Holiness Archives - Focal Point Ministries

With so much in the Bible about our call as Christians to live holy lives, I find that we often focus on the challenge and the obligation, but forget to ponder the payoff. Even when we hear the word “payoff” our minds tend to...

Live for Christ

Peter motivates his readers to pursue godliness and holiness by reminding them that the world’s enticing temptations are a part of a value system that God has promised to destroy. He poignantly describes the complete decimation of the current...

Worship

A.W. Tozer was right when he observed that “a low view of God is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us.” It makes sense that our specific view of God will determine the quality of our Christian life. If we view him as casual about sin, then we probably won’t care much about it either. If we...

Holiness

The concern for most Christians isn’t “How far from sin can I get?” but rather, “How close is okay?” Anyone who is thoughtful about obedience and wants to distance himself from temptation and sinful behavior is sure to incite the charge of being “a misguided legalist” – as if the accuser knows what biblical legalism is. He usually doesn’t. But it sounds like a good

Relationship God’s Way

The newspaper recently reported that what people are looking for these days is a “spiritual” experience without any “religious” guidelines. That’s nothing new, so were Adam and Eve. We tend to want a relationship with God our way. The problem is “our way” is “sin” – which by definition is

All Knowing God

Our God is a God who knows and perceives all things. He intimately knows all things past, all things present and all things future. He is a God for whom nothing is concealed. With him there are no secrets, there is no darkness and nothing is shrouded from his total awareness and full comprehension. God would

Righteous Anger

While most Christians are chasing a modern fantasy of an irenic and affable day-to-day Christian experience, may we recognize the truth that we cannot be godly without regularly feeling and periodically expressing righteous anger...

Christian Life

Some have tried to avoid the concept of “Christ’s life for me and my life for Christ” depicted in the gospel exchange (cf. 2Cor.5:15; Mt.13:44-46; Lk.14:28-33; Mt.10:37-39; et al.) by imagining a dichotomy in the Christian life. They suggest that there are...

Grace

God’s grace is the theme of the New Testament and yet with all this scriptural emphasis it seems we are still slow to rightly understand it. We either tend to think that it is some kind of extra credit that adds to our goodness, thus making us acceptable to God. Or we secretly tend to believe it is a “get out of jail free” card that allows us to dabble in sin without consequences. Both are obviously a...

The Pursuit of Holiness

“The pursuit of happiness” is certainly our heart’s default position. Every day we, by nature, want to experience feelings of pleasure, gladness and enjoyment. Unfortunately, at the present time, we live in a corrupted world, encased in corrupted bodies, pitted against a very powerful corrupted enemy who is bent on

Resurrection

Without the historic and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have no hope. The Bible contends that without the veracity of this single event recorded in the four biographies of Christ, we’d be wise to walk away from this entire movement we call Christianity. In the New Testament we are told...

Gospel Lessons from the Old Testament-Part 2

The Preservation Through Joseph

Planning

he Bible has a lot to say about God’s “good purpose” (Phil.2:13, Heb.6:17). It seems that on every other page we read of another instance of God working out his predetermined plan...

God’s Perfection

Psalm 18 states the obvious when it proclaims that “as for God, his way is perfect” (v.30). What may come as unexpected is that the psalmist is quick to testify that God in turn makes David’s way “perfect”...