Seventeen82

Singer-songwriter Eric Church has a song in which he sings about the life lessons he learned from his three-year-old. Here's the chorus:  You can be a cowboy on the moon Dig to China with a spoon Talk to Jesus on the phone Say "I love you" all day long And when you're wrong, you should just say so I learned that from a three year old During a January weekend this year, I came to a similar realization when I supervised a sleepover birthday party for my 0-year-old son, Joshua at a hunt camp just outside of Chester, SC. The boys ran around, played hide and seek, threw the football, giggled, roasted hot dogs over the fire and made s'mores. It was a great time for all of us (even at 1 am when they were still playing flashlight wars in their bunks). The boys didn't need a bunch of technology to entertain them. They had each other.  In our complex and busy world, we need to remember that a happy life is really...

  One of the most  difficult doctrines for us is predestination. We simply don’t like  how out-of-control it makes us  that the Lord must be entirely in control of our salvation . We don’t like to feel  so unable and  so  unworthy that our salvation must be entirely by His ability and His worthiness. But these are  simply  facts  about  us and about redemption .    We also  find it quite unpleasant to admit or remember  that every one of us entered this world willfully rejecting and despising God  and that we deserve eternal torment for it .  It is admittedly difficult to endure considering what  the wicked  will be unable to endure — suffering  “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2Th 1:9). But these are the facts about those who are not redeemed.   So,  we are not  surprised that this doctrine of “ Double Predestination”...

  As a younger man living in Mississippi, I loved to listen to the variety of talk radio options. One that I enjoyed listening to quite a bit was American Family Radio. I enjoyed the programs where listeners were able to call in and ask/answer questions from the host. As a relatively new believer, I gravitated toward programming like this. It sharpened my wits and helped me to better handle my own faith. On one such program, the host discussed some recent changes in the government. Those changes concerned him. A listener called in and said, “the government has fallen off God’s shoulders, and it’s up to us to place it back on.” There was an obvious allusion to Isaiah 9:6, and some obvious misunderstandings of who God is and who we are. Recently, my congregation has been going through 1 Samuel. Our study in chapter 5 made me think back to that radio program.  The Philistines captured the ark of the covenant and they set it up in their temple next to Dagon - who was a kind of mer...

This post was originally sent to the members of Chester ARP Church as a pastoral letter written in response to the school shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, TN on March 27, 2023.   Like most of you, I watched the news in horror Monday evening as the reports came streaming in from the most recent school shooting in our country. Sadly, these kinds of reports have become all too familiar to us.    I remember standing in the lobby of Burgaw Hall on the NC State Campus as the news from Columbine High School was reported in 1999. I was shocked that someone would open fire in a school. But that was then. In the 24 years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 15 of their classmates and injured another 24, we have seen over 350 more active shooter situations on our K-12 school and college campuses. That is staggering.    Thankfully, most of those situations have not ended in mass casualties. However, that does not mean that the collective numbers of those sh...

  ​ Having spent many years in the Pentecostal world, one of my chief consternations was that damnable heresy known as the prosperity gospel. According to the precepts of that false teaching, in proportion to one’s faith, a believer could and should expect to enjoy wealth and health in this present age. Of course, the primary beneficiaries of this blasphemous teaching  were  the preachers who promoted it, as they indicated one means to demonstrate the necessary faith was by financially supporting their “ministries.” Plant that  seed  and reap that harvest, words for one to choke on. For those more orthodox and centered in Scripture, this was their constant battle.  ​ Yet,  one d anger when confronting a heresy is to develop an equally extreme and unbiblical  heresy .  So, for instance, o ne could easily fall into a vow of poverty  mindset  in confronting the prosperity gospel. The proportion of one’s faith, in this case, is indicate...

  Lamentations is a book that explains the experience of a suffering people trying to understand their present circumstances both historically and religiously.  Lamentations not only seeks to validly and faithfully express the grief and despondency of the exile, but attempts to understand and make sense of what happened.   ​ Israel's exilic future is seen in Moses's prophetic song (Deut. 32). This text was a reminder to the people of Israel: the pain they were experiencing was due to their violation of the terms and conditions of the Sinai covenant ( Deut  31: 19-21). What Moses foreshadows, Judah experiences. ​ If Judah were to remain faithful to God, she would experience blessing.  The beginning of Deuteronomy 28 explains that God's people would be a great nation set high above all others (Gen 12:2; Deut. 28:1) and were to be made into great nations (Gen 17:6).  By  Israel , all the earth was to be blessed (Gen 28:14; Deut. 28:2-4, 11).   Israel...

  “23  When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter; therefore it was named Marah.  24  And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?”  25  And he cried to the  Lord , and the  Lord  showed him a log, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.” Ex. 15:23-25   Recently, I had a bad cough. To help cure it, my doctor gave me a prescription for a special pill which would immediately alleviate the cough. The problem, however, was that the second the pill touched the tongue, a horrible bitter taste filled the whole mouth. I tolerated it because I knew that it was for my good. In the Exodus, God led Israel out of Egypt by his strong hand. He saved Israel by holding back the waters and leading them through the Red Sea. But, at the same time, He judged Pharoah and Egypt by causing the waters to fall upon them.  Once on the other side, Moises and all of Israel s...