Love and Marriage and Literature
I’ll be getting married this June. Thus, I have been thinking about what love is; how I should love well; what a good, Biblical marriage looks like; and how I should live as a wife. Fortunately, I have not been left alone in my search for answers to these questions. God, in His grace and sovereignty, grants His children insight into these matters through a variety of means. First, I am thankful most of all that God Himself has given...
The Beginnings of Baptist Ecclesiology: A Review
When people think of Thomas Helwys, they often think of religious liberty, and rightfully so. Yet Helwys’s writings address far more than religious liberty. Marvin Jones seeks to demonstrate this in his recent monograph The Beginnings of Baptist Ecclesiology: The Foundational Contributions of Thomas Helwys.[1] Jones contends that while many scholars have considered Helwys’s Mystery of Iniquity to be a work focused primarily on...
First Aid for Emotional Hurts: An Interview with Eddie Moody
“People need the Lord. At the end of broken dreams, He’s the open door,” sings Steve Green. Indeed, people need the Lord because they are broken. They need to be mended and comforted. This is the tone and approach Eddie Moody takes in the opening chapter of First Aid for Emotional Hurts: A Biblical Approach to Helping People through Difficult Times, revised and expanded (Nashville: Randall House, 2018). Believers are tasked with the...
Agreeing to Disagree? How Christians Should Respond When They Disagree
Have you ever experienced a church or denominational conflict?[1] You know the scene: A group has split into two or three factions, each claiming the moral high ground. We might roll our eyes when this happens over petty things, but are factions ever justified? In a Relevant Magazine article, Brett McCracken points to six issues that divide Christians today: homosexuality, universalism, politics, evolution, women in ministry, and the...
Suffering in Silence
I was alone. It’s ironic to think about, since, as a pastor, my life is about people. Yet in my first few years of ministry, I suffered, feeling completely alone. It wasn’t that I didn’t expect to suffer. Being on the front lines of spiritual warfare will bring with it battle wounds. There will be opposition until Christ returns. I understood this, and I accepted that some form of suffering comes with ministry. What took me by...
Cultural Exegesis: A Primer
Karl Barth allegedly quipped that Christians should “do theology with the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.”[1] His point is that the Christian, in thinking about the truth of God, should understand how God’s truth and today’s world intersect. Theology is fundamentally practical. Yet practical theology can also be a daunting task. While the Bible provides clarity on the things of God, we may struggle to apply these...
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