Tommy Mann

  Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m just trying to figure out God’s plan for my life”? As Christians we want to follow the Lord’s leading. It is good to have plans, but we must be willing to submit to God and conform our plans to His. But how are we supposed to know God’s plan for us? The Lord does not send His plans to us via email, nor does He rent billboard space for all to see.    The Apostle Paul had to discern God’s plan. The famous missionary had devoted his life to preaching the Gospel, especially to the Gentiles, but even that involved finding God’s specific plan. In Acts 16 we read that Paul was forbidden to preach the word in Asia, then Paul decided he would go to Bithynia, but again was stopped in his tracks by the Holy Spirit. In a passage commonly referred to as the Macedonian Call, Luke writes, “Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them (Acts 16:10).”...

The Bible has a lot to say about God forgetting and remembering, and if we do not understand these words properly, we may get the wrong idea about some things. The most notable passage about God remembering is associated with Noah when the floodwaters were subsiding. Genesis 8:1 says, “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth…”    God remembered Noah? Had He forgotten about him before that? We don’t want to give ourselves the impression that Noah slipped God’s mind, and then one day God thought, “What was I supposed to do today? Oh, that’s right! Noah is on that ark, and I’d better do something to help him.” Remembering doesn’t have the absolute literal usage that implies having first forgotten; the idea is better thought of as God honoring His word. We also see God remembering Abraham (Genesis 19:29) and Rachel (Genesis 30:22), among others. Sometimes His remembering results in puni...

  Many years ago people used to talk about the importance of keeping our minds on heaven. This evidently led to people becoming so focused on the life that is to come that they neglected the life that now is. The great preacher D.L. Moody began to preach that the church had become “so heavenly minded that they were no earthly good.” Things like personal holiness, loving ones neighbor, and evangelism were out of sight and out of mind.    When the call came to stop being so heavenly minded, I’m afraid the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I believe the problem with the church now is that we are so earthly minded that we are no heavenly good. We are too wrapped up in our political parties, our sports teams, and our social events, and we rarely think about heaven. Because we are so earthly minded, we are not doing anything for the kingdom of heaven—we aren’t inviting people to church, sharing our faith, or reaching out to those in need. When we focus so much on the he...

  In last week’s column I talked about some of the evidences for the existence of God, including the ontological argument. I want to continue with that thought today and write about the teleological argument for the existence of God. From the Greek word  teleos , which refers to something’s ending or completion, this argument looks at the fact that we see things in nature that bring themselves towards their natural completion on their own. There seems to be an invisible force steering things in nature towards their fulfillment.   Thomas Aquinas used the illustration of an acorn and an oak tree. An acorn looks nothing like an oak tree, but we know that it is the seed that produces the mighty tree. But who or what causes an acorn to develop until it turns into an oak tree? The random chance arguments of Darwinism cannot account for this (did chaos cause intelligence?). Because acorns grow into trees it is evident that something or someone is causing them to do this. An inan...

  “The fool has said in his heart there is no God (Psalm 14:1).” There must be many fools in the world because there are plenty of people who say they do not believe in any God; it isn’t just that they reject the God of the Bible, they reject the idea of any sort of higher power. Over the years Christians have offered several proofs for the existence of God.    One argument points to morality. The human race is a moral race, even though there is plenty of immorality. The very fact that we classify immorality as the opposite of morality speaks to our general moral compass. While some issues are up for debate, there is a universal understanding that some things are definitely wrong. Murder is wrong in every culture. Taking someone’s personal property is wrong in every culture. We operate by a moral code from a young age. When you hear a child say, “That’s mine,” or “I had it first,” they are appealing to a universal standard of right and wrong.   How could this moralit...