Dr Paul Allen

How do I find God ’s will for my life? It’s always a pressing question on the college campus , and especially in our day of unprecedented options. Like never before, in an anomaly in world history , students loosened from their community of origin, “going off” to college, now make decisions about their future with minimal influence or limitation from their adolescent context. Before asking, “Where is God calling me?” we would do well to first ponder, “Where has God already called me?” — not that your current callings won’t change or take a fresh direction in this formative season of life, but for a Christian, our objective calling from God always precedes our consciousness of it. If it is from him, he initiates. He makes the first move. This is true of our calling to salvation, and also true of any “vocational” assignment he gives us in the world. Consider Three Factors For the college student or young adult who may feel like a free agent — considering options and determining for y...

The New Testament does contain teaching on "separation." Over the centuries, some of the greatest minds have wrestled with how to apply it—Augustine in dealing with the Donatists, Calvin in dealing with radical Anabaptists (in his dauntingly titled Brief Instruction for Arming All the Good Faithful Against the Errors of the Common Sect of the Anabaptists). The New Testament letters refer to various kinds of separation, always in the recognition that we—and indeed the church—remain S imul Justus et Peccator (at the same time just and sinner). The setting apart of the church (sanctification) is not glorification. Until Christ 's return, there is only a pilgrim church here on the earth, not a perfected one. The challenges are therefore fairly obvious. Those who effect separation are themselves, sinners. So the questions of when, why, and how to separate are of cardinal importance. The New Testament gives us principles; it does not provide us with a single, simple s...

At some point, if you are sincere about your Christian faith , you are going to have a conversation with someone about it. Or are you? Let me back up a minute, if “being a Christian” is something you take seriously, you are probably going to THINK about having a conversation with someone about it. AND – you may wonder HOW to have that conversation. Listen, I have been a Christian my whole life and have also been a thoughtful student of the human art of conversation for years and I find this thing – “sharing my faith” – incredibly hard to do. But I WANT to – I really want to . I actually believe that meeting Jesus on this side of heaven will make life richer and more joyful and more peaceful than anything else available to us. There is a tenacity and fierceness to God ’s love through Jesus that holds people firmer in the face of life’s struggles than anyone can imagine. I want everyone to know this. Everyone. Well, the key is figuring out how to start, how to continue the conversa...

The Roman Catholic Church pronounced anathemas, curses, on the Reformers — like Luther , Calvin , Zwingli — and their Protestant heirs, like me, because the Reformers understood that the way we are justified before God is through the imputation of Christ’s righteousness , his perfection, to us through faith alone . “The work of Christ is the foundation for our acceptance, our forgiveness, our justification before God.” The language of imputation comes especially from Romans 4, where Paul says, for example, in verses 4–5, “Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted [or imputed] as righteousness.” Or take Romans 4:6 as an example: “David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works.” The picture is that the work of Christ is the foundation or ground for our acceptance, our forgiveness, our justific...

Many people grew up believing that science and theology are enemies and that the secular forces of science are lined up against the angels of light in a battle to the death. This warfare motif goes back to two influential books of the nineteenth century: John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom . Both books claimed that science was winning the war and that defeat for religion was imminent. Thomas Huxley, famously known as Darwin’s Bulldog, was another nineteenth-century figure who lived and breathed this warfare narrative. He wrote, “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.” We smile knowingly. The metaphor i...

Second Timothy 3:16 contains one of the most important statements in the Bible about where the Bible came from and what it is: “All Scripture is God -breathed.” As we will discuss further in a later chapter, this means that the Bible is from God and is indeed the very Word of God. That makes the Bible the most important book that has ever been written. But what will reading the Bible do for you? If we continue reading 2 Timothy 3:16–17, we’ll find a helpful purpose statement for the Bible:  “All Scripture is God-breathed and is [therefore] useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Of the four terms at the end of verse 16, the first and last are positive—teaching and training in righteousness. The middle two are negative—rebuking and correcting. All of these revolve around the important issue of truth. We can think of truth as that which conforms to God, his thinkin...

Before the Incarnation Since the Son of God is eternal, we begin with noting his work before the incarnation, before Christ took upon himself a human nature. With the Father and the Spirit, Christ was involved in creation (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; Hebrews 1:2). More on this in chapter 22, where we consider his lordship. Another important aspect of Christ’s Old Testament work was delivering God’s messages. The “angel [messenger] of the LORD [Yahweh]” normally is understood to be Christ himself, and the technical term for these occurrences is theophany (appearance of God).  These are pre-incarnation manifestations of the Son of God in human form— Christ took upon himself human appearance to accomplish something specific before taking upon himself a permanent human nature (in the incarnation). This “angel” is no ordinary angel. For example, when Hagar fled into the desert after conceiving Abram’s son, the angel of the LORD told her to name her son Ishmael and to re...

How can Jesus be both - God and Human - in one individual at the same time?” Because this is so mysterious, so hard to understand, many have denied it and concluded that either Jesus was God or he was human, but not both. The Joining of Two Natures in One Person The taking on of humanity is called the incarnation . The eternal Son of God , the second person of the Trinity , took humanity upon himself, in addition to his deity, and became, forever, fully God and fully human. The means of the incarnation was the virgin birth of Jesus . Mary became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit , and she gave birth both to someone who had always been—the Son of God—and to a facet of him that was entirely new—the God-man, Jesus.  This was foretold in the Old Testament in Isaiah 7:14,  “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son.” Matthew quoted this verse and understood the fulfillment to be in Jesus (Matthew 1:22–23). John wrote, “The Word [Christ] became fles...

One of the most remarkable foundations of the Christian faith is that Jesus Christ is eternal God . This is disputed by other religions (including the other monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Islam), by Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and certainly by many skeptics. Without question, lacking this central pillar, Christianity fails and has nothing to offer anyone. It is no surprise that from very early on, believers have contended for, fought for, and died for this teaching—the deity of Jesus Christ . In a nutshell, the doctrine is that Jesus Christ is fully God (not half God or one-third God) and eternally God (he did not become God at some point in time). Anything less has been considered heresy. There are many lines of argument for the deity of Jesus. Plainly, the fact is crystal clear if one allows Scripture to say what it says. Here are a few of those contentions and a few examples. Not only did Christ exist before he was conceived by Mary (this is what preexistence mea...