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 your life. You ma

What is Spiritual Warfare? 2 Thessalonians 1:4 –  Therefore, we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and the afflictions you are enduring. I heard a person who was in the military once share a harrowing war story with me. He and his men were deployed in Iraq and on patrol when they walked into an ambush. Enemies had set a trap for them that they unfortunately could not escape. They were surrounded on all sides, taking heavy enemy fire, low on supplies and ammunition, and had to settle in for an extended firefight. Thankfully, their communications still worked, and they could call for support. Exhausted, beat up, stressed out, and on alert, the soldiers needed to keep fighting to hold their position until reinforcements showed up, put down the enemy, and got them safely home. The Bible talks a lot about spiritual warfare, which has a lot in common with actual combat. For the Church, we are surrounded by the Enemy at w

Nick Batzig Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is one of the most ancient and revered military manuals in all of human history. In it, Sun Tzu set out what he believed to be the “essentials of military victory.” He wrote: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”1 Many of the seventeenth-century Puritans also emphasized the importance of knowing the enemy and his tactics when they approached the subject of spiritual warfare. For instance, in his Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks highlighted “the essentials” of spiritual warfare: “Christ, the Scripture, your own hearts, and Satan’s devices, are the four prime things that should be first and most studied and searched. If any cast off the study of these, they cannot be safe here, nor happy hereafter.”2 I

My family's beloved thirteen-year-old dog is named Keller. Every day he serves as a reminder of how a certain Presbyterian pastor in New York City influenced me in the early stages of my faith. I continue to admire him, even if I have turned elsewhere for guidance in our contemporary political moment.  If you were evangelical during the 2000s, Tim Keller was a name you couldn’t avoid. After completing theological studies at Gordon-Conwell in 1975, Keller accepted a senior pastor position in rural Virginia. He honed his preaching craft there, delivering multiple sermons a week for nine years. In the late 1980s, he started a church in New York City, which became Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Starting in 1989 with only fifty members, Redeemer eventually drew upward of 5,000 people on Sundays and launched a church planting network that has led to over 800 new churches in cities worldwide. The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus noted in these pages that impressive work was happening in Kelle

He is able to save the uttermost those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them. (Hebrews 7:25) Some phrases carry such strong comfort, such enduring consolation, that they ought to be engraved on the walls of the heart. Airplanes ought to write them daily in our spiritual sky. They ought to be carved on every tree in the forest of the soul. “To the uttermost” is such a phrase. Jesus is able to save to the uttermost. “That word ‘uttermost’ includes all that can be said,” John Newton once wrote. “Take an estimate of all our sins, all our temptations, all our difficulties, all our fears, and all our backslidings of every kind, still the word ‘uttermost’ goes beyond them all.” The word carries the idea of both fullness and finality: Jesus is able to save completely, and he is able to save forever. And the reason he is able to save his people so fully, so completely, is because “he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). In a

The lack of civility in public life these days is regularly commented on. The often vicious rhetoric that opposing sides in current national debates fling at each other ought to be a cause for profound concern. God’s people, finding themselves “in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation,” are meant to “shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Phil. 2:15–16).  However, we are often tempted to justify the kind of toxic engagement that we so deplore in the secular culture. If we in the church want to critique the way that public engagement happens in our national life, we must make sure that as we do so we are living by our own professed biblical standards. One of the key things that we need to consider in this regard is Jesus’ teaching on this subject in Luke 6:28. The Lord said, “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” The Lord Jesus exemplified both zeals for the truth and a deep love for people. Christ is often held up as an example to f

“So shall they fear the name of the LORD from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him.” ( Isaiah 59:19 ) The great enemy of our souls “the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” ( 1 Peter 5:8 ). Yet he can also be “transformed into an angel of light,” and so can “his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness” ( 2 Corinthians 11:14-15 ). He and his ministers are perhaps most dangerous when most deceptive, quoting Scripture and spiritual sentiments in a superficial show of piety, yet distorting the “Scriptures, unto their own destruction” ( 2 Peter 3:16 ), and we must use the sword of the Spirit against them. Then there are those times when angered that their deceptions (sometimes even their own self-deceptions) are not persuading the true people of God to compromise their stand for God’s truth and His great salvation

You’ve probably been there. Unprecedented affliction enters your life. Along with it, all the new experiences. The anxiousness. The sleeplessness. The darkness, loneliness, anger, sorrow. Things compound. By God’s grace, you seem to make it through. The storm seems to end. There is that huge relief with the breaking sun. Tears of joy come in humble rejoicing at the storm’s passing.  The questions: “Ok, Lord, did I not meet my suffering quota for the year? Is there not some sort of trials-tap that can run dry?” The frustration: “This just cannot be happening, again.” The despair: “How in the world will I be able to keep going and be faithful to all the other stuff in my life with these constant storms?” These are all normal. Perhaps not all excusable, but normal nevertheless. And there are not pixie-dust solutions to these problems, of course. We’re talking about a crux par excellence of life, after all. Though not an exhaustive list, here are some possible explanations f

We are not living in a season of peace. Thinking Christians must surely be aware that a great moral and spiritual conflict is taking shape all around us, with multiple fronts of battle and issues of great importance at stake. The prophet Jeremiah repeatedly warned of those who would falsely declare peace when there is no peace. The Bible defines the Christian life in terms of spiritual battle, and believers in this generation face the fact that the very existence of truth is at stake in our current struggle. The condition of warfare brings a unique set of moral challenges to the table, and the great moral and cultural battles of our times are no different. Even ancient thinkers knew this, and many of their maxims of warfare are still commonly cited. Among the most popular of these is a maxim that was known by many of the ancients—"the enemy of my enemy is my friend." That maxim has survived as a modern principle of foreign policy. It explains why states that have been at

One of the standard ways that the New Atheists attack Christianity is by using some of the Old Testament war passages to argue that God is violent and petty. One of the favourite passages for this is the so-called Amalekite Genocide of 1 Samuel 15 . But difficulties with passages such as this are not restricted to atheists. In 2009, the popular website Ship of Fools ran a feature called Chapter and Worse. 1 Readers were invited to submit their least favourite Bible passages, and an evangelical acquaintance of mine submitted 1 Samuel 15:3 . And Samuel said to Saul, “The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’” ( 1 Sam 15:1 ‑3

Title page of the Great Bible (1539). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) ‎There are four important NT passages which treat of the work of Christ under the figure of reconciliation, namely, Rom. 5:10f.; 2 Cor. 5:18ff.; Eph. 2:11ff.; Col. 1:19ff. The important Gk. words are the noun katallagē and the verbs katallassō and apokatallassō.   Reconciliation properly applies not to good relations in general but to the doing away of an enmity , the bridging over of a quarrel.  It implies that the parties being reconciled were formerly hostile to one another.  The Bible tells us bluntly that sinners are ‘enemies’ of God (Rom. 5:10; Col. 1:21; Jas. 4:4). We should not minimize the seriousness of these and similar passages.  An enemy is not someone who comes a little short of being a friend. He is in the other camp. He is altogether opposed. The NT pictures God in vigorous opposition to everything that is evil. Related articles 1-Min Theology with Chaplain T: Question #63 (