1 Corinthians 6:12 (NKJV) 12All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
1 Corinthians 10:23 (NKJV) 23All things are lawful £for me, but not all things are helpful; all things are lawful £for me, but not all things edify.
The first century church at Corinth was confronted with the then enlightened libertine philosophy of a Greek culture. The phrase “all things are lawful” was the common mantra. The Greeks just could not be bound by any personal limitations. Having in the preceding paragraph declared that the immoral cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and having given special prominence to sins against the seventh commandment, the Apostle comes to this passage (1 Corinthians 6:12) to consider the ground on which the violations of that commandment were defended or given a pass. That ground was a gross perversion of the principle of Christian liberty. Paul was accustomed to say in reference to the ceremonial or positive enactments of the Jewish law, and especially in reference to the distinction between clean and unclean means, “All things are lawful to me.” As the Greeks and Romans generally regarded fornication as belonging to the class of things indifferent, that is, not immoral in themselves; it is not surprising that some of the Corinthians educated in that belief should retain and act on the principle even after their profession of Christianity.
“A biblical perspective of truth also necessarily entails the recognition that ultimately truth is an objective reality. Truth exists outside of us and remains the same regardless of how we may perceive it. Truth by definition is as fixed and constant as God is immutable. That is because real truth (what Francis Schaeffer called ‘true truth’) is the unchanging expression of who God is; it is not our own personal and arbitrary interpretation of reality.
When a denomination begins to consider doctrine divisive, theology troublesome, and convictions inconvenient, consider that denomination on its way to a well-deserved death.
A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
As I was growing up I was raised as a Roman Catholic. As I remember there were two basic groups… Catholics and Protestants. While that was a gross over simplification, the point was clear. There is a group out there that protested basic Catholic theology. They called them Protestants. Now that I am an evangelical I wonder what happened to the protest against a gospel that is no Gospel at all (
From every pulpit in the land it needs to be thundered forth that God still lives, that God still observes, … still reigns. Faith is now in the crucible, it is being tested by fire, and there is no fixed… resting place for the heart and mind but in the Throne of God. What is needed now, as never before, is a full, positive, constructive setting forth of the Godhood of God.
There is no doubt that today, January 20th is an extraordinary day as the first black man takes the oath of office as the President of the United States. For many of us who didn’t vote for President Obama, today may be a bit of a bitter pill and for some worse. With his pro-abortion position, his ambiguity over homosexuality, black liberation theology, his apparent lack of understanding concerning militant Islam and terrorism, and his socialist world view, etc., there is plenty to be concerned about. But thankfully we serve a God who is not only in control of the affairs of men, but it is He, who ultimately appoints rulers (
This is a continuation of the subject from a 
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
Just a few days ago I watched a video podcast with two pastors of the “emerging” movement. Both of their churches have seen explosive growth with an average of about 1000 members per year. As I listened to their conversation it was obvious to me that they saw this growth as an indication of what they felt was the great need in their communities and and the failure of the traditional evangelicals, seeker driven, seeker sensitive churches, and the positive confession movement. They lumped them all together and viewed their message as a sissified Christianity or a legalistic Christianity. Mark Driscoll from Mars Hill Community Church in Seattle has written, that the church has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.” While his rhetoric may be a bit over the top, there is no doubt that there is a great deal of truth to his and others assessment of modern evangelicalism. Much of the evangelical church has soft peddled the Gospel with a simplistic user friendly message that emphasizes the love of God and ignores the sinfulness of man and God’s judgment. And the positive confession movement, best illustrated by Joel Osteen, compounds this problem with a message that is a mixture of Norman Vincent Peal and Kenneth Hagen.
It was mentioned in a
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