The Blog
Of First Importance
The fact that there are different interpretations on all kinds of matters in the Bible begs the question: what is the main thing, then? The Apostle Paul tells us what the main thing is: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Him crucified, resurrected, and returning. Faith in Christ draws us into the law of Christ: loving God and loving others, as ourselves.
The First Vote
The bottom line is that Paul is not restricting women from talking in church services, nor is he restricting women from teaching men. Paul is concerned about fostering peace between husbands and wives for the sake of their marriage and for the sake of Christian witness.
Bored Faith
We formulate and develop experiences to help us draw closer to God, but the great irony is that great experiences may actually draw us further away from God, because God is not in the experience. God is God. And God is Spirit. And we encounter God spirit to Spirit in loving fellowship and relationship, regardless of the “sphere” that we devise for the “experience.”
Way of Love
The way of love edifies the church. There is nothing wrong with edifying oneself to draw close to God. But edifying others is better, more mature, more spiritual.
As Myself
The command to love does not really apply to those we easily connect with. That would be like a command to breathe. No. The command to love applies when we are faced with people we do not easily connect with. … Why? Because it is on the basis of such love that we build up the church of Jesus Christ according to the word of God and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Body Parts
The Bible tells us that every local church is critically important in the kingdom of God. And if that is true, then every house church is critically important in the kingdom of God. … No one should blindly take my word for it. We can all read the Bible ourselves from a position of faith (like our passage here) and listen to what the Word of God Himself has to say on such matters. And people can disagree with me all they want. But let no one disagree with Jesus Christ, the Living Word.
Prehistoric Ideas
Paul acknowledges human sexual needs—not just with respect to men, but also with respect to women—and then restricts sexual relations to the marriage bed, and then further restricts that bed to one man and one woman. Basically, what this is implying is that what ultimately defines the marital union between a man and a woman is not a marriage ceremony or a legal document but sexual relations between the man and woman.
In the Shadows
“Realities” of the world are just “shadows” of the spiritual realities. The “framework” or the “lens”, or whatever we want to call it, through which we can see the reality and navigate through it is the Word of God.
