What Is Faith?
The word “faith” is used in more than one way to mean more than one thing in the Bible. Each “thing” is a varying degree of belief, trust, assurance, and/or obedience....
What Is Repentance?
Repentance is not one of the favorite topics among most of today’s clergy. Perhaps it’s due to their fear of driving off their congregations with such ‘negativity.’ After all,...
Why Are There So Many Denominations?
To set the stage, let’s say you are invited to church by a friend from work. You politely, perhaps even curiously, take her up on it. The service you attend is very different...
I Believe In God, But…
I hear it all the time: I don’t want to give up sex or quit drinking. I’m not ready to settle down. I just graduated. I work on Sundays. My friends or my family would all stop...
A Protestant Visits Rome
If you're over 50, like me, you may have memories of the first fall school assignments to give a report of what you did or what you may have learned during your now-passed...
If I become a Christian, do I have to hate homosexuals?
I cannot count how many times I've had a conversation with someone claiming not to believe in God, the church, or religion because of the way Christians have acted toward them...
What is the Gospel?
Before “in the beginning,” all was the holiness and the light of God: God the Father, the Son of God, and the Spirit of God. And the Father said to the Son, Those who will...
What is sin?
There is a word that appears in many of my articles, as in many conversations about Christianity and theology. But it can be easy to overlook. That word is ‘sin.’ But what is...
What is the Christian life?
I want to address the question, what is the Christian life? I want to make an observation of the Lord’s purpose for Christians beyond saying the sinner’s prayer and planning...
Does God kill?
A reader once asked me a question I hadn’t heard in several years. It’s a question I used to ask a lot when I was still an atheist: Did God kill people in the Bible? Yes, God...
What is grace?
When I was first saved and began attending church, one of the words I noticed being used rather liberally was the word grace. What is grace? I wondered. Oddly, it was often a...
The Best Version of the Bible: An Informed Guide
I was saved in 2012. In 2011, I was an atheist. I was always very quick to ask (what I thought was) a rhetorical question, “If the Bible is the Word of God, why are there so...