Our church’s statement of faith says:We believe that all who believe in Jesus Christ are regenerated, indwelt, baptized, and sealed by the Holy Spirit and so are secured for the day of redemption. We believe that those so secured will persevere in the faith of Jesus Christ and produce fruit evidencing their relationship to God.One of the most common theological I’m asked is whether our church teac...  Read More

We believe that the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to glorify God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…to regenerate the believing sinner… “Only through regeneration by the Holy Spirit can salvation and spiritual life be obtained.”God saves us from Himself through the sacrifice of Christ.  But He also saves us from OURSELVES through the work of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit’s work is a lifelong pro...  Read More

When you want to talk about what evangelicals mean by “salvation” (or “being saved” or “getting saved”), you are talking about two separate but closely related things, because there are two things from which we must be saved.First, we must be saved from God (from His wrath and His righteous judgment).  Jesus did that for us by His sacrifice on the cross, satisfying God’s wrath at sin and turning i...  Read More

They say history is written by the victors.  But the Bible was written by prophets and apostles who, in their day at least, were on the losing side.Every visit to the King of Prussia Mall reminds me that all the Christian principles I try to live by mean nothing to most people.One soldier being pinned down by machine gun fire doesn’t mean his side is losing.  Things may look completely different t...  Read More

In my previous blog noted that the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ saved us from God’s wrath.  We weren’t involved in the process; God did what was necessary to assuage His wrath so He could forgive us.  Our part is to believe the message that Christ’s death is sufficient to make sinners right with God.A common mistake evangelicals make is to believe that turning away God’s wrath is the whole st...  Read More

God insists that He alone is God.  We are born insisting God is on our throne.  This is why we are “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2.3).The first thing we need to be rescued from is an angry God.Since we weren’t about to change, something had to be changed on God’s end – and God had to do it.  We couldn’t and wouldn’t.Our church’s statement of faith says “we believe that…Jesus Christ…died...  Read More

We believe that man was created in the image of God but fell into sin and is therefore lost and totally marked by corruption and evil…That’s all that our statement of faith says about ‘sin’.  I’m elaborating on it because I believe ‘sin’ – what Christianity deems the central problem in the world – has been misunderstood, and that is part of the reason that ‘salvation’ has been misunderstood.The ce...  Read More

The sin that plunged the world into a history of pain and suffering was not adultery or murder but eating a piece of fruit.  Eating fruit per se is not evil.  The evil was the thought that motivated the act.God had commanded us not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If God is good, then the command is good, and God’s intention in keeping us from the knowledge of good and evil...  Read More

God saves sinners.  ‘Evangelical’ means ‘preaching good news’, and “God saves sinners” is the good news that we evangelicals preach.  Five of the fourteen points of our church’s statement of faith cover God’s saving of sinners, and I’m spelling out those ideas in this blog series.  We’ve started by trying to understand the problem:  sin.  The most common misconception is that ‘sin’ is ‘crime’, i.e...  Read More

Evangelicals always talk about “giving people the plan of salvation” so people can “get saved.”  We never talked this way in the Catholic Church, so when I converted, I had no idea what evangelicals were talking about.The plan of salvation seemed to boil down to a few salient points:1:  God condemns sinners to hell.2:  We are all born sinners.3:  Jesus died to forgive sinners.4:  Sinners are saved...  Read More

The book of Genesis presents God as the good Creator of a good world.But the human race entertained suspicions that God was not good but rather a deceptive manipulator seeking to oppress us, not bless us.  We declared our independence from Him to save ourselves from (as we saw it) God’s suffocating control.  Each soul had to instead trust itself to determine good and evil for itself.  Each soul ha...  Read More

Crucifying rebels was the business of Roman soldiers.  Hardened to pleas for mercy and deaf to agonized screams, the Romans hammered spikes through the forearms and feet of the condemned, hoisted them up, and moved on to the next victim.  Then they had lunch.  It was all in a day’s work.Seventy years before Christ, they crucified 6000 stragglers from a slave rebellion along the road between Rome a...  Read More