Salvation

The Gospel According to Jesus: The Cost of Discipleship

Kirk E. Miller

What does it take to follow Christ? What does Christ have to say about the Gospel? The answers to these questions are hard pills to swallow, but a reality we need to be confronted with and must not ignore. This is the second of four messages I spoke at Winterfest 2011 at Lake Lundgren Bible Camp, Pembine, WI. In this message we took a look at Luke 24:15-35, as well as several cross-references, and examined what it means to follow Christ.

[NOTE: I apologize for some of the audio malfunctions. Some of the audio was lost in the file and so there are moments when the audio-only plays out of either the left or right speaker and at times neither. After a certain point, the audio is fine.]

Other Winterfest 2011 messages.

Podcast link.

The Gospel [Good News] of Christmas

Kirk E. Miller

This is the first of four messages I delivered at Winterfest at Lake Lundgren Bible Camp in December of 2011. In this message, I used Christmas as a springboard to examine the Gospel. We asked what Christmas is all about, why Jesus came, and finally, why Jesus died. We found our answers to these questions and more in the great “suffering servant” passage of Isaiah chapter 53.

Other Winterfest 2011 messages.

Podcast link.

Age of Accountability

Kirk E. Miller

What is “Age of Accountability”

This concept holds that infants, rather young children, and the mentally handicap are under grace and will inherit eternal life if they were to die. (The age and mental capabilities determining this point are thus subjective and indeterminable–although some will supply an objective age).

False or Inadequate Explanations
These false views are not really involved in the purpose of this article, thus, I am not going to much time on their claims nor why they are incorrect views. I am simply going to list these alternative ideas so to give a better understanding of the true view as by comparison with these false views.

A rather popular idea among sacramentalists is that original sin is wiped away by the sacrament of baptism. Thus if a baby dies before being baptized the child will go to hell, but if baptized before death he, the child will go to heaven as a result of baptism. This is a false, man-made tradition that is nowhere taught in the Bible. Baptism is that which believers do in obedience to God’s commandment. It is done after salvation and is a symbol of our baptism in death and resurrection with Christ (Romans 6:4).
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Gospel Clichés

Kirk E. Miller

What I would like to do with this article is present to you some popular Gospel clichés, as I like to call them, and provide some rather brief thoughts on each—-nothing exhaustive or too in depth, but just some thoughts to make you think about them, their use, what they seem to be saying, their accuracies and inaccuracies, etc.

“I asked Jesus into my heart” / “Ask Jesus into your heart”

First of all, the Bible does indicate that Christ may dwell in our hearts (Eph 3:17). Yet we must understand that this of course is figurative and not literal and that this specific statement occurs in the context of Paul’s prayer for believers (Eph 3:17), not as an analogy of sorts of someone being saved. With that said, I have some problems with this phrase.
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