by Jerry Bangert | Dec 16, 2025 | Articles, Mentors Corner
I go through dry periods in my walk with Christ. The Lord seems remote and I miss Him more than I can say. I don’t know all the reasons for this awful fact. Maybe it is a growing sense of demonic evil in the church and in the world or of a similarly growing awareness of my own depravity. Whatever the reasons, I have been thinking about that walk, which is increasingly more precious and fragile to me. Look again at the title of this letter from John 1. In four words the infinite divine became a finite man. Having accomplished His redemptive work on earth, Christ sent the Holy Spirit to indwell His followers and to inspire the New Testament canon. The quickening and revealing Spirit within then discloses the Logos to us. We come to know the Bible and Christ. But the Logos , Divine reason, has become flesh. He is a Person. Knowing a book of conceptual truths like the Bible is different from knowing a person. A book is not a person. Yet we believe that we have a personal, not a conceptual relationship with Christ. How does knowledge of conceptual truth become a personal relationship? The process begins with the work of the Holy Spirit communing with our broken-willed soul. Without these two ingredients all is futility and doomed to failure. The Holy Spirit will do His part; ours is to break our will. For His part, the transformative work of the Holy Spirit operates chiefly through two features of our personalities, reason and imagination. Through reason aided by the Holy Spirit we comprehend...
by Jerry Bangert | Dec 17, 2024 | Articles, Mentors Corner
“For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” Romans 12:3 How does one make such an evaluation and what constitutes sound judgment? Paul reveals his candid evaluation of himself at three different times in his life. He first calls himself “the least of the apostles” (1 Corinthians 15:9 NASB); then “the very least of all saints” (Ephesians 3:8 NASB); and finally the chief sinner (1 Timothy 1:15 KJV). This is the chronological order in which these letters were written. But how does this help me in my own self-inspection, if none of these descriptors are my own honest judgment? Since Jeremiah says the “heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?”, then my own “honest” judgment cannot be trusted. But the Bible’s judgment can be. What else does it say about me? Ecclesiastes 9:3 states, “the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives.” Lamentations 3:39 asks, “Why should in any living mortal or any man offer complaint in view of his sins?” Romans 3:10-18 indicts the entire human race with among other things, “there is none who does good, there is not even one.” And finally Paul says of himself “nothing good dwells in me” (Romans 7:18). If this is true of the man who says he was blameless with respect to the Law...
by Jerry Bangert | Dec 18, 2023 | Articles, Mentors Corner
Matthew 9:6, “’But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—then He said to the paralytic, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home.’” It has been said that Christ came to change the world. If this is so, then He paid a needlessly high price. And His followers, no price at all. This would almost certainly be true if grace and forgiveness were the same thing. To see this important difference consider another Gospel. Suppose that, instead of being born into obscurity and poverty, Christ entered this world through a wealthy and influential Jewish family, having access to and credibility with the Jewish elite. At the right time He would go to them and demonstrate His miraculous powers, proclaiming Himself to be Messiah and enlisting their aid to bring His kingdom to Israel and the world. He would then go to the Roman occupiers and demand they leave His kingdom. Any resistance on their part would be met with the power of legions of angels called down by Christ. He doesn’t go to the cross. How quickly the Lord could have ushered in His glorious kingdom! And what of the sin of His people, both Jew and Gentile? He has “authority on earth to forgive sins.” It would have been so easy. But there are at least four flies in this fragrant but flawed ointment. First, the righteous anger of God has not been propitiated, nor His justice satisfied. Second, His people, though forgiven remain slaves to sin and subject to death. Third, Satan has certain claims on...
by Jerry Bangert | Dec 28, 2021 | Articles, Mentors Corner
In the Fall and subsequent redemption of man by the blood of Jesus Christ, the glory of God is maximized, in that His Son now takes center stage to a watching universe. But redemption is in response to our sin, and because God hates sin, it must be expunged from us. The Roman Catholic Church teaches the concept of Purgatory, a place after death and before heaven in which one’s sins are purged before entering eternity. The concept of purging our sins seems biblical but the time and place for this is extra-biblical. The time and place for the purging of our sins is not after death and in Purgatory but now and on earth. Our fallen world is the best of all possible worlds, not to maximize human happiness, but to purge us of our sins. Recall Revelation 22:11: “Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy.” Something important is permanently fixed in us at the time of our death. If this does not strike terror in us, then we have not understood. If this is the God-ordained purpose for our lives on earth, the question then is, am I taking full advantage of it? Do I have the same sense of urgency and single-mindedness about the purgation of my sins as I do for—well, you fill in the blank? Only the Holy Spirit can kill my sin, but He does so for the obedient, who consciously strive...
by Jerry Bangert | Dec 13, 2021 | Articles, Mentors Corner
The world is collectively waging war against God. We neither like the way He made us nor the way He made the world. We feel driven to correct His many mistakes. The rebellion is on, for none can deny the suffering and inequities of life. How can this world be the work of a loving, omnipotent God? In 1710, the renowned Enlightenment figure Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz opined in his Theodicy that our world was not only the handiwork of God, but the “best of all possible worlds.” He was a serious and brilliant Christian, having invented calculus contemporaneously but independently of Newton. Some believe that he was the last “universal genius,” possessing all the knowledge in the world. But few have shared his opinion. In fact, Voltaire, shocked by the 1755 great earthquake of Lisbon that killed 60,000 people, disagreed so vehemently that in Candide, he placed this quote in the mouth of a fool. Most today would agree with Voltaire. But might Leibnitz be right? Recall a point made by C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain that if God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, then how can He fail to produce a perfect creation? Even the introduction of sin into the world should be unable to disrupt His plans. He said this despite having survived the horrors of the trenches of World War I. But even if we concede this powerful and difficult to refute point, still ours does not feel like the best world possible. We must be missing something. I suggest that something is purpose. To answer the question of whether this is the best...
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