My heart hurt for my son Camden, all of eight years old, after I broke the bad news and then watched him storm upstairs in a fit of anguish and pain. But in that moment, a realization hit home to me—as abstract theology suddenly became personal. But let me digress for a moment. About a year ago, my wife Camille and I decided that we n
What shall it profit a man if he reaches the whole world, yet neglects his neighbor living next door? - Someone I have not done an official survey, but my guess is that if you were to ask Seventh-day Adventists living in North America if they were friends with their neighbors, something like 90% of them would say they weren’t. Think about i
You’d probably be hard-pressed to find a person who thinks it’s acceptable for a Christian to be selfish. Selfishness is the antithesis to Christianity, implicitly at odds with it. Even non-Christians recognize this and are often quick to point out when the life of a Christian contradicts this principle. This idea is, of course, underscored repeate
In his commentary Luke for Everyone, N.T. Wright shares an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal though repeated by many, about the Russian Orthodox Church during pre-communist Russia. Apparently, in October of 1917, a contentious, drawn-out debate broke out among the church’s leadership during its synod in Moscow. What was it about? The color of clerical v
I’ve been reading through Steps to Christ again (for the hundredth time) lately, and last week I noticed a word that kept popping up repeatedly. Intrigued by the thought, I decided to search how many times the word was used in the small book and the context in which it was used. What I discovered was fascinating. And critical. The word is “cannot,”
