Dr Paul Allen

It’s a joy to reserve this part of the year to remember and celebrate the birth of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. This, of course, is what Christmas is about in the truest sense. Amid all the tinsel, the gingerbread cookies, and the trees and stockings and gift shopping, true Christians pause to reorient our thoughts and our affections to what Christmas is really about: the incarnation of the Son of God. And that kind of theological shorthand has become so familiar to us that we cease to be amazed at the truth we speak of when we speak of the incarnation. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” God. Becoming man. The infinite, eternal, self-existent, self-sufficient, almighty God, without shedding His divine nature, taking upon Himself—in addition...

It got no small notice online and has been posted all around the internet (and ‘the internet’ means ‘Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat’).  I listened to the sermon a few days ago and, like many, found it to be a biblical breath of fresh air in what is quickly becoming an unsettling age. MacArthur placed the recent supreme court decision in the light of spiritual reality.  He commented on how Satan is behind the attack against the family in all its fronts (feminism, the sexual revolution, abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, etc.).  He reminded Christians that what they’re seeing is neither new nor abnormal.  He went through several sections of the Old Testament and commented on how all the issues that we see today were all issues in Israel: homosexuality, transvestism, etc.  He talked at length about various sexual issues as they were addressed in both the Old and New Testaments, and then commented on how those same issues have arisen to the forefront of...

For each session there is the Challies summary of it, and then at Cripplegate we ran something closer to the manuscript of each message. If you want the concise version, go to the Challies link, and if you want the more detailed version, check out our link. Challies writes summarizing the content as a listener, while the Cripplegate link is more like a manuscript used by the speaker. When the audio/video is up at GTY, we’ll link that here too.   The conference began with  John MacArthur  preaching on Leviticus 9-10, and on the strange fire from Aaron’s sons.  He connected that sin with the modern Charismatic movement ( Challies summary  and the  Cripplegate notes ). Joni Erickson Tada  told the story of how she ended up losing the use of her legs, and how she has grown spiritually as a result. She talked about how charismatics have wanted to pray for her healing, while she has wanted prayer for her sanctification ( Challies summary ). R. C. Spr...

English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Author: Cripplegate . The year was 1878. Modernism was on the rise, and its attack on the church was full scale. In response, a group of conservative Bible scholars established a set of fourteen doctrinal principles to outline what they believed was the essence of biblical Christianity. Known as the “Niagara Creed” (because it was associated with the Niagara Bible Conference of 1883–1897), these principles laid the foundation for a movement that would later be called fundamentalism. On the broader front, the dispensational organizers of the Niagara Bible Conference were joined by non-dispensationalists like B.B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen in their fight against modernism. In 1910, the fourteen-point Niagara Creed was distilled into “five fundamentals” by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church . These five fundamentals were as follows: 1. The inerrancy of Scripture 2. The virgin birth and deity of Jesus Chr...