Living by Grace

In these passages Paul does not promise the Body of Christ that trouble will pass us by. He shows who meets us in it, what that God gives, and what we are to do with it: comfort that stands while the trouble stands, a hope proved by trial, and a lot we were told of beforehand.

Believers are taught that God has authored a detailed script for each life and that one wrong turn puts a man outside His will. No verse says it. This study asks for the verse, takes up every passage offered in its place, and shows that the teaching's two halves cannot both be true at once.

Ask ten believers what spiritual means and you will get atmosphere, feeling, and fervency. Paul wrote twenty-three of the Bible's twenty-six occurrences of the word, and he never once uses it of a feeling. This article traces what it actually marks — a source and a realm — and what that settles about a brother who has fallen.

Believers ache for a past that was more moral and more Christian, and grieve a covenant they believe the nation broke. But the remembered age never existed as remembered, no Gentile nation was ever in covenant with God, and Scripture rebukes the longing itself. A look at nostalgia, the Christian nation, and the post God actually gave you.

Believers are being told that artificial intelligence is the image of the beast. It is not, and the passage will not carry the weight. This article traces the fear to the films and to a world already alarmed, and shows from Paul why a machine can neither rise above you nor teach you the things of God.

A boom in fitness and body-building ministries has made a single Pauline phrase newly awkward — bodily exercise profiteth little. But Paul is not scorning the body, nor blessing its worship. Read against the ancient games, he is doing something more useful than either the ascetic or the athlete expects. He is setting a priority.

The tithe was Israel's law, never laid on the body of Christ — so what replaces it? Paul gives something freer than a percentage: cheerful, purposed, proportionate giving that flows from grace already received. This study shows where grace giving comes from, what governs it, and where the gift goes.

Daniel's fast, the clean and unclean of Leviticus, the back-to-Eden vegan plan — every so-called biblical diet borrows food rules God gave to other people under other programs. Rightly divided, none of them binds the Body of Christ, to whom God gave liberty at the table with thanksgiving.