Dr Paul Allen

Proverbs 18:21 says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue: And they that love it shall eat its fruit.” I want to illustrate the story of King Ahab to show the importance of declaring victory over your life. This king of Israel had agreed to let the enemy come in and take some of his belongings.  But when the adversary demanded even more, King Ahab said, “Tell my lord the king, ‘Your servant will do all you demanded the first time, but this demand I cannot meet.’” Something snapped in Ahab, and he decided at that moment that he had given up all that he was going to give up. The enemy will never be satisfied.  There needs to come a time when you decide to stop letting negative thoughts and words control your life. Satan’s goal is to kill, steal, and destroy you and your family, but if you can change the narrative, you can change the outcome.  Victory has a voice. Don’t let the enemy, circumstances, the world, or other people’s opinions control the narrative of you...

No. It’s totally a mystery in God’s love. Here’s the beautiful thing: go to Deuteronomy, and go to chapter 6, chapter 7, and chapter 10, and look at God’s election of Israel. At one point God says, “I did not choose you because you were the greatest of all the nations, for you were the least” (Deut. 7:7). If I was God, I would have chosen Egypt, because then you’ve got a superpower and you already have a leg up to conquer the world with your religion, right? Israel is a tiny sliver of land between massive nation-states. At one point in Deuteronomy 10, God says: “To the Lord God belongs the earth and the nations and the heavens. And yet, I set my elective love on you” (Deut. 10:14–15). If there is any text we need that tells us God’s election is absolutely unconditional, it’s that one. There is nothing in us that merits God’s election; it is purely His good pleasure and will and grace and love. This is Ephesians 1. And what does this do but drive us to gratitude and worship? It...

Cover via Amazon "The activity by which the Christian directly secures the mortification of his sins is prayer," wrote J. I. Packer in his book A Quest For Godliness . But what does this practice of putting sin to death through personal prayer look like? J. I. Packer: "I never get to the end of mortifying sin because sin in my heart is still marauding, even though it is not dominant. Sin is constantly expressing itself in new disorderly desires, as bindweed is constantly expressing itself in fresh shoots and fresh blooms. Once bindweed has established itself in your garden or hedge it is very difficult to get out because it is always extending itself under the surface of the soil. And sin in the heart is rather like that. But as blooms of sin break surface and I recognize them, I am called to — indeed deep down in my heart I want to — go into action with this prayer procedure for draining the life out of them. And I think this is a discipline every Christian has ...

There are many caricatures and missinformation when it comes to how Christians through the ages have viewed sex in marriage. In Dr. Joel R. Beeke's  Living for God's Glory: An Introduction to Calvinism , he dedicates a chapter to marriage, in which he discusses the Puritan's view. Marital love must be sexual, so that both marital partners can give themselves fully to each other with joy and exuberance in a healthy relationship marked by fidelity. Reformers such as Martin Luther , Ulrich Zwingli , and John Calvin established this aspect of marriage by abandoning the medieval Roman Catholic attitudes that marriage was inferior to celibacy, that all sexual contact between marital partners was a necessary evil to propagate the human race, and that a procreative act that involved passion was inherently sinful. This negative view was rooted in the ancient church and based on the writings of such notables as Tertullian, Ambrose, and Jerome, all of whom believed that, even withi...