The difference between the conservative and contemporary churches are becoming more evident. A recent pamphlet titled, “Is Your Church Going Purpose Driven?”1 lists 24 visible “signs” that begin to happen when a ministry is in the process of moving from traditional to contemporary. Many people I know who have experienced this kind of change readily […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
For Children and Students and Other Wear...
“There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech. We would be better Christians if we were more alone, waiting upon God, and gathering, through meditation on His Word, spiritual strength for labor in His service.”1 Charles Spurgeon A father finds many occasions to give advice to his […]
Can God Stop Evil?
Can God Stop Evil? By Rick Shrader rhaps the most frequently asked question by skeptics today is why God allows evil to exist. From the holocaust to Columbine to 9-11, it has become more common and even acceptable to question why a good God allows human beings to suffer. In 1965 Stewart Zabriskie wrote, […]
Worshippers Who Also Come To Church
I have often said to the people I pastor, “We do not come together to worship; we are worshipers who come together.” Though we use the vernacular “coming to worship” to mean “coming to church,” we must have a better understanding of where and how the real worship is taking place. We know these things, […]
Your Body: the temple of the Holy Spiri...
What! Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which you have of God, and ye are not your own? (1 Cor. 6:19). The Apostle’s question is as relevant today as ever, perhaps more so. Most of us can remember seeing pictures of the “heathen” in […]
The Nicolaitans Today
The job of doing Bible exposition not only involves interpretation (finding what the passage means) and illustration (highlighting the meaning with real life situations) but also application (exhortations to action based on the truths found in the text). The application of a text can easily be ignored because this is the harder thing to do. […]
The Disinterested and Complacent Love of...
The older writers often used terminology in a way that sounds odd to us. Two common theological descriptions of God’s love include “disinterested benevolence” and “complacent love.” They sound odd to us only because we tend to think of both of these terms in a negative way. To be “disinterested” to us would be to […]
Received With Thanksgiving
Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer […]
The Emerging Church (part 2)
The primary tenet of the Emerging Church has been that we must a) recognize that our culture has become postmodern and b) we must immerse our churches much more into this postmodernism if we are to reach this generation with the gospel. It has been my contention that “a” is true but “b” is false. […]
The Emerging Church (part 1)
There is no rut so deep to fall into as the need for constant change. Already we are being told that “postmodernism” is out of date and we are now living in a “post-postmodern” time. Spurgeon described the shifting sands of his own day in this way: “It will have no creed because it can […]