Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

Your willingness to be equipped today will in large measure determine how God will use you in the future!

“And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”’ (Matthew 28:18-20) (underline and embolding added)

Most often, this passage is referenced in order to emphasize missions and evangelism, and those are indeed vital components; however, the teaching task is often, albeit unwittingly, reduced to a secondary or tertiary status. Additionally, the essentialness of the breadth and depth of the teaching component is often obscured by our words and practice. (more…)

Dr. David Wells is Distinguished Senior Research Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He can be depended upon to offer valuable insight into biblical questions as he does so succinctly here: 

Where Christian faith is offered as a means of finding personal wholeness rather than holiness, the church has become worldly.

There are many other forms of worldliness that are comfortably at home in the evangelical church today. Where it substitutes intuition and feelings for biblical truth, it is being worldly. Where its appetite for the Word has been lost in favor of light discourses and entertainment, it is being worldly. Where it has restructured what it is and what it offers around the rhythms of consumption, it is being worldly, for customers are actually sinners whose place in the church is not to be explained by a quest for self-satisfaction but by a need for repentance. Where it cares more about success than about faithfulness, more about size than spiritual health, it is being worldly. Where the centrality of God to worship is lost amidst the need to be distracted and to have fun, the church is being worldly because it is simply accommodating itself to the preeminent entertainment culture in the world. Is it not odd that in so many church services each Sunday, services that are ostensibly about worshiping God, those in attendance may not be obliged to think even once about his greatness, grace, and commands? Worship in such contexts often has little or nothing to do with God.¹

1. David F. Wells, “Introduction: The Word in the World,” in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis, ed. John H. Armstrong (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 31. [↩]

Those of you who know me know that I am deeply concerned about not only false teaching, but particularly the shallow insubstantial teaching of the Scripture in a growing number of our evangelical churches.  This leaves this generation of Christians un-equipped and the next generation with very little knowledge of the Christian faith to not only follow but to pass down to the next generation. 

The dumbing down of the church is dishonoring to God, harmful to Christians, and consigns future generations to either perish without the truth or to live only principles of Scripture without knowing God in a way that allows them to teach the generation that succeeds them—if there is such a generation.

Simply put, one cannot teach what one does not know, and if the church abrogates her teaching responsibility, those who should be learning the faith to pass it on will be no more than emotional Christians.

C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) taught at Oxford for 29 years and later held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge until his death.  He saw the necessity and importance of correct teaching and spoke pointedly about it in one of his God in the Dock Essays.

He said, “This very obvious fact—that each generation is taught by an earlier generation—must be kept very firmly in mind . . . None can give to another what he does not possess himself. No generation can bequeath to its successor what it has not got. You may frame the syllabus as you please. But when you have planned and reported ad nauseam, if we are skeptical we shall teach only skepticism to our pupils, if fools only folly, if vulgar only vulgarity, if saints sanctity, if heroes heroism.

Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next. It is not a closed system. Nothing which was not in the teachers can flow from them into the pupils. We shall all admit that a man who knows no Greek himself cannot teach Greek to his form; but it is equally certain that a man whose mind was formed in a period of cynicism and disillusion, cannot teach hope or fortitude.  A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity through its schools: one which is not, will not. All the ministries of education in the world cannot alter this law . . . “¹

1. C. S. Lewis, “On the Transmission of Christianity,” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology & Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids; Eerdmans, 1972), 116-117. [↩]

This article includes an introduction to my views concerning the theological system of Calvinism, followed by a table of contents with links to articles on my thoughts regarding specific theological areas of concern or disagreement with Calvinism. 

My prayer is that this article will help all of you who have asked me questions or are presently confused regarding biblical issues like election, predestination, sovereignty of God, free choice, faith and works, God’s love, hell, etc.

I am forever grateful to God for the joy of shepherding the fellowship of Trinity Baptist Church. (more…)

Someone once wrote:
He knew the unknowable: the human heart and all things;
He loved the unlovable: the human sinner;
He did the impossible: He died and rose again;
He was the impossible: a sinless character.

“Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.””(John 20:28-29)

The emergent church proclaims that they are seeking to reach this generation of postmoderns.  While I applaud that goal, I am quite concerned with the message of most of the emergent church.  I mention four areas that I have noticed being promoted by emergent leaders. (more…)

Billy Wolf has provided me with a chart that succinctly summarizes some of the fundamental differences between a biblical view of scriptural doctrines and the teaching of the postmodern emergent church.  Although the emergent church leaders may be good writers, winsome, and quite capable of persuading young men and women who have little knowledge of the Scripture, they are actually communicating some of the same distortions that have been taught by liberalism or neo-orthodoxy in the past, albeit with a little different twist. 

These are not stylistic differences or ancillary doctrines; they are distorting the essential truths of the Scripture.  They have in many cases become too much like the ones to whom they are seeking to be relevant.  Thus, if they reach these postmoderns, many remain lost because too much truth was sacrificed in the quest for relevance.

postmodern-and-orthodox-church-chart-3-09

Here is the summary of our study on what the Bible says concerning homosexuality.  If you have not been with us over the last eight weeks of examining every major passage on homosexuality in the Bible, then these conclusions may look overly ambitious.  If you have not been with us, I encourage you to download the entire series.  This summary is merely to serve as a reminder of the major conclusions that can be drawn from the Scripture concerning homosexuality.

If you have not been taught what the Scripture teaches concerning homosexuality, I want to encourage you to listen to this series entitled, “Loving the Homosexual to Healing with Truth.”  We still have several weeks to go in this study, but we have concluded the section which looks at each of the major passages in detail.

It is important that Christians speak the truth in love, which requires loving God, the people Christ died for, and the truth, and also knowing the truth. (more…)

Like many readers of this current best-selling novel, I was given a copy of The Shack by a colleague at work. She said her husband was teaching it in their Sunday School class. While I had not even heard of this book, I’ve since discovered that it is being given high profile displays in our local bookstores, both secular and Christian, and that it may be made into a feature film.

At first, I thought the author was just using literary license and creativity to help the story’s protagonist come to grips with the age-old question, Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? But the more I read, the more frequently I began to sense that the author was intentionally distorting scriptural truths. And when I did a Google search of “The Shack and Critics,” I discovered numerous online blogs, critiques and reports by people who had interviewed the author, who were confirming my suspicion that we might be dealing with a false teacher. (more…)