As pastor of Sardinia Baptist Church, I got a cold call today from a town two hours away – a missionary-to-be looking for financial support to get him and his family to the mission field. I admired his gumption, but as we talked, I had more and more questions. Let’s call him Joe. Joe needs to raise roughly $11,000 per month to put his family on the field. That’s pretty steep! And the mission field?  Hawaii!  Joe might have an easier time if God was calling him to the French Riviera! At least that would be overseas.  Joe wants to…

We should always be suspicious whenever the church regularly uses language found nowhere in Scripture. You can look up all the uses of the word “heaven” in the New Testament and not find it to ever be used as part of a phrase like “going to heaven”.  Not once. You will find one verse which speaks of “ascending to heaven”, though.  It’s John 3:13 – “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” And maybe you don’t want to go there anyway – at least not yet: 2 Peter 3:10-13 – “But…

A pastor friend and I are engaged in a texting discussion over the nature of salvation.  In our last exchange he asked: If someone came to you and asked, “What must I do to be saved from hell, receive eternal life, and be declared righteous before God?” what would you tell them? I have tried to give this some serious consideration. But the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous the entire premise became. I have never been asked this question in the past four decades in which I have taken my faith seriously, and I doubt I will…

If a person’s motivation for “believing in” Jesus is avoiding the punishment of hell or gaining the reward of heaven, it’s no wonder that, either way, he or she might need reassurance repeatedly after the big “decision”. How many times will they need to be told, “Don’t worry, your place in paradise is secure”?  A certain level of uncertainty is entirely understandable for those who conceive of salvation as belonging entirely to the future. After all, you have the rest of your life to sit and wonder and worry.  But, biblically speaking, salvation starts now. And that’s good news because…

At this point in my life, if someone were to ask me “How can I be saved?”, the first thing I would ask is “What do you mean by ‘saved’? Saved from what?” If the hypothetical person answered, “Saved from hell” or “I want to know how to get to heaven”, then I would know there’s a lot of weeding to do before there’s any planting.  By and large, non-believers have picked up a lot of the same misconceptions held by Christians regarding what faith is all about. But if that person expressed a desire to be saved from “self”…

I grew up hearing the standard American Evangelical gospel message, the one focused on individual salvation: we are justified through faith by Jesus’s death, burial and resurrection so that upon death, we can be admitted into heaven. And all that is only by God’s grace, to be sure.  That was “the gospel”. Along the way I was taught “The Romans Road”, I was shown diagrams of the cross bridging a gap between earth and heaven that I could never jump across, and I heard youth pastors and preachers “evangelize” by asking, “If you died tonight, do you know where you…

Take a look at this paragraph from Free Grace advocate, Bob Wilkin, as he critiques other Christians who (according to him) don’t have the same level of “assurance of salvation” as he has: Most people witness like this: “I don’t know where I’m going when I die. If you have 5 minutes I can help you not know where you are going when you die.” With a message like that, is it any wonder that most people find it hard to witness? That isn’t good news, is it?* Does any aspect of Wilkin’s words strike you as off? (Besides the…

Psalm 103 12 as far as the east is from the west,so far does he remove our transgressions from us.13 As a father shows compassion to his children,so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.14 For he knows our frame;he remembers that we are dust. This is one of the most comforting texts in all of Scripture. First, the promise that the forgiveness God offers us is utterly complete. There’s no lingering resentment on His part. Second, His forgiveness has a real effect on us. Our sins are not just papered over, but actually removed. Third, there is…