Dr Paul Allen

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright. (Ps. 20:7–8) Don’t fear your weaknesses—God supplies all the strength you need. Be afraid of those moments when you think you’re independently strong. Admit it, you don’t like being weak. It’s not fun being the last one chosen to play on the team. It’s embarrassing to be asked a question you can’t answer. It’s frustrating not to be able to figure out the directions for assembling the furniture you just bought.  It’s mortifying to forget that important appointment or the name of a good friend. It’s humbling to fail at a task, to drop the ball, or to make a promise and not be able to keep it.  We don’t like getting lost or forgetting a phone number. We all hate those moments when we feel unqualified or unprepared. We don’t like being confused or not knowing. We covet the muscles and the brains of others.  We all hate being afraid an...

 

“Without the Spirit we can neither love God, nor keep His commandments.”   The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is like any other mainline doctrine, both saturated with variety and overflowing with controversies. The Holy Spirit, being God, makes a rather unruly subject matter in that He is too incomprehensibly vast for us to tackle with full authority, especially in the brevity of this paper. As Clark Pinnock writes, In fact, of the themes of theology, the Spirit may be the most elusive of all. How does one speak at all of the power that enables us to know God? How can one put the Spirit-breath into a conceptual bottle? Yet, the graciously given presence of the Spirit is surely the most wonderful thing one experiences and that which brings God unspeakably close.  Yet scripture provides both a reasonable description of what the Holy Spirit’s interaction with His creation is, and what we might have as a standard expectation for our own understanding and teaching.  Regardin...

 

 

As Christians, we grieve. Oh, do we grieve. Being a Christian does not mean that our sorrows go away or are minimised, or that we pretend that the many sorrows of this life are no big deal. In fact, we Christians actually grieve more. God has taken out our old, dead hearts and put new hearts in us. In Christ, the insensitivities and imbalances of our old selves are being renewed day by day into the likeness of Jesus (Col. 3:10). With the help and healing of the Holy Spirit, we feel more, not less. More than joy alone, we feel, at new depths, the seemingly negative emotions of anger, fear, shame, guilt, and sorrow. With sin still indwelling us, we often err in the timing, focus, and intensity of our feelings. But in Christ, we really can, and really do, grow to feel holy anger, holy fear, holy shame, holy sorrow—a holy grief that is wholly different from worldly despair. All joy, no grief? In 1 Thessalonians 4:13, the Apostle Paul writes with the longing that Christians “not grieve as o...

In  Jack Deere 's intriguing book,  Surprised by the Power of the Spirit , he suggests the following hypothetical situation and result: "If you were to lock a brand-new Christian in a room with a  Bible  and tell him to study what the Scriptures have to say about healing and miracles, he would never come out of the room a cessationist." 1   Elsewhere, he writes, Everyone who picked up the Bible, started reading, and concluded that God was still doing signs and wonders and that the gifts of the Holy Spirit had not passed away. The doctrine of cessationism did not originate from a careful study of the Scriptures. The doctrine of cessationism originated in experience.  2 Deere may have a point, but a person reading the Bible and studying miracles and healing may also have several questions about these things. Why do the epistles have little discussion about them? Why does Paul leave people sick ( Phil 2:26-27 ;  1 Tim 5:23 ;  2 Tim 4:20 ...