Pastors aren’t the brand
This is right. Neither pastors nor their churches need to be a brand.
Regeneration: Christian salvation is a spiritual heart transplant and can only be by grace
John Stevens looks at a new approach to heart transplants and uses it as an illustration of regeneration.
Learning from translations
Eddie Arthur looks at what we can learn from translations of the Bible in different languages.
Do you want to get well?
‘The question caught my attention. Why ask such a question. The answer seemed obvious. Can’t we assume that people want to get well? Could there be reasons they prefer not to be well?’
Two hundred people left our small church
Leaving aside that if you have 200 people to leave at all, ‘small’ is not the word we would use to describe you here in the UK, this was a particularly interesting and insightful one. I can affirm, the very worst part of being a pastor is relational issues and when people leave badly.
Resentment rots the soul: How to handle anger so it doesn’t diminish yourself
‘At bottom, resentment is anger. Anger rehashed. Over and over again, endlessly. Thus in order to understand resentment, we must understand anger—in both its sinful and righteous manifestations. Just as a bank teller learns to identify counterfeit bills from genuine ones, so we learn to distinguish sinful anger through a firm understanding of righteous anger.’
From the archive: The thin lacquer of culture
‘Ever since the Fall… man has been corrupted by sin. Though, thanks to common grace, we are not utterly depraved, we are, nonetheless, totally depraved. It only takes the thin lacquer to chip away and, faced with the right circumstances, we are capable of gross evil.’