Grace Unbalanced

Something interesting happens whenever I talk about grace, forgiveness, and acceptance. People push back. As much as we like those things, as much as we need those things, as much as we realize that they are central to our faith as Christians, we seem to want to qualify them. To put an asterisk by them....

Using the Bible Online

The Bible can be difficult to understand. Books have been written about how to study the Bible. Invariably they say that you should start by trying to understand what a passage meant to its original audience, to understand their culture, their history. There are literary questions to ask: what kind of...

Bugs, Boys, and the Wrath of God

My father grew up on a farm in south Mississippi, which means that he grew up growing what he ate, and that he ate things like turnip greens. Ugh. I grew up on Southern cooking, but it was my mother’s Southern cooking, not my father’s, and while she also grew up in south Mississippi, she grew up in the...

Who’s Really On Trial Before Pilate

The case of Jesus before Pontius Pilate wasn’t really an issue of whether or not Jesus claimed to be God. Pilate didn’t really care about that stuff. That was religious stuff, which was for the Jews to decide. All Pilate cared about was whether or not Jesus posed a threat to Rome. He was convinced Jesus...

Love, Grace, and Reproof

Whenever I write or speak about grace, forgiveness, and the dangers of judgmentalism I invariably get some pushback from some who think that I’m going easy on sin. Some of this is from people who seem to genuinely feel that grace itself is too easy on sin. I think this reflects a fundamental...

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