall the video of Iraqi President, during the Gulf War, sitting in an underground bunker while informing the people of Iraq that they were trouncing the Coalition forces. Again, he was in the bunker! The rest of the world saw what the Iraqi people were seeing: the war was going very badly for him. Obviously this confidence was ill-founded. Another example comes is from my childhood. I remember my family crossing a rickety bridge about twenty feet over a river in Florida. My dad declared that he was going to stand up on the railing and cross the bridge like a tightrope walker. My mom prevailed upon him and ...

Moving the ministry of your church forward requires a delicate dynamic of giving and receiving between the leaders and members. If not monitored closely, this dynamic morphs into a tug-of-war match, which always ends up with one side tumbling. If not both. When the effort behind the ministry tugs toward the leaders, programmatic ministry results. This is when the church does things through events and campaigns run mainly by the pastors and elected church leaders. On the other hand, when the members mostly pull the ministry forward, organic ministry will characterize the church. That is to say, spontaneous, relational service and outreach will be deemed most valuable and authentic. Both programmatic and organic ministry have strengths that all churches desire. We need pastoral ministry team...