What Joel Teaches About Natural Disasters, and What We Can Learn About Opening Our Bibles Christians generally believe Peter when he claims that God’s “divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3).[1] Further, conservative Christians believe that God has provided “all things” through an all sufficient word (2 Timothy 3:16-17). However, even conservative Christians rarely treat the Bible as if it contains the kind of information t

“Look out the window,” a father instructs his son. “You see that young man down there? He’s about to commit a terrible sin.” The son looked at his father quizzically. “How do you know that he’s going to sin?” The father looked down at his son, “I know he’s going to sin because of where he’s headed.” Many today might be tempted to accuse the father in this story of being judgmental. How can someone presume to know what someone else is going to do? However, before making this a

Though I’m sure I heard the word used this way before this time, the first time I remember really taking note of the word “sound” as a term meaning something other than noise was in preaching school. I know the term was properly defined and explained by my teachers, so I don’t fault them for the fact that I think I took the term onboard without really understanding what it meant. The word at that time seemed to me to refer basically only to two things: preachers and congregat

When I lived in Singapore, I once had a conversation with one of the brothers there about what I didn’t miss about the United States. Don’t get me wrong, I love my home country now and I did then, but the question didn’t leave me speechless; there were some things I was more than happy to be without then and could do without now. One of the things I mentioned to the brother is the rap music culture that developed as I grew up in Hotlanta (sorry, I mean Atlanta—see the influen