acts on Western Culture

Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of that history every ...

Jesus is understood in the light of the assumptions which control our culture.  When “reason” is invoked as a parallel or supplementary authority to “Scripture” and “tradition,” what is happening is t...

Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi has a scene set in South Africa where the young Indian lawyer and a white clergyman are walking together on a boardwalk, contrary to South African law at the time. ...

The world that we enter in the book of Acts is the most modern in all the Bible by virtue of its urban identity. Most of the action occurs in the famous cities of the Greco-Roman world, not in the loc...

The greatest and most powerful Christian distinctive is not the exercise of power; it is the offer of grace.

Romans 6 shines a bright spotlight on the dangerous half-truth, currently fashionable, that ‘God accepts us as we are.’ Will ‘God’s acceptance’ do as a complete grounding of Christian ethics? Emphatic...

In 1947 huge crowds came to hear a thirty-two-year-old Californian preach at mass evangelistic rallies throughout China. Although Bob Pierce had no knowledge of Chinese language or culture, his messag...

[For Christians] the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten. The church is not in the religion business. It never has been and it never will be, in spite of all the ecclesiast...

If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.

Taking Off the Old Clothes and Putting on the New Our passage continues Paul’s teaching on “the putting off of the old self” (anthropos) (of sin, corruption, and death) vs.22 and putting on the “new ...

This scripture guide is adapted from the Summer Settings sermon guide Road Trips II . For more Summer Settings sermon guides, click below. Saul's Confident Error Last week, we considered A...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Diverse Early Church From the start, the early church was a mix of people from different backgrounds, traditions, and classes.  We se...

My brother, who attended a Bible College during a smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from P...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

Union with Christ is the starting-point for everything else to be thought and said concerning what makes the Christian a Christian.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

if Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

‘Salvation’ is a wonderfully wide-ranging word and it would be a great mistake to think that it refers only to the forgiveness of our sins. God is as much concerned with our present and future as with...

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant...

God of power, love and wisdom: you’ve known us and loved us from before we even were, and extended your grace to us before we knew your name. You save us from ourselves – from our arrogance, rebell...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Diverse Early Church From the start, the early church was a mix of people from different backgrounds, traditions, and classes.  We...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea “oceans.”  The point is to relate our present-day affinity for the ocean, seashore, and beach...

Notes on the Passage Besieged from All Angles:  The context of this passage is best summed up with the words recorded throughout the letter: Trouble, Distress, Suffering, Hardship, Death at work, Ja...

Transition is one of the givens in our lives, and we only live well, we only manage our lives well, when we manage these transitions well. Our world changes; the circumstances of our lives change. The...

Preaching Commentary Taking Off the Old Clothes and Putting on the New Our passage continues Paul’s teaching on “the putting off of the old self” (anthropos) (of sin, corruption, and death) vs.22 a...

At the heart of the Protestant faith is the conviction that there is nothing we contribute to our salvation but our sin, no merit we bring but Christ's, and nothing necessary for justification exc...

Grace is the wonderful spirit that imbues every fiber of our being when we practice the fruits of the spirit: kindness, patience, understanding, forgiveness, love, gentleness, fellowship and endurance...

Living by grace inspires a growing consciousness that I am what I am in the sight of Jesus and nothing more.

Preaching Commentary Besieged from All Angles The context of this passage is best summed up with the words recorded throughout the letter: Trouble, Distress, Suffering, Hardship, Death at work, Jar...

[Jesus] sends us into the world as he was sent into the world (John 17:18; 20:21). We have to penetrate other people’s worlds, as he penetrated ours: the world of their thinking (as we struggle to und...