Dr Paul Allen

One of the things I love about the Bible is its sheer realism. The irony is that the world thinks the Bible is full of fairy tales. Yet, when you engage with its teaching, you find that it fits our humanity. The God who wrote the Bible “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” ( Ps. 103:14 ). The teaching of Scripture is wonderfully realistic. While studying Galatians in house groups, I was struck by this passage: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” ( Gal. 6:9–10 ). Paul has expounded the gospel, the glorious freedom that Christ brings. One hymn puts it like this: for those who are in Christ, “the terrors of law and of God with me can have nothing to do.” We must guard our hearts against falling back into a pattern of thought that thinks it is what we do, our external acts, that make us acceptable to God. I...

I (Sam) ran into a long-standing church member at the store. We had one short conversation, but it was emblematic of a much broader concern. She’d been going through a bit of a crisis, and we hadn’t seen her at church for a few weeks. So when I ran into her, I told her how much we’d missed her and how lovely it would be to see her in church again. She told me she couldn’t come until she was doing better. She didn’t want people to see her while feeling life’s mess: “I’m waiting until the storm passes and I’ve got things back together enough to be able to walk back into the church building.” Those words were heartbreaking. Church should be the place we sprint to when things are at their worst, not the place we avoid until we’ve got our Instagram-worthy Christianity back. I saw right away that this church member’s perspective was unhealthy. But I sensed something else was wrong, too. There was a mismatch between the beauty of the truth my church proclaimed and the culture we’d cultivated....

Ryan Ross In Revelation, John writes about “seven stars” in Jesus’s right hand (Rev. 1:16). These, he explains, “are the angels of the seven churches” (v. 20). The churches themselves are described as “seven lampstands” (vv. 12, 20). But who are the “angels of the seven churches?” At first blush, it may seem that “angels” are supernatural guardian angels in this context. Writebol, following Peter Leithart and a long history in Reformed teaching, argues that John isn’t talking about a church’s specially assigned angel but rather a messenger of the church: a pastor. This means “the letters are personal addresses from Jesus to these pastors about who he is and who they are” (6). This interpretative approach acts like a lens correcting astigmatism. It snaps pastoral implications into focus, like putting on brand-new glasses. It showed me things about myself and my ministry that were distorted before. These are letters from Jesus to pastors. This directness adds to their weight as they poin...