Dr Paul Allen

If you have been on your journey for any time, you know you can find hurt, frustration, disappointment, and failure. Regardless, you cannot give in to the destructive practice of bitterness. It is famously said that bitterness is our poison, hoping it kills others. Bitterness is the result of losing what we need for the journey. We stop walking in hope, faith, and trust and resign ourselves to accepting the worst of all possibilities.  Walk His disciples were confused and distraught when Jesus ascended into heaven after His death and resurrection. But Jesus explained it was better for Him to go away so that the Holy Spirit could come and live in His follower’s hearts. What a wonderful development that God Himself would create a way to come and live in a person’s heart. Not just in a temple they could visit or among to be seen but not fully known. God moves in! Every believer becomes a connection point between the eternal God and the present moment. And Paul explains that God gives ...

Proverbs 28:13 “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.” Although many people try to deny their sin and suppress their guilt feelings, no one can totally escape the weight of transgression. We cannot finally escape the truth that we have broken God’s law and stand under His just condemnation (Rom. 1:18–3:20). We have missed the standard that our Creator has established for us and have incurred a debt to Him that we cannot possibly repay (Matt. 18:21–35; James 4:17).  Sin and guilt are real, and the only hope we have is to find the real answer to our fundamental problem of estrangement from God. Happily, Scripture gives us a real answer to our problem—namely, real forgiveness. Humanly speaking, we see how sin weighs on others and know how it can burden our own consciences. The ramifications of sins committed years ago can last into the present. Parents feel remorse for their failures. As people approach death, t...

Two weeks before Christmas, my heart stopped. Seated next to me in a congregational meeting, my wife sees me close my eyes and slump. After a few seconds, the old ticker providentially revives “on its own.” It happens four times during that meeting. Maybe I’m just too inactive, I think. Perhaps if I get up and walk around a bit, I can get the juices flowing, and whatever is going on will clear up. While I’m pacing in the church lobby, one of the elders says he doesn’t think I look quite right. I call my physician, and he recommends that I get to the emergency room for an evaluation. I’m not to drive myself. In the emergency room, the surgeon hooks me up to a bunch of wires and asks a whole battery of questions to diagnose what’s going on. “Are there heart problems in your family?” “Yes, my dad died of a heart attack at 60. So did his dad.” “But do you feel pain?” “None.” “Did you feel dizzy?” “Not really. The room wasn’t spinning. I wasn’t nauseous.” “Did you pass out?” “Not really. I ...

The book of Psalms is the prayer book of the Bible. It contains prayers written by men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which means that the Psalms teach us how to pray in accordance with God’s Word. Therefore, one of the ways that we can grow stronger in prayer is to pray the Psalms as our own personal prayers. The Psalms make clear that the life of the true believer is inevitably full of conflict, adversity, trouble, danger, and sorrow. The Psalms show us that, for the true believer, life is difficult, indeed, life is a fight. There are external enemies in this fallen world who hate God and His people; our own sinful natures that still reside in us, inclining us to disbelieve and disobey God’s Word; and Satan and his demonic minions who tempt us to sin, pester us with worldly distractions, accuse our consciences, and mock us for our feeble faith. Read the Psalms, and you will see that not all of them are beautiful words of comfort such as Psalm 23 or songs of praise such as ...

In the early 2000s, Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) experienced an inordinate number of morally failing campus ministers. Men and women in various ministries and varied contexts—who’d seemingly followed the Lord faithfully for decades—embezzled money, harboured addictions and cheated on their spouses. Under the leadership of Marc Rutter, and with the help of Henry Cloud, Cru examined these moral failings, seeking to identify common patterns of behaviour in hopes of preventing them in the future. The patterns were clear and the profile of an “at-risk leader” emerged. Sadly, these patterns are just as present and identifiable in today’s church-planting movement—and have contributed to the recent public falls. Four Basic Profiles 1. The narcissistic star who rises quickly. These pastors are extremely successful at their craft. People are drawn to them and sometimes idealize and idolize them. Their success can either blind people to their faults or prevent people from fe...

There are a lot of things that could lead to failure in ministry, but essentially two things would be at the top of the list. One is sin. Sin is going to lead to failure. And I’m not talking so much even about behavioural sin, I’m talking about sin on the inside. We have to deal with the heart. That is the issue. James writes that sin is conceived in the heart, it comes out of the heart, and it leads to death. When you see somebody fail in the ministry because of sin, that isn’t the beginning. That is the end of a long history of losing the spiritual battle on the inside. That is why it’s so critical for people in ministry to guard their conscience. As a believer, your conscience is the mechanism God has given you to excuse you when you're doing the right thing or accuse you when you’re doing the wrong thing. You want to listen to your conscience. The Apostle Paul defended himself to the Corinthians by saying in 2 Corinthians 1:12, “I have a clear conscience.” You’re s...

1 John 1:8-10 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.  If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. John’s readers were confused by two false teachings. The first was the claim that those who choose sin’s lifestyle can maintain fellowship with God. This John labeled as a lie (v. 6). The second claim was by those who said they were without sin (v. 8). They based their claim to fellowship with God on the belief that they matched God in His moral perfection! John called this claim self-deceit: “We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (v. 8). Truth and falsehood are not related so much to the trustworthiness of the teller as they are to correspondence with reality. The problem with the claim of sinlessness is not that the motives of the claimant are unpure. His or her re...

Use of pornography and other sexual sins are rampant in our culture and in the church. Many have concluded that such behavior or at least the lust that drives them is fundamentally an unsolvable problem, a sin that will not be defeated in the lives of God's children. But this response is unacceptable in the face of the severe and incalculable damage that lust inflicts upon lives, families, and fellowships. If we want to overcome lust, we need to recognize what we are dealing with. A good place to start is to understand the "sexual buzz"—the electric feeling of pleasure that makes sex so enjoyable. The psychobiologic sexual buzz involves our emotions, our bodies, and our cognitive functions. God designed these feelings for good. The sexual buzz occupies an essential role as an early phase of intimacy within the sexual union of marriage. Without it, we would not become aroused and sex probably would not happen enough to keep reproduction going or marital ties bindin...

If I Should Fall from Grace with God (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) If you haven’t figured it out yet let me encourage you to see something that will greatly help you. Not all of your ideas are good. Some of them are bad. And God will often let you flail and fail out there for very good purposes. And when you fail do not lose the opportunity to find grace in the midst of it. I believe this is especially important for pastors to understand. It’s one of the most important lessons I have learned in 16 years of pastoral ministry: failure is to be expected and learned from. I have misspoke, misstepped, and missed the mark in more ways than I can explain here. And failing hurts. Most of us of are afraid of it. Leaders in particular are afraid of failure since it’s always a bit more of a public spectacle. I’m not talking about moral failure that disqualifies someone from the ministry, but ministerial failure. It may sometimes involve sin, but more often it’s poor judgment or simply the ba...