Each week the TV show, Touched By An Angel, solves a problem and has a happy ending for the characters on the TV screen. What’s more, the show does amazing things for some of the real-life people who watch it. They say so in their letters. A man on the verge of killing himself watched […]

For about a year I attended a church that had very little outreach to the people of its neighborhood. The members were generally skeptical about evangelism. Their reasoning ran like this: “Around here, some people already have a church, so it’s no use talking to them. For the rest, they’re not interested in church. You […]

Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer recently delivered a speech at St. Anselm College in Bedford, NH, that touched on familiar moral issues I at the center of his campaign. Among other things, Bauer said, “Many…assaults on the Catholic Church and traditional Christian beliefs take sexually explicit forms because, for some on the extreme left, unrestricted […]

Do We Have To? In this article I would like to consider some of the background issue involved in dealing with cultists in general. The first question we should consider is whether we have a responsibility to deal with them at all. After all, they’ve been brain-washed and they’re not going to listen to us. […]

This friend of mine was bright and gifted. His wife was attractive. Their children were healthy and fairly well-balanced. But my friend was addicted, not to cocaine or cocktails or prescription drugs, his compulsions were less obvious but more insidious. My friend was part of the statistical mass of male Christians in America who are […]

Revelation 11:1–4 Someone has quite aptly said that chapter 11 is the “graveyard” of commentators and their explanations. And so it does at times seem. A cemetery is usually a rather solitary and silent place. But by no means always. Graves have to be dug; bodies placed in them and covered. Then at times these […]

Revelation 11:4–14 Shortly after World War II the Communists made a strong bid for power in France. One day a party member was discussing this with a churchman. He said, “You have the tradition and institutions and wealth; also the people. But we have the future. We are ready to die for our convictions. Are […]

Revelation 11:15–19 What an awe-inspiring scene is unveiled to the seer on Patmos. And we, with enlightened eyes, are privileged to see it through the words of this passage. The ever-coming Christ makes ready to appear as the great Day of days begins to dawn. Already earlier. with the opening of the seventh seal, we […]

On October 31, 1999 officials of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches met in Augsburg, Germany to sign a “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.” The date and location were deliberately chosen to symbolize that a step was being taken towards the healing of one of the major divisions in the church stemming from […]

If we were to select two dominant themes of discussion in the world and church today, no doubt the current breakdown of the home and the work of the Holy Spirit would rank high. At first glance these two topics seem to be picked at random, but actually there is a very close relationship between […]