“Saul listened to Jonathan’s advice and swore an oath: ‘As surely as the Lord lives, David will not be killed.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
When sin is loosed in a situation, the hold on the truth of the various parties to it becomes one of the first casualties. As this chapter unfolds, we see various different individuals lying in one way or another. It’s all part of one big mess which ultimately lies at the feet of Saul. Read the rest…
“So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Jesus says two really important things here. The first gives us the rubric for having confidence in our fellowship. The second gives us the dual result of this state of affairs. Read the rest…
“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
We live in this day now. The power and influence of the church has been steadily eroding in the West for more than a generation. A good argument can be made that this has been a progression that started back in the 19th century and has continued apace with only a few interruptions since. Read the rest…
This past Sunday we kicked off a brand new teaching series at FBCO called, Reasons to Believe. For the next several weeks we are going to tackle some common objections to the Christian faith, try to turn them on their heads, and show why, rather than offering reasons to not believe, they actually offer us very good reasons to embrace the Christian faith with even more tenacity than before. This won’t necessarily be an easy journey, but it will be a good one. I hope you’ll come along for the entire ride because in the end, we’ll see that having a relationship with Jesus is the most important reason to believe. In this first part, we face head-on the notion that Christianity’s claim to be the exclusive pathway to truth and life isn’t nearly so arrogant as we are often taught.
Knowing What’s True
There’s an old story about a man on a quest for truth. He wanted to know what was true and what was not so that he could dedicate his life to the truth. His search eventually led him to seek out an obscure guru who was rumored to have spent much of his life pondering the question of truth. As a result he was considered most wise on this particular topic. When the man finally found the wise, old guru he posed his question to him: “How can I know what’s true and what’s not true?” Read the rest…
This week as we continued in the third part of our series through 1 John, A Word on Reality, we looked at how we can stand firm in the reality of God against this world’s unrelenting tide of fantasies and their ever more aggressive attempts to move in their direction. If we are going to resist the lies of this world, there is one key thing we must do. Read on to find out what it is.
A Vise-Grip on Truth
For the past couple of summers, Lisa and I have enjoyed the show “Fool Us with Penn and Teller” on the CW Network. It’s a gameshow wherein four different magicians bring their best tricks to try and fool the world-famous magician duo. The challenge is that they’ve been at it for over 40 years and know just about everything there is to know about magic and how to do it. While there are a few tricks we have been able to figure out, there are some that leave us absolutely flummoxed as to how they did it. Any really good magic trick can leave you feeling like maybe there’s more to this world than we know about. Now, of course, no magic show is any more than a cleverly disguised trick, but the intimation of something more is part of its appeal. Still, while the nod and wink of a magician is entertaining, following that rabbit all the way down its hole can lead, as Alice discovered, to more trouble than most of us would care to find. Read the rest…
The Nexus 