The Bible has a lot to say about orphans. The Hebrew word for orphan is yatom—usually translated fatherless. It describes a child who lacks the protection and provision of a family.
The best modern equivalent for this type of person is a foster child—a child whose parents are either unable or unwilling to care for them.
Let’s see what the Bible has to say about them.
Starting today, you have eight weeks of free access to Dr. Bock’s course, Introducing the Gospels and Acts: Their Background, Nature, and Purpose.
At the heart of Randy Alcorn’s latest book, Happiness, is the simple belief that Christians, having a direct relationship with the source of all happiness, should be happy.
This isn’t a call for delusional ignorance of the terrible things that happen all around us, or the sinful embrace of all things that may produce some fleeting glimpse of happiness. Alcorn spent three years compiling hundreds of pages of research to demonstrate that God does desire for us to be happy, and that Christians have historically embraced that Christianity leads to happiness.
We’ve seen a lot of discussion and debate in recent years on the nature of heaven, hell, and what happens after we die. But these discussions are nothing new. The church has been debating eschatology (the study of last things) ever since the time of Christ, and the Jews before Christ were discussing the same.
Scripture provides many insights about the afterlife. But when theologians combine these insights into a coherent whole, they come to some very different conclusions about what the Bible teaches. The nature and duration of hell is one such example.
For several years, Faithlife has been producing original Bible art on a new verse every day.
If you’ve ever encountered our Verse of the Day art out in the wild, you’ve probably wondered, “Do they have art for this verse, too? How can I see them all?”
Now there’s a one-stop-shop to search Verse of the Day Bible art. Over 1,000 of our finest Verse of the Day pieces have been organized into 103 categories for you to browse.
Faithlife empowers people to grow in the light of the Bible. It’s why we create advanced Bible study tools like Logos Bible Software, free reliable resources like the Faithlife Study Bible, and everything in between.
So why church presentation software?
Proclaim is how we help you share the light of the Bible. Every week, you work hard to provide a meaningful experience for your congregation. So we decided to put together a team of designers and developers to help you create better experiences faster.
Today’s guest post is by Dr. Daniel Bush, author of Live in Liberty: The Spiritual Message of Galatians and Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God. Dan holds a B.Sci. from Michigan Technological University, the M.Div. and Th.M. degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland).
I don’t recall how the conversation turned to the topic of hair. My sister-in-law noticed I still had a full head of hair, which is nothing spectacular, except when compared to my brother, who is growing bald patches where he ought to be growing luscious locks. So, I strutted and made a joke about Rogaine, then got honest: My brother is losing hair, but what he has is dark while mine is beginning to look like winter preemptively struck—morning frost everywhere.
Gray hair means I’m getting old and tired, and one of the things I’m tired of is comparisons, which are a gentle way of judging. We compare everything: our green lawns, our athletic and academic children, our fulfilled lives, our sin, and then we use social media to prove to ourselves and others that we actually have a life, a bunch of friends, a brilliant smile, and can strike a pose with the best of them. Beneath it all, however, we’re unconsciously leveling all of these things, attempting to compare goodness. It’s mostly innocent; nevertheless, the impulse to compare goodness is as powerful as the impulse to get a cup of coffee on a frosty winter morning.
There’s one more thing making my hair grey: Bumping into the notion that following Jesus is really all about “getting better”—that is to say, Christian spirituality is about putting an end to all of our sinning.
Dan Lovaglia, director of leadership development at Awana, says there’s a disconnect between the church’s objectives and our results—particularly in children’s ministries. Across denominations, ministries and churches share many of the same goals for discipling kids—and we experience many of the same problems reaching those goals.
The issue isn’t how we are addressing the individual problems with children’s ministries. Dan says the issue is discipleship.
In George Marsden’s brand new “biography” of C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity (part of Princeton University Press’s “Lives of Great Religious Books” series), Marsden offers a thorough round-up of opinion on Lewis’ famous “trilemma.” Lewis said to the British nation through the BBC broadcast talks which became his influential book,
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about [Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (52)
Liar, lunatic, or Lord. That’s the trilemma.
Read more…
Providing separate ministries for children, teens, and young adults is how churches lean into knowledge of childhood development and adolescence. It’s how the body of Christ walks beside parents to teach kids to embrace and live out the gospel. It’s about meeting kids on their level, and sharing the gospel in a way that makes sense to them.
But children’s ministry doesn’t always live up to our ideals.
In Relational Children’s Ministry: Turning Kid-Influencers Into Disciple Makers, Awana’s Dan Lovaglia highlights some of the key issues with children’s ministry today.