“You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus.” (Luke 1:31) The gospel rests on three giant pillars: Jesus’ virgin birth, his atoning death, and his bodily resurrection. The Easter season celebrates Jesus’ death and resurrection. Christmas focuses solely on the virgin birth. I remember my doubt about it as an unbeliever. I thought it defied one of the most basic laws of nature. So did Blaise Pascal. Pascal was a French scientist who lived in the […]

“Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:18-20) Many of my older readers likely remember what Jimmy Carter once said about the sin of lust. Then President Carter […]

“Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst…The water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:14) Our mission as Christians is to win others to Christ. But the tricky part about soul winning is that it is more of an art than a science. In other words, how we go about it can make all the difference in the world. For example, the easy thing to do is to point […]

“The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.” (Matthew 1:23) I wrote most of this column from my hotel room in Washington, D.C. in 2000 where I spent the first weekend in March attending the Annual Legislative Conference of the National Association of Counties. It’s a story that I didn’t want to go stale on me before I returned home to tell it. It’s still fresh over eighteen years later. I told […]