Tommy Mann

In late December of 1972, President Richard Nixon gave the green light for Operation Linebacker II, which became known as the Christmas Bombings in Vietnam. Over the course of nearly two weeks the United States pulverized Hanoi with an aerial assault at a time when most people were expecting the North was ready to surrender anyway.     War-weary Americans were horrified by the images from Linebacker, especially with the carnage coming over Christmas, a Christian holiday associated with peace on earth and goodwill toward man.    It was no secret in those days that Billy Graham was a close friend of the President (even if, as it turned out, Graham was completely fooled by Nixon). The evangelist was often a mouthpiece for the White House, helping to sell the Nixon agenda to his massive Christian following. So when news of the bombing broke out, people called on Graham to intervene and convince Nixon to call off the offensive.       One pastor in...

A sculptor once made a remarkably lifelike statue of a lion. A friend of his was struck by how realistic the image was, especially in light of the fact that he could not have a lion stand still and pose while he was working on it. When his friend asked him how he was able to craft such a stunning piece of art, the sculptor replied, “I just kept cutting away anything that didn’t look like a lion.”  That is great advice for life. No, I am not talking about us sculpting lions, but in living lives of holiness. In I Peter 4:2 the Apostle said believers are called to “live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God.” Being a Christian means we are called to live a set apart life—set apart from the world and set apart to God. Rather than a lion, we need Jesus to be our model, and then we simply need to cut away anything that does not look like Him. The Apostle Paul gave us some specific character traits that might need to be cut away. Before...

  If you spend much time in church or listening to Christian radio, you will no doubt hear the phrase “blessed be the Lord” or “blessed be God.” The word blessed, in this context, means to be praised (this is a different word than in the beatitudes). The Greek word for blessed gives us our English word eulogy, which we use to refer to the message at a funeral when one speaks well of the deceased. In fact, Kenneth Wuest’s Greek translation of the New Testament says, “Eulogized be God.”    God should be praised. And yet this key phrase is only found three times in the New Testament. We might expect to see it more often, but I believe those three occurrences are just enough. Here is why:   Ephesians 1:3-4 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love....

One of the great, yet often overlooked doctrines to arise from the Protestant Reformation was the belief in the clarity of Scripture (known as the doctrine of perspicuity among theologians). The world into which Martin Luther cut his teeth theologically was one in which only the religious elite were allowed to discus the meaning of the Bible. This elevation of scholasticism over the commoners in society created two class of believers: the clergy, who were permitted to talk about God, and the laity, who could only hope to be fed spoonfuls of the Gospel during the weekly service.    Luther rebelled against this heresy. Being a highly educated man himself, Luther believed that the more people read the Bible for themselves, the better off they would be. He detested those who lived in their spiritual ivory towers, who turned the message of salvation into a secret reserved for those in their exclusive club. Luther was greatly aided by the advent of the printing press, and he publish...