During the middle of your worship service, if your pastor held up an image of Jesus and said, "This is a symbol of our God. Pass it around and treat it with the highest respect. You may even kiss it."

Would you object?

If so, why?

Great new Video at PragerU really got me thinking.

Goodbye, America

From the Christian perspective how should we judge nations? How should we judge people for that matter? Do we define entities by the sins of their youth?

This is essentially what the left does. While the Kavanaugh sins have been completely debunked, his entire life was going to be judged by the sins of his youth. Never mind the great life, even they admit, he lived afterward, his past completely defines him as a...

* "... Scripture casts light on the great moral problem of how an inherently corrupt nature originates in each child from the beginning of its existence without its Creator being the Author of sin.

"David declared, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” ( Psalm 51:5).

"He described his depravity as innate and not created, as derived from his mother and not his Maker, showing that defilement is transmitted directly from Adam through the channel of human...

The order of things in salvation.
Election
The Call
Sanctification
Repentance
Faith
Regneration.

". . . Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied. . . ." -- 1 Peter 1:2.

". . . According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, . . ." -- Ephesians 1:4.

". . . God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation...

In one of the other OP's Seven Churches-Why all the Ado?, rockytopva said that the seven churches represented seven ages all down through history and at this present time we are in the age of the Church Of Laodiceans... If that is true, then what benefit did that have on those suffering and persecuted Christians who first heard these letters?... NONE!... It was circulated among all of them but it was directed to each one specifically and the problems in each church... Same as today as any...

I'm looking into the area of the gift of speaking in tongues. There is rather a lot of different positions on this. What is 'tongues'? there seem to be two positions, either it is speaking in a foreign but "earthly" language; the other is it is a special "heavenly" language. which do you hold to and why?

Secondly, is speaking in tongues still for today or have they ceased?

I have some time this week before starting teaching on Monday, and one of our translation students is interested in the translation philosophy of Dynamic Equivalence (DE) in the Good News Bible, often the source text (ST) for Wycliffe people and other Bible translators. (DE, invented by Eugene Nida, was later renamed functional equivalence because of misuse of the original term, but we'll use DE.) So to help me with that, first I'm going to define and describe DE, then go through the GNB...

". . . All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. . . ." -- Isaiah 53:6.

". . . And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. . . ." -- 1 Corinthians 15:17.

". . . he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, . . ." -- Ephesians 1:4.

". . . Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience . . . ." --...

In another thread, the issue of killing in self-defense was briefly discussed. This topic was not in keeping with the OP, so I started this thread.

Matthew 5:44 is often used by pacifists to defend not committing any violent act even if it is in self-defense or the defense of others. I think that view is wrong because the text is about wholesale persecution, and not defending one's life.

Even though I own firearms, I have no desire to shoot anyone. I will do everything possible to avoid a...

"I will say this as we launch off into this series. If the church must be anything, she must be a safe place for the gender confused and the sexually broken. If she is not safe for that, then we do not believe our own message. We are all broken, all in need of salvation, all in need of grace, and to take a particular struggle and put it outside the bounds reveals we don’t quite understand what it is we believe. Then we’ll take other people’s sins more seriously than we’ll take our own. It’s...