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The Pattern of This World

By Alan Dowd   To get an idea of how sex-soaked our culture is, try to look at life from the perspective of an innocent child of, say, 6 years of age. He is bombarded by suggestive, sexualized images: the magazines at the grocery store checkout, TV shows celebrating the hookup culture, the way women […]

Love Letters

By Alan Dowd   The world will know we are Jesus’ followers not by the fish decals on our bumpers, but by the love we show for one another.  Trying to be a better reflection of Jesus, I recently turned to one of the Bible’s authoritative passages on love: 1 Corinthians 13. And I found […]

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Know Your Enemy

By Alan Dowd If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Although these […]

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A Righteous Man

by Alan Dowd It’s odd that the Bible doesn’t tell us much about Joseph, the husband of Mary. After all, Jesus spent many—perhaps most—of his formative years with Joseph. In a patriarchal, male-dominated society like that of first-century Judea, we might expect more detail on this fill-in father figure. But the Joseph of the Gospels […]

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Living in a Whatever World

by Alan Dowd We hear it all the time in our self-absorbed, apathetic, detached world: “Whatever!” Teenagers say it, with a melodramatic roll of the eyes, to their parents. Parents say it, with a weary wave of the hands, to their kids. At its best, it’s a verbal way of shrugging the shoulders. But at […]