The Ten Commandments #9

You may have heard of the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments have to do with man’s relationship with God. The last six commandments have to...

Christian Origins #12 - Acts

When you read the New Testament, you really want to see a group of people united in purpose, thoroughly converted, working together for the greater pu...

Christian Origins #11 - Acts

Imagine that you attend a small church of, say, 50 people. You have been meeting together for quite a long time. You have a common set of beliefs and...

Christian Origins #10 - Acts

The very first Christian missionaries in all history were a couple of men named Saul and Barnabas. (We know Saul better as the Apostle Paul.) They had...

Christian Origins #9 - Acts

The greatest missionary church in history was established by men whose names we do not even know. No, it wasn’t Jerusalem, in spite of everything that...

Your God Is Too Small

There is very little in the way of direct revelation of a world that exists alongside our world. We get little glimpses from time to time in the testi...

Christian Origins #8 - Acts

I would not like to suggest the apostles of Jesus were stubborn or blockheaded, because that would not be fair. The transition they were having to mak...

Christian Origins #7 - Acts

You have to wonder about a man like Saul of Tarsus. Here’s a man that we will come to know as the apostle Paul—probably the strongest intellectual fig...

Jews and Christians

How should Christians think about Jews? For that matter, how should Jews think about Christians? The relationship between Jews and Christians has been...

The Inward Man

Christian Origins #6 - Acts

There is a great divide between Christianity and Judaism. And it goes back a lot further than most people realize. It goes back way beyond Paul, and w...

Christian Origins #5 - Acts

I think it is fair to say that God used the power of the Holy Spirit to jump start the early Christian church.
They started with 120 members, th...

Christian Holidays #9

Of all the Christian holidays, the one that surprises me the most is Pentecost. It surprises me that every Christian does not observe it. After all, i...

Christian Origins #4 - Acts

I remember my first experience with power. It was behind the wheel of a 1948 Chevrolet. Granted, by today’s standards, that is not a lot of power, but...

Christian Origins #3 - Acts

Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour. And a certain man lame from his mother’s womb was car...

Christian Origins #2 - Acts

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing...

Christian Origins #1 - Acts

How many hundreds of millions of Christians are there in the world by now? What is your guess? Well, I looked it up. Christianity of all stripes is th...

About Pentecost

The Power to Love

A man can live without food…for a while. He can live on short rations for quite a while. But sooner or later the body withers and dies. We know what i...

The Gospel of John #12

I can understand why Jewish leaders were concerned about Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ. If I were Jewish, I would probably feel the sa...

The Gospel of John #11

It’s fascinating that the longest discourse of Jesus in the entire New Testament is also the most private, the most intimate, the most personal. It is...

Everything Is Beautiful

I used to wonder at the decay of popular music in all of its forms. Why wasn’t anyone writing beautiful music? It seemed almost as though they had los...

The War for Your Children

Not a few Christian folk are beginning to worry. They’re thinking that they may be losing the culture war. The strongest evidence they see: their youn...

A Mother to Remember

What would happen to you if you were down and out and there was no one to help? Where would you be if you were sick and broke in a strange city with n...

The Land Speaks

Whoever kills any person, the murderer shall be put to death by the mouth of witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against any person to cause...

The Gospel of John #10

Have you ever wondered why it is that Christian people feel they are never alone? It’s true, you know—we are never completely alone. In the night of t...

The Gospel of John #9

One of the saddest things about the ministry of Jesus is the number of people who believed him, believed his message, believed what he said about who...

A Relationship with God

Not long ago, Someone I respect very highly commented that she did not have a relationship with God. She believed in God, she practiced her faith assi...

The Gospel of John #8

Jesus defies explanation. You can’t just put him in a category and then say you have him figured out. Nearly every conventional idea of Jesus is contr...

The Gospel of John #7

I must confess, I was a little puzzled at the reaction of the Jewish community to the movie The Passion of the Christ. But when I reflected on some of...

The Gospel of John #6

Jesus was a constant puzzle to the Pharisees. Sometimes he is a bit puzzling to us, too. And we have had a lot of time to digest what he was saying. A...

The Gospel of John #5

Considering all that Jesus did, and considering his personal charisma, does it strike you as strange that there was a point when many of his disciples...

The Solitary Man

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Everyone knows this verse by heart. But ther...

The Gospel of John #4

Of the four gospel writers, it is John who is the theologian. More than the others, he captures and reports for us those words and deeds of Jesus that...

The Gospel of John #3

Jesus of Nazareth was full of surprises. His disciples often had trouble figuring him out, but Jesus had an agenda. Everything he did was for a reason...

The Gospel of John #2

From here, it’s hard to imagine what those first encounters with the mature Jesus were like—for those who saw him for the first time. I have no reason...

The Gospel of John #1

The apostle John presents us with the most astonishing theology. And he does it right off the bat, without preamble. To the early theologians of the C...

The Days of Elijah

If you happen to enjoy contemporary praise music, you more than likely have heard These Are The Days of Elijah. (It happens to be one of my favorites....

The Gospel of Matthew #40

Did Jesus die of a broken heart, or was he brutally and violently killed? Now, you have to understand something about us preacher-types. Sometimes we...

The Gospel of Matthew #39

I know that Jesus had to die for my sins. But why did he have to die the way he did? Why the pain, why the shame? Why the spitting, why the humiliatio...