Jesus has been misunderstood by enemies, crowds, and even His own disciples; but His claims allow only two honest verdicts — base impostor or Son of God — and to understand Him rightly we must receive both Himself and His kingdom. On the Emmaus road two…
When God’s people borrow the world’s religious vocabulary, they soon borrow the world’s religious ideas; faithfulness therefore requires that we hold the pattern of sound words and call Bible things by Bible names. This is a lesson about words, and someone will object that words are…
All authority in religion belongs to Jesus Christ; therefore His word, and His word alone, settles every religious question, and to refuse to hear Him is to be cut off from the people of God. Every religious dispute, when traced to its root, is a dispute…
Holy Spirit baptism was a specific divine promise, administered by Christ, poured out on the apostles at Pentecost and on the household of Cornelius to open the door to Jew and Gentile — not a general experience to be sought, and not the baptism commanded of…
The New Testament speaks of five different baptisms, but only one is the commanded baptism in force for sinners today; rightly dividing the five guards us from both neglect and counterfeit. A single word can carry several meanings, and nowhere does that cause more mischief than…
The sin that struck Ananias and Sapphira dead was not stinginess and not even mere lying to men; it was hypocrisy before God — the loss of the sense that God inspects the heart — and that sin is as deadly to a congregation now as…
The Lord chose twelve very different men to lay the foundation of His church, and in their variety He teaches every congregation that He has a place and a work for every kind of faithful disciple. We are tempted to look at the apostles as giants…
There is a reason people say they believe in biblical authority and then turn around and defend practices the New Testament never authorizes. The problem is usually not that they suddenly hate the Bible. The problem is that they have abandoned the only honest way to determine what the Bible authorizes. Once that happens, “biblical authority” becomes little more than a religious slogan, and men begin justifying whatever seems helpful, effective, or harmless.
We have not experienced that kind of famine. Today, we carry the Bible in our pockets. We can open a phone or a computer and read God’s word anytime. The Holy Spirit has given us the **completed revelation** in 66 books.
But imagine if every Bible—printed, digital, recorded—were suddenly gone. No access at all. At first, some might not notice. But eventually, we would ache for it.
We caught a glimpse of that hunger during the pandemic, when we could not gather. At first, it was manageable. But after weeks and months, many of us were starving and thirsty for fellowship, worship, and the word of God. We did whatever we had to do to come back together.
That is the kind of longing Amos describes.
John 8 also includes the account of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). Many Bibles mark this section with brackets or a note because some early Greek manuscripts do not contain it, and it appears in different places in some copies. The account fits the character of Jesus and the teaching of Scripture, but major doctrine should not rest on this paragraph alone. The remainder of John 8 is firmly established.