“When I was young, I was reading a book by C. S. Lewis, who wrote that the New Testament says nothing about the Resurrection. I wrote a real big ‘No!’ in the margin. Then I realized what he was saying: nobody was sitting inside the tomb and saw the body start to vibrate, stand up, take the linen wrappings off, fold them, roll back the stone, wow the guards, and leave.” – Gary Habermas[1]
We began Part 1 by explaining the significance of the disciples’ reaction to seeing the risen Jesus. Critics are forced to accept that the disciples truly believed that they saw Jesus alive after His crucifixion because of the changes that took place in their lives. They went from cowering in the upper room to being bold proclaimers of the gospel—the message that Jesus had come to the earth and taken on the form of a man, that He had died, and that He had been raised to life again through the power of God.
“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever” (John 14:16). The word here translated “advocate” is the Greek…
In a previous article we looked at three characteristics of personality displayed by the Holy Spirit—knowledge, will and emotion. These are characteristics of a person, not an inanimate object. Is…
“It is a fundamental revelation of Scripture that the Holy Spirit is a person in the same sense that God the Father is a person and the Lord Jesus Christ is a person. The Holy Spirit is presented in Scripture as having the same essential deity as the Father and the Son and is to be worshipped and adored, loved and obeyed in the same way as God.”[1] Personality, John Walvoord explains, “is commonly defined as containing the essential elements of intellect, sensibility, and will.”[2] We shall briefly look at each of those elements.
In the Introduction to her book Jesus in Me, Anne Graham Lotz says, “I’ve heard the Holy Spirit spoken of as an ‘it,’ a feeling, a dove, a flame, a…
In his excellent book Forgotten God, Francis Chan makes this statement: “As I thought about this chapter, I realized how ludicrous it would be for anyone to say they were going to explain the Holy Spirit. The Bible says we cannot fully understand God, and I am certainly not the exception to that rule. There are things about God that are mysterious and secret, things we will never know about Him. But there also are things revealed, and those belong to us…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently reading and researching for my upcoming series on the Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit. One of the books I’m reading is Elmer Towns’ excellent book, The Ultimate Guide to the Names of God. It is chock full of great thoughts. Three of Dr. Towns books have been combined into this Ultimate Guide: My Father’s Name, The Names of Jesus, and The Names of The Holy Spirit.
In his book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, Phillip Keller talks about the day he bought the first sheep for his own flock. He recounts how his neighbor handed him a knife and said, “Well, Philip, they’re yours. Now you’ll have to put your mark on them.”[1]
During her last few years, my mother suffered from some very debilitating health issues. After more than six decades of serving God first as a missionary in Africa, then in home-based missions, the day came when she was pretty much confined to a chair or to her bed.