Most people live comfortably with tension. However, there are some models of Creation and origins that pit an unnecessary battle between the two. Instead of trying to figure out if both genres can live in unison with each other, people of faith and of science believe it has to be one or the other.
Sharing thoughts on the role of the Teacher
That is what teachers do. They fall in love with the material they are teaching, and they lead others to understand and love it as well. The Teacher is one of the fivefold ministries.
Weapons of Spiritual Warfare Part 3 – Fighting Grudges and unforgiveness with forgiveness
Next to despair, grudges and unforgiveness are the enemy’s greatest weapon to derail us from our Christian walk. When someone holds a grudge – withholding forgiveness and retaining bitterness in their hearts - they damage their relationship with God.
Weapons of Spiritual Warfare: Part 2 – Fighting despair with worship
In the first part of this series, we looked at who exactly we are fighting. We examined the fact that we are not fighting people but fighting against spiritual satanic forces. The enemy uses people, but they are not the enemy. In this part I am going to look at the wicked weapon of despair, and how God has given us a powerful weapon to defeat that weapon in worship.
Weapons of Spiritual Warfare: Part 1 – Who Are We Fighting?
There has been a lot written about spiritual warfare. Most discussions focus on the celebrated passage in Ephesians 6 concentrating on the full armor of God. That is a remarkable passage, but I think the Scriptures give us far more than defensive armor and one weapon. As powerful as the …
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Modern American and Chinese Christianity: Modern Christianity in Two Cultures and What They Can Learn From Each Other
Introduction In the Spring of 2006, I had the great privilege to travel to Shang Hai and train twelve Chinese engineers to support my company’s software. Spending 10 days with these people, I found myself immersed in their culture. Each day at lunch, we would go to a different restaurant and would talk …
Book Review – Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music – Biography of Larry Norman
I am a huge Larry Norman fan. So Long Ago the Garden was one of the first Christian albums that I listened to the whole way through. It rocked my world because I always thought that Christian music had to be sterilized copy of what the secular music world was doing. But what Larry Norman …
Review: Jesus Among Secular Gods
Good review of a book that I have read and still use…
I am the youth minister at a local church in North Texas, and twice a year I walk some of our students through a discipleship course. This time I presented them with a number of Bible studies to choose from, and they landed on Jesus Among Secular Gods, a study written by Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale and published by LifeWay (2017). It is a companion to their book of the same name which was published by FaithWords in early 2018.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching through the study, learning many things myself, and thought I would write a brief review here. The version I am reviewing is the student edition, but there is an edition for adults that I assume is very similar, especially the teaching content.
Jesus Among Secular Gods is a six-week study following this outline:
- Week 1: Be Prepared
- Week 2: Atheism and Scientism
- Week 3:…
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Book Review: A Concise History of the Christian World Mission
A Concise History of Christian World Missions: A Panoramic View of Missions from Pentecost to the Present by J. Herbert Kane is an ambitious attempt to review the history of Christian missions succinctly. Kane spent the first part of the book reviewing the different ages of Christian missions and the second part on reviews of …
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Does the New Testament Condone Slavery?
This is a very good article on Slavery in the Bible. Many skeptics point out that the Bible condones slavery. It clearly does not. Read on…
Earlier this week Haden’s post answered critics who claim that God is immoral because He condoned slavery in the Old Testament. Clearly this is not the case, for Old Testament slavery was completely different from the nineteenth century enslavement of African-Americans by American plantation owners. As a companion piece, I will now examine slavery in the New Testament, drawing many of the same conclusions.
Mentions of Slavery in the New Testament
Slavery is a topic that arises multiple times in the New Testament. Three mentions of it are found in the household codes of Ephesians (6:5-9), Colossians (3:22-4:1), and 1 Peter (2:18-25). The main Greek word used to denote slaves in the New Testament is doulos, occurring 126 times. The related term oiketes is also used four times. Interestingly, the way English translations of the Bible translate these words differs greatly. The HCSB, my translation of preference, translates doulos
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