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Showing posts from June, 2023

Meeting God in the Whirlwind: Trusting Him When Answers Never Come

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by Bart Denny There are moments in life when what we want most from God isn’t relief—it’s clarity. Many of us can endure pain more easily than we can endure not knowing why. When life goes dark, we instinctively reach for explanations. We tell ourselves that if God would just explain what He’s doing—if He would tell us the reason, the lesson, the purpose—then we could handle the rest. And so our prayers subtly change. They stop sounding like cries for help and start sounding like demands for answers: What did I miss? What are You trying to teach me? Why this? When the silence stretches on, something settles into our hearts. Not outright rebellion, but frustration mixed with confusion. We’re still praying. Still showing up. Still believing. But underneath it all is an assumption we rarely name: If I understood what God was doing, this would be easier. That assumption isn’t unique. It’s deeply human. We live in a world that runs on explanations. When something breaks, we diagnose it. Whe...

Original Sin: Inherited Corruption or Inherited Guilt? (and Why It Matters)

by Bart L. Denny, Ph.D., Th.M. Maybe you’ve heard the term “original sin.” You might be surprised to learn that there is considerable debate about precisely what the phrase “original sin” entails. Christians hear the term original sin and have differing conceptions of it. Reading the Bible, I have always understood original sin to mean what I more often heard described as a “sin nature,” an invariable propensity to sin inherited from our first father, Adam. Except for Jesus Christ, the God-man, all have sinned, and none can help but sin. All flavors of orthodox Christianity have accepted that humankind inherits a sinful nature and that no human can attain sinless perfection in this life. This sinful nature, because it has come down through Adam, might be considered “inherited corruption.” One of the consequences of this inherited corruption is the eventual physical death of all human beings. But I never recognized that this understanding of original sin, common among Baptists, Arminian...