That’s why, from their god-less point of view, these speculations are no surprise. – Until they acknowledge that God began the world in the first place, how will they ever accept that God has also planned how to end this world?

The painful evidence is all around us. – News’ headlines are just obituaries in a different form: Right here at Northgate on Thursday, a guard shot dead. – At least 67 dead in Nairobi after a brutal mall siege last weekend. – At least 42 dead after a boat sank on the Niger River on Friday. – 85 Christians slain in a Pakistan church last Sunday. – The day before that, at least 515 dead in a Pakistan earthquake. – And this all just in the last week. – “Death reigns”.

By Paul’s day, some also held that death extinguished life totally. – Or that death only led to some shadowy, ghostly existence in the underworld. But to speak of a bodily, physical existence in the world to come was a belief not fit for polite company! – To speak of rotten, decaying corpses that get resuscitated? –

If you take a standard Christian hymnal and search the index for hymns about God’s grace, listen to what you’ll find:
There are hymns about: converting grace, the covenant of grace, efficacious grace, the fullness of grace, magnified grace, refreshing grace, regenerating grace, sanctifying grace, saving grace, and sovereign grace. –

Antioch, HOW do we make sure that doesn’t happen to us? – HOW do YOU make sure you’re not the next mediocre Christian whose life revolves around something other than the gospel? – HOW do we make sure we don’t just become another distracted church that sidelines the gospel (in exchange for 100 other good-but-lesser things)?

Now, elsewhere in Paul’s writings, his greatest emphasis is on ALL that women CAN do in ministry. – And we mustn’t allow prohibitions like this to blind us to the full biblical view of the diverse, multi-faceted roles of women in the church. –

1 Corinthians 14:26

More and more Baptists and reformed evangelicals testify of their tongues & prophecies, or at least their openness to it. It’s becoming trendy to be ‘reformed & charismatic’, or as I call them, ‘Calvismatics’. (And indeed, many of these are dear brothers in Christ from whom we can learn much.)

1 Cor. is all about confronting worldliness with the life-changing power of the gospel. – See, the church had become like the world.
There was too much of Corinth in the church, and too little of the true Church in Corinth.+ Realise that there was nothing uniquely Christian about ecstatic speech and strange utterances: Many of the pagan Greco-Roman religions, including those active at Corinth, also had bizarre tongues. – Just as recent studies have shown was common in Zulu tradition as well, and in other traditional cultures.

1 Corinthians 14:1