Living by Grace

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.

Paul warned that Satan's ministers appear as ministers of righteousness, not as open enemies. This study examines why the counterfeit stands inside the Christian column rather than beside it, why sincerity, results and personal godliness cannot test a teacher, and what Paul actually gives the Body to test him with.

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.

One of the hardest sentences Paul wrote appears to say a man's bad works can get him destroyed by God. Read whole, it says very nearly the opposite, and the clause most often left off the end is the one that answers it. Here is what defiling means in Paul's own vocabulary, and why the temple was never the thing in danger.

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 golden calf was never announced as a rival god. Aaron called it a feast to the LORD. The idols in the modern church do the same thing: they wear the name of Jesus while the congregation worships its own appetites. This companion to The Worldly Church names the idols the heart actually serves, and the one god standing behind them all.