It’s with great sadness but also joyful expectancy that I’m announcing that as of fall 2020, I will no longer be teaching at Talbot School of Theology. I say “great sadness” because I love our department and my last sixteen years (my first year was part time) teaching for Biola University have been the best […]
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Not long after a famous Christian leader’s son took his life, I was speaking at a church in Carlsbad, California, on “Crusades, Inquisitions, Witch-hunts, Slavery, and the Oppression of Women.” After my presentation, I took questions and the first question was from a slender, 40 something brunette. She asked, “Can a Christian commit suicide and
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In the last two posts we’ve seen that God uses suffering to protect us, and we’ve seen that God uses suffering to purify us. In this post, we come to an often underappreciated aspect of how God uses suffering in our lives for our good: God uses suffering to prove us. Proverbs 17:3 says, “The
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In my last post, we saw how God uses suffering to protect us from future harm. Related to that, in this post we’ll see how God uses suffering to purify us. This, of course, is folly to the non-Christian. Only those who, as Jesus said, “hunger and thirst after righteousness” (Matthew 5:6) will understand this
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As I mentioned in my second post on suffering, for us to triumph in suffering we need to know what God is seeking to accomplish in and through us by our suffering. If we don’t know why we’re suffering, then suffering will be insufferable. But it’s amazing what people can endure if they think suffering
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One thing confusing many Christians is the origin of suffering. In my last post I explained the inevitability of suffering. But why do we suffer in the first place? Many Christians see suffering as contrary to God’s plan for their lives. Indeed, I grew up involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, now Cru, and I
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Prayer for healing needs to be understood in the context of God our Father. Consider that the Lord invented the father/child relationship and He tells us that we have that relationship to Him. But, if God is our loving Father, there’s nothing to work up—we don’t need to continue to say that God is going
Prayer for Healing—3: God’s Our Father Read More »
As I said in yesterday’s post, there are a lot of confused Christians when it comes to prayer for healing, and this has resulted in some zealous and harmful mistakes.
Prayer for Healing—2: Confused Christians Read More »
Many Christians are confused about prayer for healing. Like The Little Engine that Could, some contend that the sick should say “I believe God will heal me, I believe God will heal me, I believe God will heal me,” because to get God to heal them they cannot doubt that God will heal them. Others treat the
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