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Our God Is a Consuming Fire Last year damaging wildfires swept through several states. During one of them, Nicole Jolley feared for her life. Flames surrounded her car and filled it with smoke. She called her husband on her cell phone, convinced she was speaking to him for the last time. “Nick, I’m gonna die, and I’m not gonna make it out...

The Parable of the Shepherd Shakespeare’s play Hamlet contains a play within the play. Hamlet hopes the story will cause his unsuspecting uncle to betray himself, showing that he was complicit in the murder of the king. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” Hamlet declares. Some of the prophets acted out parables...

Judgment on Jerusalem’s Enemies Anne Rice, a well-known author and an atheist, wrote a series of books about the life of Christ. In the first, entitled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, she includes an author’s note which explains how and why she had been drawn back to God. She wanted to understand a historical mystery: the survival of the Jewish...

City of God Every year magazines like Money, Kiplinger, and U.S. News & World Report publish lists of the best places to live. They make their choices based on a variety of factors, including income rates, crime, taxes, and even the number of days of sunshine per year! If such a list were made during the thousand-year reign of Christ, one...

Is it a sin to fantasize about a celebrity? There weren’t television or computers in Christ’s day. Wasn’t He speaking only about people who knew one another? Question and Answer While there were no television or computers in Christ’s day, the temptation to fantasize has existed since the Garden of Eden. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve...

I often feel as though, under the pressure of addictive sin, I have no choice but to fall. How much choice do we really have when something seems impossible to resist? Question and Answer This is a very good question, and sadly it suggests a deception too often propagated about one of the great gifts God gave us, the gift of choice. Because...

He Came to Serve as God The right start is important for a successful journey. This holds true whether you start your morning with a nutritional breakfast so you can have the mental capacity and energy for the rest of your day, or it can mean enrolling your child in the right school so they can become an outstanding learner and a productive,...

A Prayer-Dependent Life C. Dixon (1854–1925) was a pastor, a Bible expositor, and an evangelist. He published a book series called The Fundamentals with Moody Bible Institute president R. A. Torrey. Dixon wrote on the importance of prayer, “When we depend upon man, we get what man can do; But when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can...

Good Growing Soil How casually we listen to the Word of God! If we don’t like a biblical teaching on spiritual gifts, remarriage, submission, reconciliation, justice, election, or the like, we reject the teaching as false, insensitive, not applicable to our situation, or only half of what the Word of God is saying. In Jesus’ time, everyone...

Desolate of Resources In Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcey, the romantic interest of main character Elizabeth Bennet, says, “Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.” As Christ followers, we are to have true humility. It is all too...