Tommy Mann

Has Christianity become boring to you? I love to be around people who come to the faith later in life because they seem to have an enthusiasm that most do not. People who were raised in the church often lose that zeal as they age. That can be a problem for the church if the majority of its attenders are not all that excited to be there.    Many would argue that the church has plateaued because of theological compromise or doctrinal anemia (a serious problem, to be sure), but according to Trevin Wax, that is not the number one issue. In the opening line to his book  The Thrill of Orthodoxy,  Wax wrote, “The church faces her biggest challenge not when new errors start to win but when old truths no longer wow.”   Errors creeping in to a church is never a good thing, and one of my passions is to zealously defend the truth from heresy, especially the subtleties that sneak in under cover. But, according to Wax, a worse problem is when we no longer wow—when we lose that sense of holy wonder.

Have you ever tried to repair something that was broken? Some people have a knack for being able to fix anything. My grandfather was one of those people, but not me. If something stops working, I either replace it or pay someone else to fix it. But some things are unable to be repaired—the house has been condemned, the car is a total loss, or the cell phone that went through the washing machine cannot be revived in a bag of rice. Sometimes we need to know when to throw in the towel and cut our losses.   Do you know something else that cannot be repaired? Us.    That’s right. The original us, what the Bible calls the old nature, is irreparable. We are born in sin and separated from God, and we cannot be saved with a little behavior modification or completing some multi-step program.     In his book titled  Rightly Dividing the Word,  Dr. Oliver B. Greene wrote, “Do not try to repair what God gave up as unfit for repair.” In our original state, we are enslaved to sin and are enemies of G

If people ever ask you was Jesus human or divine, the answer is  yes . We often say that Jesus is fully God and fully man, but for many years that was a hotly debated topic.   An early belief system known as docetism taught that Jesus is completely divine, and that He only appeared to be human when He was on earth. The church had to fight off this false teaching, and they did so under the leadership of Ignatius of Antioch.   But then the pendulum swung the opposite way. A man named Arius began to teach that Jesus was completely human, but was neither divine nor eternal. His followers said, “There was a time when the Son was not.”   A man named Athanasius wrote a critique of Arius' position, which nicely showed the balance between the dual natures of Jesus. He wrote:   “When it was necessary to raise up Peter's mother-in-law… it was a human act when He extended His hand but a divine act when He caused the disease to cease. Likewise, in the case of the man blind from birth it was

These days it has become popular to attach a possessive adjective to the word truth. One says,   You’ve just got to live your truth , while another says,   That may be right for you to believe, but this is my truth.   Your  truth?  My  truth? What ever happened to  the  truth? How I miss the indefinite article rather than the possessive adjective!    In his wonderful book  The Thrill of Orthodoxy,  Trevin Wax compared this way of thinking to the weather. “You may love the plentiful sunshine of a cloudless morning in late spring, or the gentle fall of snowflakes on a winter night. You may have your preferences, but you don't say  my  weather and  your  weather, because you're not in control. It's something that's there, something that happens, to which you must adapt.”   If we want sunshine and are dealt rain, we fool ourselves if we simply declare, “Well,  my  weather is sunshine!” That person would not be taken seriously. No one would be asked to play along, pretending