Excerpt:
A church may preach the gospel, teach young people, and support preaching in other places without building separate ministry structures, branded sub-organizations, or institutional networks beyond the local church. The issue is not whether evangelism and discipleship are important, but whether the New Testament authorizes the structures modern churches use to carry out that work.
The church was in the eternal purpose of God and the mind of Christ from the beginning; it is the true Israel, the saved remnant, the “little flock” that receives the kingdom — so that there is no Christianity without the church. People speak today of…
Christians are God’s fellow workers — not because God needs us, but because He has chosen to build His kingdom through human agents; this privilege carries both dignity and accountability, and the work is tested by fire. “For we are God’s fellow workers” (1 Cor. 3:9)….
The gospel preacher’s responsibility is not to the institution that employs him, the congregation that likes him, or the reputation he has built. It is to God who commissioned him, to the church whose truth he represents, and to the hearers who need what he has…
The church is by its very nature a missionary institution: its God-given mission is to uphold and spread the truth of salvation and to seek and save the lost — the same mission as Christ’s — and every member shares it. A congregation that forgets why…
The outline grounds the sermon in I Tim. 5:21 — a text addressed to Timothy about judicial impartiality in church proceedings. He uses it to identify prejudice as the parallel sin to preaching a false gospel (Gal. 1:8-9). Both involve rejecting God’s power — the false…
Every Christian is a priest. Not in a metaphorical sense — in the direct biblical sense of I Peter 2:5 and 2:9. The structure of the Levitical priesthood (one High Priest, many secondary priests, qualifications, duties, sacrifices, altar) is replicated exactly in the Christian age: Christ…
The Holy Spirit is a divine person — not a divine influence, not a force that can be poured like a liquid, not a vague spiritual energy. The evidence is convergent: the masculine personal pronoun used for him in contexts where the neuter grammatical gender would…
It is a strange thing that the simplest command in the New Testament has become the most disputed. Boles noticed it: no inspired man ever had to preach a whole sermon arguing for baptism, because it was told in a few plain words and obeyed on…
The word “Christian liberty” is used in two almost contradictory ways. One use invokes it as a shield against accountability — “I have liberty in Christ; don’t bind your traditions on me.” The other use names the profound freedom Christ actually purchased: freedom from the guilt…