Dr Paul Allen

“This is the conflicted experience of all believers of all times and in all places.” —Abraham Kuruvilla. Every Christian is like Spider-Man.  Not because we shoot webs, but because we live with a fundamental identity crisis. We've been supernaturally transformed—united with Christ in baptism—yet we still struggle with the same old problems. Why it matters:  The gap between our new identity in Christ and our ongoing battle with sin creates confusion and discouragement. Understanding how sanctification actually works is crucial for faithful Christian living. Here's the sanctification tension: We've been genuinely cured.  Union with Christ in baptism is a real, completed work of God. We're no longer under sin's ultimate authority or the law's condemnation. Christ took on that condemnation—death—so we're freed from both sin and the law's condemning power. But we still experience the effects.  Even though we're united with Christ, sin still "has its ...

One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God. What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice? Facing such a serious diagnosis, Keller was forced to reexamine not only his “professed beliefs” but his “actual understanding of God.” He writes, Had [my ideas about God] been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life  should  go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree. I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may  feel  freeing—but it offers no...

The Holy Spirit receives or is fully received by repentant saints, i.e., by Christians who, through obedience, have removed all conscious sin from their lives. Regarding Holy Spirit Baptism, obedience has two curves: one is active, the other is passive. In the first, the candidate is urged to act, and in the second, he is urged to cease from acting. i. Active Obedience, (a) Separation from Sin . Obedience means first of all and actively the separation from sin. Whether understood negatively, as repentance, or positively, as obedience, under this condition the Pentecostals’ implicit doctrine of sin can be discovered. Sin is understood as something which, with Christ’s help,53 the Christian can, indeed must, remove before his being able to receive the full gift of the Holy Spirit. Obedience has as its major task the removal of sin. For “you can receive the Holy Spirit, but not with sin in your heart” (Conn, Pillars, p. 96). Sin, first of all, is anything in a man’s life—large or small—wh...

Stephen Wellum Any sane person knows that there is something wrong with us. No one can honestly examine history, let alone their own lives, without being struck by the extent to which we as a human race have “missed the mark” and not lived up to our ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr keenly observed that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”[1]  The “human condition” has been the subject of countless books, films, and plays as people have wrestled with the reality of good and evil. One of my favourites is The Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien explores the insidious power of the ring and the evil that lurks in every heart. 1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 24. However, although everyone admits that something is wrong with us, we do not explain the “huma...

A decline in the spiritual life lies in disregarding the Word of God and a lack of attention to prayer. Christians who allow sin to linger “unlamented” are in great spiritual danger. I encourage Christians to develop a habit of dealing with sin promptly, faithfully, and biblically. It is a timely word for our day as it was during his own. I considered how the duty of prayer is attended to as one considerable reason for spiritual declension. In this, I propose considering another cause contributing to the same end: sin lying on the conscience unlamented.[1] When the apostle Paul wrote his First Epistle to the church at Corinth, they were sunk in a wretched condition. With admirable faithfulness, wisdom, patience, and tenderness, he wrote that Epistle to reclaim them. Many of them were reclaimed, but some, it seems, continued insensible, which induced him, when he wrote his Second Epistle to that church, to express himself thus: “I fear lest when I come again, my God will humble me among...

It is the greatest civilization coup d’état of the 21st century — a seismic moral, cultural, social, and religious revolution that catapulted a fringe perversion to the status of a privileged orthodoxy. The staggering enormity of the gay guerrilla putsch punched me in the face when I saw an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled “Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament,” written to celebrate Pride Month last year. How did nuclear scientists suddenly come to the spine-chilling conclusion that the world is threatened by “vulnerabilities in nuclear decision making” if LGBTQI+ individuals are excluded from making decisions “by a homogenous, cis-heteronormative community of practitioners”? In November 2022, the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation decided to include LBTQ people in the nuclear weapons space. Immediately, laypeople began tweeting about it, saying things like, “They should not allow mentally il...