Dr Paul Allen

There is no way out . She knows such bitter, biting thoughts are wrong and shameful, but her friend’s comment cut so deeply. Her mind keeps returning to the moment, reliving the wound. She feebly tries to turn her thoughts elsewhere, but the offence seems to surround her like a fog. And how do you fight a fog? He, too, is well aware that he’s walking down a worthless path. He’s been here before — this thought, leading to that fantasy, producing these seemingly unconquerable desires. Maybe he could have escaped if he had turned around immediately, but he feels he has gone too far. He has plucked and felt the fruit; how can he not now taste it? No way out. Who hasn’t felt the force of these words amid bitterness, lust, or a thousand other temptations? And who hasn’t succumbed to their dark suggestion? If some lies have slain their thousands, this lie has slain its ten thousand. Every Temptation Escapable We are hardly the first to feel trapped, surrounded, and hemmed in by the power of s...

“Some have made shipwreck of their faith,” the apostle Paul reports in his first letter to Timothy. In fact, the language of leaving is all over 1–2 Timothy: they were wandering away from the faith, departing from the faith, swerving from the faith, being disqualified from the faith (1 Timothy 1:19; 4:1; 5:12; 6:10, 20–21; 2 Timothy 3:8).  There seemed to be something of a small exodus already happening in the first century, perhaps not unlike the wave of deconversions, we’re seeing online today. We shouldn’t be surprised; Jesus told us it would be so: “As for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8:14). Those same thorns are still sharp and threatening to faith in our day. In fact, with the ways we use technology, we’re now breeding thorns in our pockets, drawing them even closer than before. This context gives the charge in 1 Timothy 6:1...

RUN JOSEPH RUN! “She caught him by his garment, saying, ‘Lie with me.’ But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house” ( Gen. 39:12 ). - Genesis 39:11–18 Potiphar’s wife does not abandon her desire to seduce Joseph after first making the brazen demand for Joseph to sleep with her ( Gen. 39:6b–9 ). Instead, she softens her request in an attempt to get around Joseph’s forthright refusal to be with her. “Day after day” she speaks to Jacob’s favorite son, begging him to “lie beside her” or “be with her,” a seemingly innocent request that he spend time with her without doing anything improper. However, Joseph is smart enough to know better (v. 10). He knows that to put himself where he might find temptation is to play with fire, and so he wisely determines not to listen to the “smooth words” of this adulteress ( Prov. 7:4–5 ). Nevertheless, as today’s passage indicates, this woman will get her way, or else! No one is around one day when Joseph goes to work...