Chapter six of I Timothy closes the letter with a cluster of practical duties arranged around the theme of what is worth pursuing. The servant asks: worth honoring my master? The false teacher asks: worth teaching for money? The person minded to be rich asks: worth…
Money is not evil; it is a rival. The person who lets money be a rival of God has lost the capacity to use money righteously. The person who keeps money in its proper place — a tool for supporting life, caring for others, and honoring…
James’s one sentence — “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:14) — contains within it both the greatest urgency and the most clarifying perspective…
Jesus was “a man of sorrows” — and he was also a man of deep, unshakable joy. The New Testament does not present these as contradictions. It presents them as dimensions of the same great soul. The church has a long tradition of depicting Jesus primarily…
The New Testament shows elders appointed in every church — at Jerusalem, Ephesus, Philippi, and the cities of Crete — always a plurality serving as shepherds and bishops in the local congregation, never one bishop ruling over many churches. “Elder” is a plain word that has…
God has always required His people to give; since we own nothing but merely steward what is already His, the Christian gives himself first and then his means — liberally, freely, willingly, as he has prospered, regularly through the church and as need arises among men….
The decisive question about the second coming is not when but why — and Scripture answers plainly: Christ comes not to set up an earthly kingdom but to complete the church, end every agency of salvation, close the church’s ordinances and His own intercession, raise and…
The New Testament church had a simple, God-given organization — apostles in the foundation age, then elders (a plurality overseeing each congregation), deacons who serve, and evangelists who preach — with Christ alone as Head and no office above the local church. The New Testament never…
The resurrection of the dead is a single, universal, bodily, and final act of Christ’s authority in which every person will rise at His voice—some to life, and the rest to judgment.
What is Hades? This lesson shows from Scripture that Hades is the temporary realm of the dead, not the final lake of fire, not purgatory, and not the end of consciousness. The dead remain conscious, their condition is fixed, the resurrection is still future, and judgment still lies ahead. Christ entered Hades but was not abandoned there. Therefore men must stop speaking loosely about death and get right with God now.