Out of Neutral | Grace Baptist Church

Everybody knows the story of Noah’s Ark. Children love drawing the zebras and monkeys, and adults endlessly speculate about how everything fit and what it might have been like. But all of those things distract us from the message that Noah’s Ark is intended to convey. Do you know what it teaches? There are several important lessons that we should hear from Noah’s Ark no matter what our age.

If someone ate a cheeseburger and a root beer, thought about what Jesus did on the cross, and called it the Lord’s Supper, you’d probably tell them that Jesus had something more specific in mind. I think the same needs to be said about baptism.

Sometimes, cultural shifts can help us to understand the Bible more effectively. The rise of the transgender movement may have unknowingly done that in our generation. Today, it’s common to hear people say things like, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body.” The person’s feelings drive them to think about their life in ways that don’t correspond to the objective reality of their biology. Th...

It’s easy to put other Christians and other churches who have rejected God’s commands in a different category from ourselves. We say things like, “I can’t believe they did that,” but our surprise says more about us than it does about them.

If you find yourself rushing through your reading, deliberately slow down. The Bible doesn’t TikTok well. Our digital scrolling trains us to skim but God’s Word needs to be stored and hidden deep within us to have its effect.

If you just need some life hacks, maybe a Christian self-help book will do. But if you realize that your problems go deeper than that, you need something more powerful. When you invest in daily Bible reading, you’re taking a blow torch to the impurities in your life and a sledgehammer to the hardhearted attitudes that get in the way of your growth.

Hopefully, you’re not reading this because you want to start a cult. But I think it’s important that we understand the ingredients of Christian cults so that we can recognize them when they come. Here’s how you might start a cult that taught that you have to be baptized to be saved.

I was asked to debate baptism with a Christian Reformed pastor. As we talked back and forth for more than two hours, it was clear how much we shared in common but also how Christians from our traditions can often misunderstand each other on this issue.

If you grew up Catholic and visited a Protestant church, you might be surprised to see that they use a different Bible. But it’s not for the reason you might think. Understanding why they differ, tells you something important about these two churches.

This year, the most read articles and watched videos included topics from marriage and parenting to prophecy and church membership. See what you missed or what might warrant a second look as I break down the top 10 of 2023.

No matter what your religious background is, you should be at least a little outraged at the message that a child’s presents somehow correlate with their moral behaviour. As others have pointed out, the presents that children receive mostly reflect the relative wealth of their parents, not whether they’re on some list of morally superior children.

We often view hope the same we do gasoline: it helps us move so we don’t care much about where it comes from. But hope isn’t neutral. There are many things we hope in that end in huge disappointment and even painful consequences.

Each of these individuals was likely hard-working and well-educated. They were probably personable and sincere. If you had lunch with one of them, you would probably be impressed with their charm and conclude they were “good people.” So, how did things go so terribly wrong?

Nobody’s watching. Surely, no one will notice. You’ve heard God’s warnings, but you decide to do it anyway. It’s compromise. You’re cutting a corner. You’ve stepped over the line. And then you wait for God’s consequences. Only they don’t come. Whew, you got away with it! Or did you? In those moments, we often misinterpret sin’s consequences and God’s heart toward us.