While driving to my office recently, I noticed a leaflet attached to the middle of a stop sign. It read, “Same Day Abortions” and included a phone number along with the name of the doctor. The leaflet was weathered, so I couldn’t make out the name of the doctor. I’ll...
The work of missions is one of the most important that any church can engage in. It is the responsibility of every Christian. We are either supposed to go into the mission field or we should be supporting those who have gone with our prayers and our finances. This is...
The following article is abridged and repurposed, with express permission of the author, from the Cripplegate blog. The original article can be read here. The article originally appeared as a chapter in Things that Go Bump in the Church by Mike Abendroth, Clint Archer and Byron Yawn. George Orwell’s seminal political...
Every so often, when engaged in discussion on the subject of the prosperity gospel, I hear voices sympathetic to this doctrinal poison say, “But surely God does not want us to be poor, does he?” This is viewed as a trump card, as if there is no middle ground between...
It’s a supreme irony, or perhaps a sad blindness, that the present generation is supposedly in love with “authenticity,” “sincerity,” and “keeping it real.” After all, we’ve been doing everything but that for nearly a century. As Neil Postman pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we took a medium designed for amusing...
In our ongoing consideration of the seven things that God hates, we have considered “haughty eyes,” “a lying tongue,” “hands that shed innocent blood,” “a heart that devises wicked plans,” “feet that make haste to run to evil” and “a false witness who breathes out lies.” The seventh thing that...
The title of this article might lead you to think that I am about to provide some autobiographical insights. In a sense, I hope that is true. If I am correct that the world needs a certain kind of nerd, then I want to be one. And I want you...
The British poet John Dryden once wrote, “Truth is the foundation of all knowledge and the cement of all societies.” The God of the Bible is a God of truth, and in the list of seven things that he hates, we have already considered “a lying tongue.” But Solomon also...
Four pastors were sitting down to lunch. Having just read James 5, in which James urges his readers to confess their sins to one another (v. 16), one suggested that they practice what they had read. They all agreed, and so the first pastor said, “I have been a little...
Have you ever watched a film or read a book—perhaps a horror, a crime thriller, or even an action title involving some elaborate criminal scheme—and thought, who comes up with this stuff? Have you ever read or heard of some act of real-life wickedness and wondered, what kind of a...
