Dr Paul Allen

If you were asked to describe our world in one word, would you choose “peaceful”? I’m guessing there are a lot of other words that come to mind before that one. Your list may include words like “chaotic,” “broken,” “unstable,” “frightening,” or “disintegrating.”   Right now, the world is anything but peaceful.   But we all desire and need peace. Many people look for peace in superficial things, including drugs, alcohol, entertainment, and money, and yet they still feel empty.   Truthfully, we’ve been looking for peace in all the wrong places because the world cannot offer true, lasting peace. We need peace that isn’t of this world.   Other-worldly peace is just what Jesus offers us. On Palm Sunday, a week before He was to go to the cross, suffer, and die, Jesus took His disciples aside and gave them a fantastic promise, saying, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.”  This is a remarkable promise.   Peace Served Three Ways Th...

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:6) We can all recall a time when we had a seating assignment.  In schooling, at work, or around the dinner table, a particular chair may be your seat. We tend to size up the quality of our assigned seats by factors such as visibility, the ambience, and, above all, the surrounding company. If we’re off to a concert or sporting event, our first question may be, “Do we have good seats?” We intuitively recognize that where we sit and (more importantly) whom it is that we sit next to play no small role in our experience. Thus, as Christians, we do well to pause and ask the question, “Do we have good seats?” Christians possess the most awesome of all assigned seats. How so? In this Ephesian passage, Paul has j...

The kind of man you hate reveals what kind of man you are. “But I hate him,” Ahab declared of Micaiah, God’s prophet. Jehoshaphat, the righteous king of Judah, sat with Ahab, the wicked king of Israel, to deliberate one question: Should they go to war together against Syria? Peace had lasted three years with the pagan nation, but Ahab desired the strategic city of Ramoth-Gilead for Israel. He questioned aloud to Jehoshaphat, “Do you know that Ramoth-Gilead belongs to us, and we keep quiet and do not take it out of the hand of the king of Syria?” (1 Kings 22:3). Jehoshaphat consents to fight with Ahab but desires to hear first from the God of Israel. Ahab calls his four hundred prophets, who, with one voice, give their hearty Amen! “Go up,” they say, “for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king” (1 Kings 22:6). The kind of men from whom you solicit counsel tells us what kind of man you are. These men were no messengers of Yahweh, and King Jehoshaphat knew so. Diplomatically, he ...

In C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the character Mark describes his life as “the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.” Along with his wife, Mark functions as a personification of modernity, and his beliefs represent many secular people today. Yet through the events of the plot, Mark becomes awakened to transcendence. While imprisoned and subjected to psychological torture, he has a profound moral experience: There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked, some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the “Normal”—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. In m...

  Saint Augustine answered that question at its root when he wrote, “You have made us for Yourself and [therefore] our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” If God has made us and designed us to be happy with him, then nothing else can take his place. God is the food our spirits need to eat. Other things will make our body happy (Eccl 2:24; 3:13; 5:18–20), but not our spirit, our soul, our true self. Other things will make us happy for a while, but not for long. Other things will make us happy on a superficial level, but not deep down. In the Bible, we read that all happiness, all joy, all beauty come from God (James 1:17). The joy of friendship, the beauty of nature, the happiness of human love were all created by God and designed to reflect his joy and beauty, to carry a little of his joy to us as the air carries the light of the sun.  Every joy you ever feel is a reflection of God. God is not one of the many sources of joy, for “religious people” only (whoever they a...

We live in a world of pain, anguish, and torment, even though we only get glimpses of it—unless perhaps we work as a counselor or in emergency services. All around us are people in silent pain because of something in their nagging past, their anguishing present, or their dreaded future. Depression is no respecter of persons . Even one’s philosophical or religious views don’t seem to offer either immunity or susceptibility. Neither can depression be blamed on the modern technological age. Novelist William Stryon (1925–2006) called depression “a dreadful and raging disease” and likened it to “a veritable howling tempest in the brain.” He gives a conservative estimate that one in 10 Americans will suffer from it. Nobody is safe from depression—not even from “major depressive disorder,” the diagnosis I saw on my paperwork. What I Have Discovered I’m sure my feelings weren’t like those of every depressed person, but I know they weren’t unique. Fortunately, depression usually doesn’t strike ...

As a new president is inaugurated next week, here are some suggestions for how Christians can pray for our nation, our political leaders, and ourselves as we pursue Christ through an increasingly political culture. Consider using these verses in your own personal prayer time, or to help structure a small group or church service devoted to prayer for our nation. 1. Pray for our own peace and joy in the midst of change “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:4–7 Politics uniquely combines attempts to persuade others who do not agree with you, as well as a polarization/demonization of those who do not agree with you. Thus, politics can be addictive...

There are eight godly attitudes in Colossians 3:12–14 that are foundational to biblical peacemaking. But to understand them we need to understand the preceding context. In Colossians 3:1–4, the apostle reminds believers of their new spiritual position in Christ. We died with him, we were raised with him, and we will gloriously appear with him when he returns. Because we are united to Jesus, we should fix our hearts and minds on him (Col. 3:1–2) and put off all vestiges of our remaining sin (Col. 3:5–11). The sins listed are comprehensive, reflecting the attitudes and practices of our old nature. In contrast, Paul calls us to live out the new life that God is forming in us, patterned after Jesus’s glorious image. In verse 12, the apostle cites three identity descriptors that are foundational to the eight peacemaking qualities: we are “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved.” First, God chose us. Nothing will encourage us more than to know that God has handpicked us, that in eternit...

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 5:1 Martin Luther was a man racked by the agony of a sin-seared conscience. His spiritual struggles, his Anfechtungen, seemed to have no remedy. And so, Luther said, “I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him.  Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him.”1 In the Pauline expression “the righteousness of God,” Luther heard only a terrible thunderclap of divine condemnation. It was that righteousness by which God judges the wicked, and thus also that righteousness thwarted his every attempt to find rest for his troubled soul.  But then, one day, the storm clouds parted and shining from that same expression “the righteousness of God,” Luther, at last, saw not the justice of God to condemn sinners but the gracious provision of God in Jesus Christ to declare...

“And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.” ( Zechariah 9:10 ) This wonderful prophecy follows immediately after the verse predicting the coming of the Messiah into Jerusalem riding upon a lowly donkey’s colt (v. 9). That prediction was fulfilled by Jesus as He came into Jerusalem on that last Sunday before His death and resurrection ( Matthew 21:4-5 ), but the prophecy in our text was certainly not fulfilled at that time. There have been wars somewhere in the world practically every year since Jesus came. Nevertheless, the day will come when He shall indeed speak peace to all the nations. Early in the last century, the nations had fought a great war that was supposed to end all wars. They celebrated the armistice that ended that war on November 11, 1918, and established an...