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 […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
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 Already we are being told that “postmodernism” is out of date and we are now living in a “post-postmodern” time.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 […]
Growth and the Local Church (part 2)
We have noticed in part 1 that (1) the church is a called out group of people who have voluntarily believed, not a kingdom of people who have been conquered against their will, and (2) the Great Commission is to preach the gospel, not convert the nations. We continue in part 2 by emphasizing the […]
Growth and the Local Church (part 1)
The church growth movement, in its effort to help the church accomplish the Great Commission, may have actually done more to hinder than to help. What started off as an effort to get as many people under the sound of the gospel as possible, has often ended with churches full of merely professing believers whose […]
Guess What Has Not Changed?
Perhaps the most difficult problem in dealing with a postmodern culture is defining our terms. I doubt that a generation has ever been so flexible with language as this one. One hundred years ago W.H. Griffith Thomas, combating German Rationalism, said, “We cannot in any degree be sure of the thought unless we can be […]
Local Church Methodology
Every time I read advocates of contemporary worship, I can see why many have said things like, “Every time a new book is published, read an old one.”1 The old truth that you are what you read becomes true in those who spend their time reading about the contemporary church scene. You can only digest […]