Dr Paul Allen

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...

 ‘Queers for Palestine’ The headline declared, “WATCH: ANTI-ISRAEL ‘QUEERS FOR PALESTINE’ PROTESTERS BLOCK ACCESS TO DISNEY WORLD.” In this story, we learned that tensions “rose when anti-Israel protesters with the group Queers for Palestine blocked traffic on Saturday outside Disney World in Orlando, Florida.” Queers for Palestine? But of course! That’s like African Americans for the KKK or Jews for Nazism. A delightful mix. You can feel the chemistry. Never mind the fact that there are precisely zero queers in Palestine — because, as many have pointed out, such people would be instantly marked for death by the terrorists in charge. GLAAD So Sad Finally, we read that “Jennifer Lawrence Calls Mike Pence Gay at GLAAD Media Awards: ‘Conversion Therapy Is Not Real – Even Though You Think It Worked on You’.” After making a crude joke about gay sex and noting that “she once fell in love with a gay man but eventually realized her love would never be reciprocated,” Lawrence chose to attac...

Even though we may not be able to fully explain why Satan came into being, we know he does exist, and he was there from the beginning of mankind because he tempted Adam and Eve in the third chapter of Genesis.  We also know that Jesus commanded “the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (Mark 1:27), Which is a fantastic statement. He said to Satan in the wilderness, “Be gone!” and he was gone (Matthew 4:10). And we know at the end of history, God will throw Satan into the lake of fire so that he can’t influence God’s people anymore or harm us anymore (Revelation 20:10). So, from all this, we know God could have bound Satan completely the moment he fell or at any point in history in between. We know he doesn’t because, in the end, the whole New Testament is telling the story of Satan’s activity in this world and how he deceives, how he tempts, and how we need to do warfare against the principalities and powers. “Seeing and savoring the superior beauty of Christ is the way we defeat th...

By faith, he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. (Heb. 11:28) “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” These words from Exodus 12:13 are some of the most comforting in the Old Testament, if not the entire Bible. But comfort (biblically speaking) often comes amid crisis.  When God spoke these words to Israel through Moses, Israel was in anything but a comfortable position. For several hundred years, they had been harshly enslaved by the Egyptians. Their God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—had been deafeningly silent throughout those centuries.  Egypt was a land full of pagan deities, and Pharaoh was a self-proclaimed deity among them—and he knew neither Joseph nor the God of Joseph. Time has a way of chilling warm memories, and all that God had done for Israel and the Egyptians had faded from memory. The people of God now pined away as slaves, labouring under the blighting sun of Pharaoh’s vainglory—a ...

  God’s people kept falling back into sexual sin during the days of the Judges, and the pattern continues to this day with the constant lure of wealth, power, success, pleasure, comfort, sex, indulgence, and pornography. These same demons are powerfully at work in our culture, continuing to seduce God’s people into evil and sin.  The rise in everything from worship of the environment (as our sacred goddess Mother); to greed that worships the demon Mamon in everything from crime to skyrocketing debt; to murder of the innocents, starting with the unborn; to the mainstream acceptance of pornography, polygamy, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, transgenderism, and every other sexual deviancy, is all the work of Baal and Asherah waging spiritual warfare that manifests in our physical world. The liberal, progressive, woke, and mainline Protestant “churches” that fly rainbow flags and celebrate tolerance, diversity, and Pride Month are filled not with the Holy Spirit but with unho...

How Not to Fight Sin Fighting sin is spiritual warfare, and warfare requires a battle plan. If left to our own devices, we would have little success against our unseen enemy. Thankfully, God’s word supplies wisdom to assist us in eluding the evil one’s snares. We’ll begin by briefly considering how not to engage in the battle, followed by practical tactics to flee sin and follow God. Don’t Fight Sin by Ignoring It Pretending sin isn’t there won’t help you fight it, as with Ben. Ben was a jokester, but at times, his jesting became inappropriate. He turned innocent comments into crude remarks and occasionally used off-colour language to get a laugh. When conviction came, he rationalized it away. He’d think, “I didn’t really mean it. It’s not who I really am. It’s not that big of a deal. I’m free in Christ.” An unwillingness to admit sin prevents you from repenting of it. Don’t Fight Sin by Entertaining It We also can’t fight by entertaining sin, as with Jess. Jess struggled with body ima...

The Jesuits have a history of subverting Scripture to promote propaganda. To discredit the clarity of Scripture in counter-Reformation polemics, Jesuit luminaries like St. Robert Bellarmine and Fr. Diogo de Payva de Andrada resorted to the subterfuge of disparaging the Bible as obscure, even on matters of salvation. When Pope Sixtus V published his edition of the Latin Vulgate, into which he had introduced at least two thousand errors, Bellarmine, who bombastically designated the pontiff as “vice-God,” hushed up the scandal and falsely blamed the errors on the typesetters. Bellarmine sneered at the Hebrew manuscripts when they contradicted mistranslated Vulgate texts. He upheld, for example, the copyist’s error from the proto-evangelium of Genesis 3:15, which read: ” she [Mary] shall crush your head” instead of “he [Jesus] shall crush your head”—an error finally corrected by the Vatican in the Nova Vulgata of 1979. The iconic Jesuit even defended fornicating priests over against clergy...