Savedthroughfaith.com

Do you have questions about Christianity, God, or the Bible and you can’t find good answers? Do you have friends and family who don’t know Jesus and you’re not sure how to tell them that he loves them? Have you been far from God, and now you’re ready to come back to him but you don’t know what to do or where to go? If so, Alpha is the place for you. At an Alpha course, people explore the Christian faith in a relaxed ...

John Locke believed that pushing the button in The Swan station was his destiny. Saving the world by entering the code and pressing “Execute” was his calling, his purpose in life. The Island had brought him there to fulfill this mission. And then he found out that it was all a joke. Pushing the button was just a vast psychological experiment. He wasn’t saving the world. He was being had. He was being laughed at. His “desti...

On September 5 we began our 6-week class called LOST, Spirituality and Culture. It’s an exploration of the spiritual themes of the TV show LOST and how Christians should engage with culture. I’ve talked with a lot of people who gave up on LOST somewhere in the middle of its 6 year run, and all of them quit watching the show because there were too many unanswered questions. Even after the show ended, many people were frustrated because...

The Gospel is the most important message of our faith, and yet so few of us know what it is, much less how to live it. Too many Christians think that the Gospel is, “You can go to Heaven when you die if you believe in Jesus”, or something along those lines. But this common misunderstanding gets it the wrong way around. We think the Gospel is about us, but it’s really about God. As we try to understand what the Gospel is, maybe t...

At the end of his book, the apostle John writes this intriguing little statement: Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room enough for the books that would be written. As he looks back on his three (or so) years with Jesus, John is basically admitting, “I’ve forgotten more about Jesus than I’ve written here.” Even if Jesus only did the things recor...

The Kingdom of God has long been a matter of primary importance for the people of God. God’s rule come on earth was what the Hebrew prophets longed to see. Jesus taught his disciples to pray with this request superseding all others: Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. True believers want God to rule the world—for him to take his rightful place as the King of kings—and they pursue his kingdom rule with their li...

Idolatry is easy. Humans turn created things (or those things which are not God) into objects of worship quite naturally. We devote our lives to success, wealth, power, or even our own kids rather than to the God who created us and sent his son to die for us. We place pastors, politicians, athletes and celebrities on pedestals of undo height and glory. We make gods of mere mortals. In the Bible, idolatry is the sin that infuriates God the most, a...

Maybe you’ve heard the word “metanarrative” before. It’s a five dollar word that educated types like to throw around to make other people regret they didn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars on a post-graduate degree. (And yes, I’m one of those guys. Sorry.) Metanarrative just means Big Story. It’s the Story behind and above the story. You might say the metanarrative of the Lord of the Rings is the trium...

It seems that the Bible is constantly coming under attack as being hopelessly full of errors and contradictions, and that the many manuscripts on which our translations are based are unreliable. The critique normally takes the line that too large a gap of time exists between the original documents and the earliest copies we have found. Hundreds of years have elapsed, they tell us, between the first writing and the copies we now possess. Who knows...

How do we get our English Bibles? What are the documents that the Bible translators work from? Haven’t all of the original documents been lost or destroyed? Is it true that all we have now are copies of copies and that they are full of errors? The questions of Bible translation are difficult and complex. Some scholars would have you believe that we are in an impossible position because we don’t have any original documents and all we&#...