Dr Paul Allen

It’s helpful to have a simple plan . If we were all God, we wouldn’t need to have a simple plan; we could just overflow spontaneously. But we’re not God.  Hard and Happy Way You could explain from Psalm 37:4 that it’s a happy way: “Delight yourself in the Lord.” The Lord is worthy of our joy; he wants us to be happy in him. “In [his] presence there is fullness of joy; at [his] right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11).  And from Matthew 16:24, you might explain that Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” And you might say a few words about how taking up the cross is not a vacation. It’s where you die; it’s where you suffer. In other words, you will say to them, “Jesus will lead you through some very hard things.” “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). Four concepts of biblical truth: God - Sin - Christ -Faith 1. Begin with truth about God. Everything starts with God. ...

We live in an age of narcissism. It is the era of self-actualization, the relentless race to perfect the self. Time  magazine reported in 2013 that “ Narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their twenties as for the generation that’s now 65 or older. . . . 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.” As the West has become more narcissistic, so have the people in our churches. We see it on social media. We hear it over coffee. We see it when young people break away from living and breathing social groups to snap a selfie. We also see it in our evangelism. A decade or two ago our evangelism still pointed outward. We spoke of the existence of God , objective truth, and the historical reliability of the resurrection. Now, swaths of churches have moved on to leading with personal testimonies. This contextualization isn’t necessarily wrong. In a postmodern era, stories are often more powerful th...

“And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” ( Philippians 2:8 )   The only begotten Son of God substituted Himself for all humanity to save them from the righteous judgment of a thrice-holy Creator.   Jesus found Himself “in fashion as a man,” which therefore made it possible for Him to humble Himself and to become obedient to the death that had been ordained for Him prior to the very foundation of the world ( 1 Peter  1:20 ).   Perhaps it is too much to suggest that Jesus “woke up” when He “found” Himself in Mary’s womb, but it is certain that He “increased in wisdom” ( Luke  2:52 ) as He grew in “stature.” Basically, because He “became” human, He experienced the normal increase in awareness and experience that all of us do.   The difference was, obviously, that He “humbled” Himself, even though He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” ( Hebr...

“For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.” ( Isaiah 28:10 ) The setting of this unusual passage is most sobering. Both the people and their priests in Israel ’s northern kingdom (personified by “ Ephraim ”) were in gross rebellion and drunken disobedience to the Lord. They were even ridiculing God ’s prophets who were trying to call them back, complaining that they were being treated like school children. In effect, they were saying: “Are you presuming to teach us as you would freshly weaned infants, going line by line, with rule after rule?” Whereupon God replied that He would use people of another tongue to come in and teach them what they refused to learn from Him. These precepts He had been trying to teach them should have provided true rest and refreshment, but now learning these lessons would prove to be their undoing. What should have been a blessing to them would become their condemnation....

Although the mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) has been challenged for the past century and a half, there is still good reason to believe it to be true.  It has become fashionable to believe that the Pentateuch is a result of a compilation of various documents labeled J, E, D, P, which were eventually put together by an editor in its present form about 400 B.C. This fanciful and elaborate theory, however, has little to recommend it and is based upon erroneous methods of investigation.  As C. S. Lewis illustrates from personal experience, when he writes about the critics’ application of their methods to his words:  “What forearms me against all these Reconstructions is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way.  “Until you come to be reviewed yourself you would never believe how little of an ordinary review is take...

"The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made us all into deep historical pessimists." So observed Francis Fukuyama in his seminal 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man . What happened? The nineteenth century’s humanistic faith in inevitable moral progress was destroyed on the battlefields of two cataclysmic world wars and in the unprecedented murderous cruelty of Hitler's gas chambers, Stalin's gulags, and Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields. History seemed to point, not to a golden age of moral progress and enlightenment, but toward an age of unspeakable cruelty backed by technological developments that would stagger the moral imagination. Fukuyama demonstrated the failure of historical "faiths" such as Marxism, with its confidence in the ultimate victory of the proletariat through class struggle and revolution. His analysis of modern historical pessimism was correct, at least in this respect, for secular myths did not fare well in th...

Eph 4:26-27 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. 1. Identify your sin of anger This means pasting a biblical label on it. Don’t call it being crabby, irritable, or hot-blooded. We often speak in terms of anger coming from a source other than ourselves. We use victim terminology. We ‘lose our temper’ because he ‘makes us so angry.’ But anger is a sin that is conceived in the only place sin can be: your heart ( James 1:14-15). But this verse implies that it is possible to be angry and not sin, so there are two types of anger. Garden variety anger:  This is getting upset when someone wrongs you. It makes you want to get revenge, or somehow retaliate to signal your displeasure. This is why cars have horns ….. to tell other drivers how angry we are….right? Righteous indignation :  Jesus burned with zeal for the temple, made a whip and drove out the avaricious merchants. So, yes, there is suc...

Death is the great enemy, though many of us live in denial of it. Our culture tries to hide death . We don’t see bodies in the streets, as in some parts of the world. Corpses go straight to the morgue or the funeral home — out of sight and out of mind. Many of us have never seen a dead body . Fewer have witnessed a person actually die. We would rather not think about death, we don’t like to talk about it, and we’d prefer to pretend it won’t happen to us. But it will happen to us. In fact, in one hundred years from now, everyone reading this will be dead. Does that sound harsh? That’s because it  is  harsh! But it is also true. Only as we confront the reality of death will we appreciate the hope of resurrection.  There is nothing like death to make us desire resurrection. John 11 begins with a sick Lazarus . His sisters Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus to come to Bethany (John 11:1–3). But Jesus does not go right away. He delays. In fact, he waits two day...