Fear and Trembling

I hope that you have found this little series to be helpful.  I have outlined the reasons that I have chosen to be a Christian and to remain in the faith.  I have shared much of my own personal intellectual and emotional journey. The reasons given are not persuasive arguments for everyone. I pray that if you are a person who does not find them convincing that you will at least be motivated to explore other arguments and approaches. Some places to look on the internet are: www.str.org , www.ligonier.org , www.carm.org , and www.4truth.net .   Some helpful books include The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, Reasons to Believe by R. C. Sproul, Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, and I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek.  These men differ on many theological issues, but their arguments for God’s existence and the truth of the Bible are sound.   ...

I was raised in a Baptist church in a small, West Tennessee town. Many times, I have heard the testimony of a person who has been radically and completely delivered from the awful, evil sins they once committed. I have often questioned the miraculous deliverances purported in these testimonies, especially when the speaker implies that my life must assuredly be changed in the same dramatic way if I truly repent of my sins and come to Christ. I do not intend to discuss a long, rambling account of my personal sins and the way I have tried to set them aside. I have found in my own experience that my besetting sins have persisted after I became a Christian, even though I am better than I once was. The difference in my life I want to discuss is not a dramatic reversal of my behavior. The Holy Spirit has helped me to get better over time, but I have not been made perfect, and I have not been radically and instantly delivered from sin. The change in my life that I want to focu...

Psychology, the way people think, has always been a fascination of mine. Great care must be used by a Christian in this area, but the concepts can often be redeemed. One of the most fascinating areas of psychology is temperament theory. Temperament theory can be traced back to Hippocrates. It is undeniably imperfect, and some have even rejected the theories altogether. Many of us are very reserved in temperament.  We were just made to be calm and quiet.   It might surprise those who know very little about people like us that we want to be happy. Not just happy-go-lucky, smile all the time, laugh at everything type happy, but truly happy. We want to be happy in the sense of being “blessed” or “delighted.” It might help to remind of the old adage, “Still waters run deep.” John Piper has been a great help to me in many ways. His teaching has reinforced much of what I have learned about the way my heart works. God made us to live a moral life, and we should ...

I have mentioned before that the ideas Christianity holds make intuitive sense to me. This idea is true of the central message of the Christian faith: what most call “the gospel,” or the good news. The gospel is intuitive in that, once I was made aware of it; I knew “in my gut” that it explained my experience. Of course, it is not intuitive in that I would never have thought this up without someone telling me about these truths. The gospel is the fact that God offers eternal life as a free gift. Paul wrote, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” As a gift, eternal life is not earned or deserved. I will return to this idea latter.  The law requires perfection. Jesus Himself said, “Be ye perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect.” We cannot avoid the knowledge that we have fallen short of this obviously true ideal.  (???) No one obeys the law perfectly or obeys the law with perfect motives: “For...