A Shallow Hermeneutic

Read Jeramiah 17:5-13 … When one investigates the Scriptures there should be a desire to find THE TRUTH. Isn’t that God’s purpose throughout all of salvation history? To present THE TRUTH in such a way that one can understand, and not just understand but also to apply. Recently while listening to a sermon a gentleman …

Harm My Peace

Read Romans 14:14-23 … It is always interesting to have religious conversations with people – one never knows where they will go or what will be said. Case in point, a conversation regarding something on the news sparked a chat about various beliefs concerned with the end times. Not too outrageous, but after a short …

Why Believe the Bible?

Read Hebrews 6:13-20 … It’s a question that is often asked by non-believers, “Why should I believe the Bible when there are so many other books?” To be fair, there are a great many books in the world today that claim to point to either a better life now in the form of health and …

Is Talent Enough?

Read Rom. 12:3-8 … One of the better known parables told by Jesus is the parable of the Talents. A similar version of this parable occurs in both Matthew and Luke with the major differences being the number of servants and the amount of money given to each. In Luke there are 10 servants each …

An Open Mind

Read Matthew 7:24-29 … Where I work there used to be a sign hanging in that one certain spot that almost everyone passed which said, “Communication is the bridge to a successful OR.” A sign like this could hang in almost any business that employs a lot of people having to work together toward a …

Calling on the Name of the Lord

Read Acts 2:16-21 … Long before the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the prophet Joel was looking forward to a time when the glorious reign of the Messiah would come to full flower in this world. Joel speaks of a time in the future when God will “pour out My Spirit on all …

We Don’t Get a Vote

Read 2 Corinthians 11:2-4 … Around this neck of the woods the “Vote for _________” signs are starting to pop-up like the perennial weeds that overrun a yard every spring, or the flu everyone seems to get regardless of the yearly inoculation. Really, those signs do serve a function – getting a candidate’s name in …

Instructive, Not Authoritative

Read 2 Tim. 3:16-17 and 1 Thess. 5:21 … “Where the Bible speaks we speak; where the Bible is silent we are silent.” This phrase, meant to point to the supreme authority of the Bible has, in some parts, become a battle cry over the personal and congregational prerogative to engage in certain practices or …

No Creed but the Bible

Read Psalm 119:97-104 … There has been a long-standing aversion to creeds and confessions in the Church of Christ … at least as long standing as those such as Stone and the Campbells made it clear that creeds and confessions have no part in the dogma of the Church. Creeds and confessions have certainly been …

The Church is the Kingdom of God

Read Matthew 16:13-20 … Right off the bat, when reading the title to this article, one encounters a problem because the term “church,” although present in our translations of the Scriptures, is not present in the original language. In the original is the word ekklesia ­– a word which would better be translated as “assembly.” …