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Most of the new Christians in the early church were Jews, and Jews had been raised to believe that obedience to the law was how you got close to God and obtained favor from him. After these Jews (called Judaizers) came to faith in Christ, they still kept some of this old law mentality, because—as we all know—old habits die hard. So, they taught that in addition to faith in Christ, real believers needed to make themselves acceptable to God by forcing themselves to obey the law. By keeping the commandments, they believed, you could transform yourself into the kind of person God wanted you to be. Chief among their concerns was the Old Testament command to be circumcised, which, for 1,500 years, had been the primary distinguishing mark of the Jews. The Apostle Paul calls what the Judaizers were teaching a different gospel (Galatians 1:6), a perverted gospel (v. 7), and a contrary gospel (v. 8).,,

A while back, my good friend Tony Vance sent me an article and asked for my feedback. After reading only the title, “Why Are You Still A Christian, After Reading This? (Thorough)”, I answered: because Jesus. With a little prodding, (and some late night facepalming), I worked through Ben Alonzo’s piece, and jotted down some responses to his work. Shake Your Faith: The Truth In this section, Ben points out he was a hardcore Christian “until I started questioning what was actually in the Bible.” My first response to Mr. Alonzo, “Just how ‘hardcore’ were you if Bible study wasn’t even a part of your Christianity?” Choosing Jesus was a hard decision for me. In fact, just yesterday I shared with some close friends that I believe being a faithful Christian is the hardest job in the world. Bill Hybels in his book, “Courageous Leadership”, recounts a speech he gave to a group of Harvard business students. One student asked how church leadership had anything to do with secular success. “You are the best and brightest this world has to offer. You are going to do great things and make the best widgets and gizmos ever known. But the church is charged with changing the world.”...

Bible study is not the same thing as Bible reading. If Bible reading is like raking for leaves, Bible study is like digging for diamonds. The Christian life calls for both. When we study the Bible, we are on a quest for meaning — and not just any meaning, but God’s meaning through the Bible’s human authors. Discovering God’s meaning may require hard work (digging for diamonds always does), but the journey will leave us with deeper knowledge, more Christlikeness, and a stronger sense of God’s beauty in his book...

Most pastors are more than happy for someone else to choose the songs on Sunday morning. With sermon preparation, counseling, and countless other responsibilities, shouldn’t someone else worry about what the congregation will sing? While I understand the difficult demands of being a pastor, I want to encourage pastors to be involved in the selection of songs for corporate worship. Levels of engagement may differ (based on a number of factors), but it’s not appropriate for pastors to disengage completely. After all, there’s truth to the saying, “We are what we sing.” The songs we sing together shape our thoughts of God, the gospel, and the way we see the world. In fact, singing to one another is a mark of the Spirit’s filling (Ephesians 5:18–19) and the word of Christ dwelling in us richly (Colossians 3:16). With this in mind, I want to share six imperatives I’ve come to value in the selection of songs for corporate worship. Then I’ll describe how we put these principles into practice for a Sunday service at my church. Six Imperatives for Selecting Songs...

it’s not true that we’re dealing with “a translation of translations of translations,” as if the original Greek first went into Chinese which went into German which went into Polish and finally we got around to putting it into English. No, we’re able to translate directly from the original Greek and Hebrew, so at worst we’re dealing with a translation, full stop. But what should we say about that last idea, the charge that all we have available to us are “hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies?” Copypock. Er, I mean, poppycock. That’s what we should say. Let’s think for a moment about the question of transmission—that is, can we be confident that the original text of the Bible was transmitted accurately to us through the centuries? As we begin to consider that question, we should just right off the bat acknowledge the gigantic glittering elephant standing here in the room: We don’t have the originals....

Science is an amazing thing! It’s enabled us to transcend so many of our previously existing barriers, from being able to walk on the moon to being able to carry on a live conversation with someone on the opposite side of the planet, from helping us know what makes fevers run hot to knowing what makes stars hot, from giving us the flashlight to the strobe light to the blacklight. It’s an amazing thing, but unfortunately, many seem dedicating to pitting science against Christianity and vice versa.On the one hand, you have the atheists who have tried to monopolize science as theirs and nobody else’s (Their symbol is an atom for Pete’s sake). On the other hand, you have Christians who insist that a strict, literal, face value reading of Genesis is the only way to read it, and if you deviate from the 7 24-hour day view, you’re a man pleaser and a compromiser. The Bible and Science both talk about our origins, so it’s no wonder that people would wonder if they’re simpatico. I would affirm that there is no conflict between God’s world and God’s word. There may be a conflict between science and theology, but not between the world and The Bible. Science and theology are both interpretations of God’s world and God’s Word respectively. If the universe and The Bible have the same author, then

“Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.” Obi-Wan’s admonition to Luke Skywalker sums up what some skeptics probably think about Christianity. If it were real, they would be able to “feel it” in some tangible way, and perhaps also be able to manipulate its power. A skeptic I spoke with recently framed it this way: “I don’t ‘feel’ God in my heart the way most theists claim to, I don’t see any external justification for his existence, and I simply see no good reason to believe. So why is it my fault that I don’t believe? God supposedly created me just the way I am, after all. So, I’m not ‘rejecting God’ since he never made himself known to me in any real way. So why is non-belief a crime at all? What is the effect of non-belief that is so horrible?”...

Is there a way to use the Bible to get someone interested in knowing more about the Bible? I’ve thought about this question for many years. As I learned more about the Word, and spoke more with people who called themselves Christian but knew little or nothing about what the Bible teaches, I wondered about the best approach to take. Here, in a nutshell, is one possible approach to make the case for studying the Bible from the Bible. Most people who call themselves Christian will acknowledge that the Bible is the inspired word of God. What this means to them varies...

No doubt part of the wonder that is concentrated in the word "Behold" is on account of the contrast with the unbelieving lament of the preceding sentence. Zion said, "The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me." How amazed the divine mind seems to be at this wicked unbelief! What can be more astounding than the unfounded doubts and fears of God's favored people? The Lord's loving word of rebuke should make us blush...

Sometimes we get confused about the way salvation works. Almost by accident, we can fall into a gospel that’s heavy on encouraging one another in God’s forgiveness and grace and mercy, but woefully light on warning one another of the dangers of diving headlong into sin. This kind of gospel has no word for the brother or sister who gives in to temptation over and over again — who “makes a practice of sinning" (1 John 3:8). “Sin is hell-bent on premeditated murder. It will kill you.” Over time, we avoid the Old Testament with all of its narratives of God's judgment, cherry-pick through the sermons of Jesus and the letters of Paul, then skip passed the harsh warnings of Hebrews and James. We select only the passages that tell us of God's love and forgiveness and joy. But are these warnings in Scripture not a part of God’s plan to save, too? Let’s admit the hard truth: Many of us are failing in the fight against daily temptation.