The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” For Nietzsche, the God of the Bible was reprehensible because Christian morality suppressed what he thought was good. In his understanding of the world, goodness was power, and evil was “whatever springs from weakness.” Therefore, he […]
In 1740, the British warship Wager was rounding Cape Horn when it crashed on a rocky island. Many presumed the ship and its crew to be lost, but against all odds, 33 men survived. In The Wager, David Grann recounts the astounding story of their survival, treachery, mutiny, and rebellion. After the shipwreck, divisions began […]
A few years after graduating from Bible college, I was hanging out with a group of friends. In my arrogance and pride, I began to run my mouth and bash the school we had all graduated from. I disagreed with some of the things they taught and positions they held, but I was not gracious […]
If you visit just about any church website, you will notice certain adjectives used to describe the church’s culture. Words like exciting, inspiring, uplifting, and vibrant are commonly used. Other adjectives would probably more accurately describe these churches––divided, fleshly, proud, arrogant, and selfish––but these are never used in a church’s tagline. There is one other […]
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the events in our nation in the last week are a cultural inflection point. Just weeks after a deranged killer murdered children at a Catholic school, the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina provoked horror at how such an event […]
Calvary Bible Church is an independent church, and unashamedly so, but often independent churches can have a mindset of independence from the church universal and the church historical. At Calvary, we do not want to fall into such a mindset. This is why, for many years, we have recited the historic ecumenical creeds (Apostles, Nicene, […]
In 1912, David Blair forgot a key in his pocket. This would usually be of little significance, except that this was the key to a lockbox on the Titanic. In that lockbox were the ship’s binoculars, but the key was with Blair back on land. Without binoculars, the ship’s crew had to scan the icy […]
What is acceptable worship? This is a question Christians should be deeply concerned with. God created us to worship him, but sin distorts and misdirects worship. Because sin pollutes everything, not all that is called worship is acceptable to God. From the beginning of the Bible, we see acceptable and unacceptable worship. Cain brought an […]
What’s in it for me? For many of us, this is how we approach life. Everything from our jobs to our family is centered on ourselves. However, this is a worldly perspective. Like so many worldly perspectives, this one creeps into the church—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. The church is to be radically different in every […]
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psa. 90:12) If the odometer on your car reads 29,200, you have low mileage. When it is the number of kilometers biked around the world in 108 days, like Lael Wilcox did, it is a lot. The average span of […]