Dr Paul Allen

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...

We all have questions about death. What is death? Why do we die? Why do we all die? Why is death so scary? Why did Christ die? Why do Christians have to die? How can I face the death of someone I love? How can I prepare for death? How can I help others prepare for death? What happens after death? To answer these questions, we need to look to Scripture and see what God has to say. The Bible is God’s Word and is completely reliable and true. If the Bible tells us something about death, then we can stake our lives on it. We also have a lot of help. Our spiritual ancestors thought profoundly and practically about death. Throughout the church's history, pastors and teachers have sought to help God’s people face death in light of the riches of biblical truth. In the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago, the church recovered the gospel in its full biblical integrity. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the British Puritans, and their spiritual heirs have left us rich reflections on suffering...

Those who reject Christ's claims will reject the Bible as a whole, so we are not surprised when we find non-Christians questioning the stories and teachings of Scripture. We are living in a funny age, however, when even many professing Christians want to cast the Bible in a negative light.  It is not uncommon for people who claim to be followers of Christ to question God's character or reject the truthfulness of entire portions of Scripture because they believe specific biblical stories and events contradict God’s mercy.  The invasion of Canaan is one of those stories that prompts many people, including many professing Christians, to question the Scriptures. Charges that “God commanded genocide” are frequently uttered.  Even after responding to the charge of genocide, however, we still need to consider how the story fits into the broader biblical revelation of the character of God.  THE PROBLEM IS US When we encounter something that troubles us in Scripture, we are t...