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My great grandfather was a sharecropper in Southeastern Alabama, near the Georgia state line. He rented a small piece of land to work, and in return, he would give a portion of his crop to the landowner at the end of each year. My great grandfather decided he wanted a better life for his family…

Reinhold Niebuhr once stated that original sin “is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”1 By this he meant that we only need to look at human history to believe in the reality of original sin. This doctrine goes all the way back to the garden of Eden where we encounter…

Discipleship is a lifelong journey. Thankfully, God provides help for us along the way. The sacraments are specially ordained means of grace that serve as resources for enduring and victorious Christian living. That is, they are means of God’s sanctifying grace. Baptism Baptism is normally…

The term sanctification is not a distinct word in the Greek New Testament. The meaning of sanctification, expressed by a number of words, is related to holiness. The adjective “holy” refers primarily to God. The holiness of God the Father is evident everywhere in the New Testament as represented in…

Over recent years, an intriguing phrase on social media relationship updates has caught my attention: It’s complicated! I’ve not known exactly how to interpret this ambiguous phrase. I assume that it may describe a struggling relationship or perhaps one’s uncertainty regarding the nature of a…

For many of us, the word “sanctification,” like the word “justification,” has come to refer to one particular moment in the life-story of the Christian. We think of justification as that moment when we first come to faith and our sins are forgiven. In the last article in this series of three, we…

I have fond memories of the church in Mozambique and the ways it shaped my life. The Church of the Nazarene in Mozambique invests a lot of time in teaching and preaching on holiness. A week or weeks of holiness revival were normal and intended to rekindle interest in, passion for, and practice of…

Another particularly destructive fire season recently took its toll in my country. Tens of thousands of acres of forests, thousands of homes, and several lives have been lost as these massive fires burned out of control for weeks. I live more than 500 miles from the nearest forest fire. However,…

I have never lived on a farm—never milked a cow, never plowed a field, never waited for the harvest. I am a city boy. This puts me at a disadvantage, at times, when I read the parables and illustrations of Jesus in the New Testament. Many of His images in preaching came from a context of farming—…

Every human is guilty before God because of his/her sin and cannot run away from this guilt and condemnation. Each of us is destined to death, but through our faith in the gracious intervention of the Son of God who took our sins on Him, we can be saved. On the cross, we were rescued and redeemed,…