Ronnie W. Rogers
Loyalty that runs deep in our soul, so that we are not just a friend to others but rather a treasured friend indeed, will be tried in the fires of disloyalty. Disloyalty is suffered most often and most heartbreakingly by loyalists. Deep anguish is the sometimes lot of the loyal friend. To be sure, the…
Without love, our humanness evanesces. Wrong is wrong and sin is sin. Neither love nor anything else can make a wrong right or a sin sinless, but love can hide sins. This Christian love is not blind to the sins and frailty of others, but neither does it require others to measure up before Christians…
Calvinists take solace in the claim that they believe salvation is totally a work of God (unconditional election, man’s passiveness until selective regeneration, regeneration prompting faith, etc.), while oftentimes either implying or explicitly accusing those who make salvation conditioned upon man exercising faith (exercising faith in response to hearing the gospel prior to regeneration or…
Being Christian means to be like Christ, not just partly like Christ. The person of Christ reminds us that strength, power, knowledge, righteousness, and that even knowing what is the right thing to do in every situation does not necessitate brutishness, arrogance and being uncompassionate. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for…
Church discipline visibly demonstrates the seriousness of sin as well as both the holiness and love Christ calls His church to live (Matthew 18:15-20). When church discipline is first implemented, the immediate fallout may appear to be all negative. However, in time the church will benefit by having honored God with obedience, and the credibility…
John Piper said, “The book of life represents God’s free and unconditional election. In the New Testament the book of life is synonymous with the list of those who are elect and predestined for eternal life.”[1] John Calvin said, “Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates, and that for no other cause but because…
Christians can feel free to cry at a funeral. While we do rejoice that our loved ones who know Christ as Savior go to be with Jesus, death is still a sorrowful time. Jesus did weep at the death of Lazarus (John 11:35). We are not like those without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13), but as…
Short memories produce crass Christians. Christians need to guard against becoming so accustomed to being a Christian and being around Christians that they saunter down the path of harshness toward the lost. As though the difference in us and them originated in us. “It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came…
Millard Erickson holds to a compatibilist view of moral freedom, as do virtually all Calvinists. Compatibilism is the perspective that determinism and moral freedom are compatible; hence, the name. To wit, man makes a free choice when he chooses according to his greatest desire; however, what is often overlooked is that the desire from which…
How does it happen? A path all to often followed over an extended period of time might look something like this. The nefarious process begins with a subtle loss of desire for holiness, then an equally slight emphasis on something else that is spiritual, which seems to balance the scales from the injustice of selectively…