God has been very gracious to me. He mercifully saved my soul at age 8. He then gave me the strength to go to school everyday as a outcast because I loved Christ more than the world. When I was 14yrs old, I had the desire to be in full-time pastoral ministry. After high school, God granted me schooling at Moody Bible Institute to be trained in full-time ministry. When I first arrived, I had dropped the pastoral-desire and instead wanted to pursue sports-ministry (specifically camp ministry). I was unhappy with that major, because it was more about me than about serving Christ and His church.… Continue reading
Category Archives: Bibliology
Context! Context! Context! (a lesson from Luke 15)
Context is king!
I have been told this for a very long time, especially in seminary where I was learning to rightly divide God’s Word. The Bible was not written in a vacuum. It was written in real history, with real people, making real speeches, writing with real pens & ink & paper, with real burdens to see God’s holiness perfected in God’s people. And each book makes an argument for us to live as God intended: for His glory. Every passage, then, must be taken at face value and interpreted in its context, so that the truth contained will be understood as God the Author intended it to be understood.… Continue reading
“No Creed but the Bible” & Sola Scriptura
One of the foundational theological convictions of my life and ministry is the principle of Sola Scriptura, the biblical doctrine that Scripture is the only infallible authority of Christian faith and practice. Directly related to this conviction is my belief in the sufficiency of Scripture: the truth that in the Scriptures, we have every divine word needed to live a life that honors God. As Paul puts it so memorably in a letter to his student, Timothy: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, italics mine).… Continue reading
Reading the Bible Prayerfully
Happy New Year, dear reader! It’s that time of year where we all make commitments that we know we’ll never keep. I’m only kidding of course (sort of!). Although there is nothing inherently different about the beginning of a new year from any time throughout the rest of the year, the turn of a new year is a good opportunity to re-evaluate the direction of our lives, reset our priorities, and even make some reasonable commitments to pursue growth in the coming year.
A couple of helpful posts have been written in the last week about these things here on the PS23 blog.… Continue reading
Deny or Not to Deny? … Inerrancy, that is
Over the past several weeks, I have had the privilege of meeting with some men in our church to do a study in Theology. These men (ages from 18-40) have all grown up in the church-culture, most have sat under excellent Bible teaching during their life, but they have never taken the time to read-consider theology. They approached me and asked if I could help them in this and I agreed. So far, it has been a blessing, stretching, challenging time and we have only dealt with “why study the theology?” and a bit of Bibliology (the study of the Bible).… Continue reading