Consider Your Response to Receiving the Greatest Gift Anyone Could Ever Get Paul tells the church of Philippi to work out your salvation (Philippians 2:12). He doesn’t say to work for your salvation. They’ve already received eternal life as a free gift through God’s goodness (his grace), and there’s nothing they need to do to […]
Stop Asking If You Can Do Something and Start Asking If You Should We have freedom through Jesus. Do we believe this is true? How does this idea inform our day-to-day actions? We’ll do well to consider this thought to determine the best way to apply it to our lives. As children, our parents taught […]
Some of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses Counter the Practice of Buying Salvation Martin Luther objected to the abuse of indulgences; you can’t buy salvation. Though he mentioned the Church and the pope in some of his theses, he focused on the unbiblical excess of this one practice. Here’s the background: In a creative, though misguided, […]
Discover What We Must Do to Be Saved A recurring theme in Jesus’s biographies is people asking him what they must do. What’s frustrating is Jesus doesn’t always give the same answer. Jesus tells different people to do different things. (For this discussion, we’ll understand “kingdom of God, “kingdom of heaven,” “eternal life,” “salvation,” and […]
Eternal Life Begins Today (Not When We Die) Jesus often talks about the kingdom of God (the kingdom of heaven). He talks about how close the kingdom of God is, saying that it’s near and even that it’s here. How do we understand this immediacy of the kingdom of God in our life today? Is […]
Running Barefoot in the Snow In my book Bridging the Sacred-Secular Divide, I tell the story of our children running barefoot in the snow. Here’s what happened. One day I painfully realized that whenever our children asked for anything, the default answer of my wife and me was no. It mattered not how legitimate their […]
The Source of Life, Truth, and the Way to Father God Is Through Jesus The disciple Thomas wants to go where Jesus will go but doesn’t know how to proceed. He seeks clarification. Jesus gives him a five part answer, which another disciple John records for us. Jesus says, “I am the way and the […]
Our Savior Came to Heal and to Save After giving us four chapters of historical narrative, Isaiah shifts back to more prophecy. His future-focused look tells us about Jesus and justice. Though Jesus is God’s Son, as our Savior—the Messiah—he is also God’s servant, who will come to earth in service of Father God to […]
When Does Eternal Life Begin The phrase eternal life occurs forty-two times in the Bible. But what exactly does this mean? Do you know that eternal life begins now? Some think that it is a synonym for heaven. If we believe in Jesus, we will go to heaven when we die. That is what eternal […]
But Luther Believed the Pope Had No Power Over Purgatory Martin Luther’s second group of ninety-five theses addressed the pope’s authority over purgatory, or to be more correct, the pope’s lack of authority. Martin asserted that the pope had no power when it came to remitting sins and their penalty in purgatory. Though some accounts […]