Friday, 10 May 2024

Evangelicals

“Ask Jesus into Your Heart”: A History of the Sinner’s Prayer

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With the recent dust-up over whether Donald Trump prayed for salvation with prosperity gospel preacher Paula White, it is a good time to revisit the history of the “sinner’s prayer.”

Many an evangelical pastor has concluded a sermon by asking non-Christians to “ask [or receive, or invite] Jesus into their heart,” or to pray a version of what some call the “sinner’s prayer.” But some evangelicals, including Baptist pastor David Platt (president of the SBC’s International Mission Board), have in ..

James Dobson Walks Back Assertion Trump Is Christian: ‘Do I Know That for Sure? No.’

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Co. — James Dobson, the founder of the renown Colorado-based organization Focus on the Family, is seemingly walking back comments he made last week asserting that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a “baby Christian” who needs to be “cut some slack.”

As previously reported, Dobson was interviewed last Tuesday by Michael Anthony of GodFactor.com, who was among the nearly 1,000 evangelicals who came to listen to Trump at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan. During t..

3 Ways Your Preaching Might be Hurting People

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Orthodox evangelicals believe in something called a “closed cannon.” In other words, we believe the Bible as it is presently constructed – 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament – are the complete, written, inspired, inerrant Word of God. This matters for lots of reasons, but two big ones: a) we have all we need for faith and practice (2 Peter 1:3; 2 Timothy 3:16) and b) there is no new revelation, no new Scripture. The latter point takes seriously Revelation 22:19 in th..

Heresy and Humility — Lessons from a Current Controversy

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As Harold O. J. Brown warned, the gates of hell often come very close to the church. Confusing the questions endangers the church, and no faithful theologian would willingly risk that danger.

I have spent my entire adult lifetime concerned with the danger of heresy. As a young theologian, I worked through the early centuries of church history and understood that knowing the difference between orthodox Christianity and heresy is really a matter of life and death for the church. A failure to recognize and refute heresy means disaster for the church and its witness to Christ.

At the same time, I saw that two dangers quickly emerged. The first, and most dangerous, is the unwillingness of many modern theologians to acknowledge the reality and danger of heresy. Liberal theology denied the possibility of heresy and then openly embraced it. The second danger is like the fable of the b..

Christians and Brexit: Did God command the UK to leave the EU?

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Christians overwhelmingly voted in favour of leaving the European Union last Thursday.

Polling from Lord Ashcroft showed that nearly six in ten of those who identified as Christian voted for Brexit. This is significantly higher than the 52 per cent who voted for Brexit across the nation. It is particularly stark when compared to Muslim and Hindu voters, seven in 10 of whom voted to remain.

Brexit campaigners tried to invoke the Bible to convince voters to leave

There are a whole host of reasons why this might be.

It may correlate with ethnicity and have little to do with faith. Although numbers have fallen, 93 per cent of Christians in the UK are white. By contrast two-thirds of British Muslims are from an Asian background. And Lord Ashcroft's poll showed that 67 per cent of Asians and 73 per cent of black people voted to remain compared to 47 per cent of white people.

Or it may correlate with age. The 2011 census showed that one in five self-identifying..

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From Bruce Ellis Benson:
Still, my question boils down to this: are evangelical colleges at risk of sliding from neo-evangelicalism to something like “neo-fundamentalism”? In other words, are evangelical colleges (or perhaps evangelicals in general) making a retreat from the world and embracing a new sort of solitude? Fundamentalism, as we noted, is not just about standing for the truth but doing so in a way in which one purposely separates oneself from the “world.” Here I should point out that ..

Character in Leadership — Does it Still Matter?

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In the coming weeks, we are going to be learning a great deal more about the presidential candidates. But it’s also increasingly true that we’re going to be learning a great deal about ourselves as evangelical Christians in America. Perhaps we had better brace ourselves for what we’re going to learn.

In the 1976 presidential campaign, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, then the Democratic nominee, made headlines in the United States and around the world merely by granting a single interview. That interview was with Playboy magazine. The interview was a political bombshell. No major American politician had come within any distance of Playboy magazine. It was considered the iconic symbol of American pornography, and the very fact that a political candidate—not to mention the nominee of one of America’s major political parties—had granted an interview to Playboy magazine, seemed almost ..

As SBC Backs Refugee Resettlement, World Relief Leader Resigns

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Southern Baptists vote to encourage compassion, while Stephan Bauman reveals next move.

Southern Baptists adopted a resolution this morning encouraging fellow believers to offer “care, compassion, and the gospel” to refugees, while at the same time calling on the American government to “implement the strictest security measures possible in the refugee screening and selection process.”

While on the floor of the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Resolution 12 on “refugee m..

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Seventy-five years ago (June 8, 1941) C.S. Lewis ascended the pulpit at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford and delivered “The Weight of Glory,” one of the most insightful sermons of the twentieth century.

At the new Evangelical History blog I will give a historical overview of that presentation—with photographs—and some of the influence that it has had as a subsequent publication. I look at who drove him to the sermon, the weather outside, who attended the sermon, how long it..

We Need to Laugh at Ourselves (Try Checking out the Babylon Bee)

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Over the years, I’ve observed some Christians who are perpetually somber, never laughing or poking fun at themselves, rarely celebrating, and quick to frown when they see someone having fun. They believe that happiness is ungodliness, and that having fun is a sin. It’s not!

Though his portrait shows a somber expression, German Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) said, “It is pleasing to the dear God whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.”

As believers, we need to lau..

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