In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote about some Muslims' love affair with death. It raises the question of how Christian martyrdom is different. He writes:

“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: “[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.” Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”

“The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz…

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Since all humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and the work of God’s law is written on every heart (Romans 2:15), and the heavens are telling the glory of God to everyone who can see (Psalm 19:1), and God has put eternity in man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and by God’s providence every person is set to grope for God (Acts 17:27), and in God we all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), it is not surprising that even people without eyes to see the glory of Christ nevertheless have glimpses into the way the world really is, and then don’t know what to do with them.

Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and not a Christian. “I think of God as a metaphor. …

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In the notes that we posted from my talk last week at Resurgence I asked,

But how should we regard these errors [Wesleyanism and Arminianism] in relationship to the teaching office of the church and other institutions?

The answer I gave was not precise enough. Here is what I said:

Here’s my rule of thumb: the more responsible a person is to shape the thoughts of others about God, the less Arminianism should be tolerated. Therefore church members should not be excommunicated for this view but elders and pastors and seminary and college teachers should be expected to hold the more fully biblical view of grace.

What is not precise here is the implic…

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Your life hangs on how you relate these two statements:

1. “If anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous” (1 John 2:1).
2. “Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you” (John 5:14).

Do you experience the first one weakening the second?

Or do you experience the first one joyfully empowering the second?

Your life hangs on your answer.

What kind of man would send his wife and 12-year-old daughter to Kenya by themselves?

The answer I wish I could give is: The kind of man who was smart enough to marry such a woman.

But, alas, when I married her I didn’t know that’s what I was getting.

So all I can answer is: A thankful man.

What about those hungry fellows who promised not to eat till they ambushed Paul?

We read about them in Acts 23:12, “When it was day, the Jews made a plot and bound themselves by an oath neither to eat nor drink till they had killed Paul.” It didn’t work. Why? Because a string of unlikely events happened.

• A boy over heard the plot.
• The boy was the son of Paul’s sister.
• The boy had the courage to go to the Roman centurion guarding Paul.
• The centurion took him seriously and brought him to the Tribune.
• The Tribune believed him and prepared “two hundred soldiers, with seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen” to take Paul to safet…

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Desiring God, like all fallen, finite human ministries and people, sees “in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). We do not claim to be perfect in what we know. And we do not claim to know all that can be known. Nor do we claim to see what we know more clearly than others may see it.

But we do say with Paul, “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak” (2 Corinthians 4:13). Though we do not know everything there is to know, and though we do not know anything perfectly, yet we do know many things truly and confidently, because of God’s revelation and his Spirit...

Read the rest of t…

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Dear John,

Thanks again for posting my first response to your thoughts about "A Common Word" on your website and for further engaging with me about these crucial issues! Here is my second response to your article, "How Shall We Love Our Muslim Neighbor?"

My goal (or “end game”) is the same as yours, John—to communicate the good news about the person and work of Jesus through word and deed to Muslims. Thus, I believe that both of us agree on apostolic doctrine—the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

I agree with you on apostolic doctrine, but I am also concerned (as I am sure you must be as well) for apostolic practice. I believe that it was Paul’s apostolic practice to…

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When I am most affected by being forgiven, it is often by my wife’s forgiveness of me, or by my parents’ forgiveness in the past, or even the simple way that my 3-year-old forbears this impatient father without a thought. In fact, I am consistently more moved by all of these than I am by how I’ve been forgiven by God through Jesus.

This doesn’t make sense, of course. After all, whatever my family has forgiven me for, God has forgiven me for too. And he knows the enormity of these sins far more accurately than they do. He has also forgiven me for the sins my family has no idea about—that even I have little idea about sometimes.

Usually, my wife and son and parents are as forgiving as…

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It’s Black History Month. The biggest book in my entire library is The Norton Anthology: African American Literature. It has 2,665 pages. Flop it open to the middle (like Psalms in the Bible) and you land on Langston Hughes—1902-1967.

In 1926, he wrote what became a manifesto for black artists of the time, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. . . . We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

One of his best known and earliest poems is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”...

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