Articles

Faithful pastors often remind their flocks, “The church is not a building. The church is the people.” That is a true and important reminder. Yet it is also true that the New Testament frequently refers to the church as just that: a building—that is, that the people themselves are like a building on which God has broken ground and is constantly working.

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The book of Proverbs is timeless. Thousands of years after it was written, its practical precepts are still relevant. Men and women continue to face the perplexities of human existence, trapped between the apparent futility of life as we know it and the promise of life as we long to know it. What we hope to be and what we actually are is separated by a large chasm.

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A Chicago Tribune article published in 1991 reported an astonishing study: At the time, the American Association for the Advancement of Science said of humanity, “Proficiency at lying may be the best measure of advancement, with primates much more adept at it than other mammals and human beings the most masterful liars on the planet.”¹ Proficiency in lying, the Association reasoned, is the best measure of our progress as a people. We are what we are because of our ability to deceive, perjure, and distort the truth.

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In Romans 8, as the apostle Paul considers the grandeur of God’s salvation, he encourages us to look beyond our tiny private worlds. God’s plan is to put the universe back together again in a brand-new creation through redemption in Jesus Christ. Through faith in Him, we await a “glory that is to be revealed to us” (v. 18), which is “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (v. 21) and includes “the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23) finally and totally from the grasp of decay and death.

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The truth of the Gospel, when it is believed, is to find expression in the behavior of those who have come to trust in God. It is, in other words, “truth for life”—not just a head knowledge but a soul-transforming understanding.

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In any flock of sheep, some are assertive and move forward, some hang toward the back, and others manage somehow or another to drift off on their own, stragglers and wanderers. These kinds of groups are also found in nearly every local church—and it’s the wanderers that we will now consider: those who, if ever they were holding fast to the Gospel, seem to be slowly, imperceptibly loosening their grip.

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If you’ve ever been with a woodworker at a task, you’ll know the kind of care that is required with a sharp blade. The same is true of a surgeon laying out the instruments of surgery. The Word of God, Hebrews tells us, is like a sharp blade (4:12). It is all too possible to brandish it like a sort of whirling dervish, swinging it around recklessly, striking terror and causing untold damage. Instead, those who wield it are urged to do so cautiously and graciously, purposefully and kindly.

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Firemen, bomb disposal experts, miners, surgeons—we generally view these as high-stakes, dangerous, or stressful jobs. But the New Testament adds another occupation to the list: teaching. In the letter bearing his name, James offers this warning:

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The Truth For Life daily program and a library of nearly 500 sermons by Alistair Begg are now available to approximately 900,000 incarcerated people through a prison platform called Edovo. Edovo is a self-paced learning tool that offers a wide variety of educational content to men and women in prison on personal devices, such as computers or tablets.

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