Coffee Snobs Beware


I'd like to think that my coffee palette is more refined, but...

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An Approach to JW's

My sister Becca just mentioned that some Jehovah's Witnesses had come by her house recently. Conversations with cult members are difficult because they have a lot of training in being really persuasive. I don't have much help to offer in this area, but I thought I would post some notes from a class lecture from Dr. Timothy Beougher's Personal Evangelism class, with some of my own thoughts. The specific notes are on how to approach Non-Trinitarians, specifically JW's. "Concept statement – if the Bible teaches there is only one God, and the Bible calls three persons God, then I must, in faith, accept that God is Triune even if I don’t fully understand it." Based on that statement, you walk the person through the following verses, one at a time: Deut 6.4, Is 43.10-11, Is 44.6, Rev 1.8, Rev 22.13, 16, Rev 1.17-18, Heb 1.1, 2, 8, Acts 5.3-4 Your point all along is very simple, and in line with the above concept statement: You are showing them that the same things...
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Packer part 2

Where does prayer come from? [Who thought it up?] Why do I often not pray at all, but I always feel that I should? I think one answer that J. I. Packer might give is this: “It is not too much to say that God made us to pray , that prayer is (not the easiest, but) the most natural activity in which we ever engage, and that prayer is the measure of us all in God’s sight.” (Emphasis added) Prayer is at least communicating with God. And any genuine communication is two way. Thus when we long to pray we are seeking to fulfill that innate desire to receive and respond to revelation. The great catastrophe of the human fall into sin (see Genesis 3) is that it was a failure to "take God at his word." What he had promised to Adam and Eve was revelation: of truth, of beauty, of Himself. When we pray we say, "Lord, show me who you are and why that matters in my life right now." God's revelation to us in 2009 is through his Son and through his Word. So we must let t...
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John Frame on a Hard Phrase in Scripture

I always love it when someone helps me understand something a little bit better. Especially when it's something in the Bible. John Frame is someone who has done this for me several times before. You know those difficult phrases in the OT when it says “God relented” or “God changed his mind” or even “God repented” (see particularly in 1 Samuel 15 )? There is no easy, quick answer to the apparent difficulty with God changing his mind. In other words, doesn't someone change their mind when they don't really know what's going on? Isn't God omniscient (i.e., since he knows everything why would he change his mind?)? This quote from Frame is instructive: How then should we understand God’s “relenting?” For one thing, God states as a general policy in Jer. 18:5-10 that if he announces judgment and people repent, he will relent; similarly if he pronounces blessing and people do evil. In other words, relenting is part of God’s unchanging ...
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