For a man who wrote and taught so extensively about unity, the apostle Paul surely had a lot of personal conflict. He famously (and publicly) fought with Peter (Galatians 2), became so fed-up with John Mark that he wouldn’t even take him along in ministry for a time (Acts 13), then clashed with Barnabas so […]

A woman in my Bible study has been walking with some dear family friends though the end of life process with their elderly mother. The mother is a lovely Christian woman, but this process has been long and painful. The mother has been bed-ridden for some time and one day was holding her husband’s hand […]

When I was a kid there was a professional basketball player who famously told a reporter, “I’m not paid to be a role model!” This statement sparked an enormous debate about how much responsibility celebrities have to be good examples, particularly to children. In 1 Corinthians 11:1, the apostle Paul takes an entirely different approach. […]

In First Corinthians 10, the apostle Paul listed a variety of situations that happened in the Old Testament and then wrote; “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us (vs. 10).” How grateful we are that some lessons can be learned from the pages of scripture, rather than […]

Sometimes we need a little balance in our Bible study. The Bible was always meant to be taken in its entirety, studied from cover to cover, over and over again throughout the course of our lives. I heard a pastor once warn; “Never base your theology on just one verse. Always look for at least […]

In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul addressed an issue that we would more likely find in a trashy daytime drama than in church, but there it was. A member of the Corinthian church was sleeping with his father’s wife. The Greeks were extremely tolerant of nearly all sexual situations. In fact, there was a Greek saying; […]

The city of Corinth was the Las Vegas of the ancient world. It was located on an isthmus that allowed sailors, merchants, refugees and adventurers from all over the world to mix together, blending their customs and ideas. Corinth was rich with agriculture and a variety of export products. The city had adopted a “pleasure […]

I’ve never written or taught on the greeting portion of one of the New Testament epistles before- but the last section of Paul’s letter to the Romans is just too good to pass over. I think you are going to love this! First, in the long list of names of church leaders that Paul gave […]

A few years ago, our family was living in the South. Every day, I pushed my double jogging stroller up and down the drive that connected a few homes in our little area and got some exercise while meeting the handful of neighbors that we had. One neighbor was an elderly gentleman named Arlie who […]

A couple that I know of visited a national park. Along the paths in the park were signs that urged visitors not to take any of the obsidian rocks that they found along the trail, explaining that if people continued to steal the unique rocks, soon there wouldn’t be any left. The man was shocked […]