Dr Paul Allen

English: St. Paul by El Greco, c. 1608-1614. Originally taken from artchive.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) How do you overcome sin and live the Christian life ? Is defeating sin something God does in you, or do you defeat it by obeying the commands of Scripture? In other words, is the Christian life an exercise in passive trust or active obedience? Is it all God’s doing, all the believer’s doing, or a combination of both? Those questions are as old as the church, and the varied answers have spawned movements and denominations. This is not an unusual issue when dealing with spiritual truth. Many doctrines involve seeming paradoxes. For example, Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man; and while Scripture was written by human authors, God wrote every word. The gospel is offered to the whole world, yet applied only to the elect. God eternally secures believers’ salvation, yet they are commanded to persevere. Christians who try to reconcile every doctrine in a humanly rationa

English: Saint John of the Cross, portrait (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The only thing worse than falling into a spiritual valley is the conviction that one must always be on a spiritual mountaintop. Though the Bible is the very history of the ups and downs of God 's people, God's people go on thinking themselves immune, and that something is terribly wrong if their passion and joy today is not at the same fever pitch it was on the day they came to faith. There is, of course, a ditch on the other side of the road. We can grow complacent, our ardor having all the vitality of lukewarm water. But cooler than it once was can be a long way from lukewarm. We ought to be taking our spiritual temperature. We ought to pray for passion, joy and gratitude. What we have to watch out for is when the devil comes calling like some diabolical pusher offering us his spiritual uppers. When we are dissatisfied, when we are looking for more, the devil is more than happy to offer us what we th