Christian Living

If it’s true, as the ancient Tertullian said, that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” much seed has been sown on Turkish soil, from the 2 nd -century martyrdom of Polycarp to the massacre of Christian Armenians in 1915 (where 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives). And these are...
Throughout Genesis chapters 1 and 2, the reader understands that it is God alone who gets to determine and pronounce what is good (each of His created days - 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31) as well as what is not good (that man should be alone - 2:18). It is for this reason that God put a reminder, a...
My father's family escaped the Soviet Union in 1934, a few months after the United States established diplomatic relations there, in 1933. They had Russian roots and naively returned to visit an ailing relative in 1922. The Russians said "Welcome back, comrades," seized their passports, and kept...
Perhaps the phrase that gets stuck in the throat when reciting the Apostle’s Creed is “ He (Christ) descended into hell .” And if it does, it wouldn’t surprise me. It was difficult for John Calvin to utter the phrase despite having used the Apostle’s Creed to formulate his Institutes of the...
Within the early verses of Genesis, we find not only the source of the universe but also the source of every woman’s identity. The story of our first mother, Eve, has much to tell us about the purpose of women on this earth. Imago Dei The first piece of Eve’s identity is the fact that she was made...
As we watch news of North Korea and pray for that gospel-deprived country, it might be encouraging to remember the rapidity and intensity with which Christianity spread within the still undivided Korea in just a few decades. One of the most influential missionaries in Korea was Horace Grant...
How important are the first chapters of Genesis to our understanding of the whole of Scripture? What happens to our perspective if we isolate Genesis 1-3 from the rest of God’s Word? Richard Barcellos drops in. He’s written Getting the Garden Right: Adam’s Work and God’s Rest in Light of Christ...
I have heard Roman Catholics say that the Council of Trent brought great improvements to the church. If so, the improvements barely touched Italy, where the religious authorities continued to hide criminal acts and the Bible disappeared for centuries from the hands of the laity. In fact, at the...
It could be argued that the very concept of primary and secondary doctrines is a very Protestant problem, precisely because it comes down to an understanding of interpretive authority. Older writers referred to primary doctrines as dogma, those doctrines which have a definite and decidedly fixed...
I go there from time to time. The lady I visit is the wife of an old friend from another part of the country. He went to be with the Lord several years ago. Even then, she had begun, as the British can affectionately say, “to lose her marbles.” Since then, in God’s kindness, she has been moved to a...