Dr Paul Allen

We don’t hear much about virtue, character, or moral excellence in the church today. There might be many reasons for this omission, but let me suggest a couple. The first is that calling people to a high standard of moral excellence is to place a demand on them. These demands are challenging to align with our typical mindset of making the church consumer-friendly and keeping our own business. Additionally, our culture does not value what is good for its own sake. Many people look for ways to improve their lives immediately, in tangible ways that they can measure. With this mindset, truth and goodness are only relevant if they help maximise production. Virtue, though, should be valued, not because it is pragmatically effective, but because it reflects God’s holiness, beauty, and goodness. Therefore, we should value moral excellency, character, and virtue because they all showcase the excellencies of our Lord. However, this message of moral excellence only resonates with those who believ...

Fruit of the Spirit, we took a general look at the list to begin to uncover the meaning of the Apostle Paul’s words to the Galatians. Now we will examine each of these slices of the Spirit’s fruit, starting with love. What is this love produced by the Spirit?  Defining love is not an easy task, but here’s one that attempts to sum up the biblical nature of love: Love is a holy, divine affection toward others produced by the Spirit of God in all believers. This is spiritual love – produced, wrought, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. So, what does this love truly mean? First, spiritual love is not a natural phenomenon. Spiritual love is not the natural affection of the world. The world might be capable of love in the human sense of the term. We know there are unbelievers who have good marriages. Some unbelievers are willing to sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. It is possible to do these things without having true love as God defines it. As Paul says, a person can be a great ...

Author: Clinton Archer When Spanish missionaries arrived in California in the 18th century they planted seeds of truth and some other seeds too.  In order to have wine for communion, the missionaries established vineyards, which flourished. After the Gold Rush of the 1850’s Northern California became a major wine producer. But when the 18th Amendment prohibited the production of alcohol, except for religious purposes, only 141 vineyards survived. No one on the international scene paid much attention to these wines. Connoisseurs the world over presumed that a region producing cheap grapes could never compete with serious wine countries like Italy, Spain, or South Africa, and certainly not France. But that all changed in 1976 when the British merchant, Steven Spurrier, invited several California wineries to participate in a blind taste test in France, known as the Judgment of Paris. The cheap wines were pitted against Bordeaux and Burgundy wines, considered the best in the world. The...

Growth in personal holiness is largely determined by our progress in self-discipline. Without this foundational discipline, there can be no advancement in grace. Before other disciplines can be administered, whether in the home, business, or church, there first must be self-discipline. Admittedly, personal discipline is not a popular subject today. In our society, any insistence upon self-discipline is largely resisted, even among many Christians. Legalism, they cry, defending their rights of Christian liberty. These free-spirited believers maintain that discipline restricts their freedom in Christ, binding them in a spiritual straightjacket. But many of these believers have so abused their freedom in Christ that they have virtually no spiritual discipline. They have swung the pendulum so drastically toward Christian liberty that their spiritual lives are out of balance. Such neglect of self-discipline prolongs their spiritual immaturity, leaving them with little self-control t...

Many are well aware of Galatians 5:22–23, where Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit. Yet, very rarely do we make connections between that passage and a popular philosophy that reigned in Paul’s day, namely, Stoicism. While Stoicism was a school of philosophy that included several perspectives, a popular consensus among these Stoic philosophers was the notion of the unity of virtues . Within Stoicism, it was widely accepted that if one did not possess all the virtues, one did not possess any of them. This sounds odd to modern ears since it seems to imply the necessity of perfection in order to be truly virtuous, but even the Stoics acknowledged that such perfection was nearly unattainable in this life.  Yet while in the pursuit of the virtuous life, the Stoics believed that if one claimed to have possessed some virtues but did not possess others, then it would be questionable as to whether the Stoic sage possessed any of them. I believe that a similar notion could be ...

To be led by the Holy Spirit does not mean that we are led only by supernatural manifestations of the gifts . The supernatural fruits of the Spirit are just as vital in determining the mind of Christ as the gifts. The fruits and gifts are like two sides of the same coin, and both sides must be in good shape for it to be “spendable.” Evangelicals tend to emphasize the fruits of the Spirit, and charismatics the gifts. But the Holy Spirit is not in competition with Himself. Both the fruits and the gifts are manifestations of the Spirit’s activity in our lives. Isaiah declared prophetically, “You shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace” (Isa. 55:12a, emphasis added). To make decisions according to the spiritual peace they bring is being led by the Spirit. To take action because of the joy of the Lord is to be motivated by the Holy Spirit. To move in faith—which is both a gift and a fruit of the Spirit—is moving in the mind of Christ and walking with God , “For we walk by...

When we say that  joy is not optional  in the Christian life, we don’t mean that we ever have it in full in this life. We  can  promise joy in all its fullness, but that doesn’t mean we minimizing the significant hurdles, barriers, and infringements we face this side of heaven. And it doesn’t mean that we taste it all now with no explosive increase still to come. Yes, God commands that we be happy in him, and he stands behind it with his omnipotent help. But no, we are never fully happy. Not utterly. Not yet. Not as long as we remain in these bodies of sin, in this world of suffering, with an Enemy and his armies plotting against us. And not as long as we’re still yet to see Jesus face to face. There is no fullness of joy without the fullness of Jesus. Only in God’s presence is there fullness of joy (Psalm  16:11 ) — and we’re not yet in his presence. Only at his right hand — where Jesus sits enthroned as the divine-human sovereign over all the unive...