TPJ, Author at Timothy Paul Jones - Page 11 of 25

Advent: Finding Joy When God Seems Silent

16th December 2016

Advent is the season when we meditate on experiences of waiting and silence in the Scriptures. By coming to terms with the waiting that we see in Scripture, we prepare our souls for those moments when God seems silent in our own lives. One of the ways we prepare ourselves for this silence is by […]

Family Ministry: How Adoption Taught Me to Trust My Heavenly Father More

14th December 2016

Thirteen years ago this week, we finalized the adoption of our first child. In the spring of 2003, a seven-year-old girl had struggled up the front steps of our home in Oklahoma, tattered vinyl suitcase clutched to her chest. In the room where we had wept so often for the baby that never came, I […]

Writing: Choosing the Right Tools for Writing

1st December 2016

Nearly everything I’ve taught or written in the past several years has been handwritten with a fountain pen before it was reduced to pixels for the purposes of editing and publication. As a result, I’ve owned more than a dozen different pens, scores of notebooks, and many ounces of ink. Many of my students have […]

Culture: C.S. Lewis and the False Promise of Pornography

17th November 2016

“We are fast becoming a pornographic society. Over the course of the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into…virtually every niche of American life,” R. Albert Mohler writes. “By some estimations, the production and sale of explicit pornography now represents the seventh-largest industry in America.” Pornography has become—as William Struthers has pointed out in his […]

Family Ministry: Discipleship and Family in African-American History

15th November 2016

A few months ago, I sat down with my colleagues Kevin Smith and Kevin Jones to discuss the dynamics of discipleship and family ministry in African-American communities. Rev. Smith is the executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware. Dr. Jones is a scholar of the history of education and coauthor of the […]

Culture: Is Christianity Headed South?

11th November 2016

Is Christianity headed south? Year after year, Western culture continues to grow increasingly secularized. Secularization is—in the words of Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler— the process by which a society becomes more and more distant from its Christian roots. Though the formal sociological theory is more complicated than that, the essence of secularization is the […]

Family Ministry: The Radical Book for Kids

10th November 2016

Do you want to cultivate your older children’s curiosity and shape their souls at the same time? Here’s a new book that will help you to fulfill both of those goals. As I flipped through page after colorful page in The Radical Book for Kids: Exploring the Roots and Shoots of Faith, one thought kept recurring […]

Giveaway: Win a Free Four Views of the End Times Pamphlet

3rd November 2016

This pamphlet that comes with my Four Views of the End Times video series provides you with a quick guide to what Christians throughout history have taught and thought about the end of time—and it’s small enough for you to slip into your Bible for rapid reference anytime. This week, I’m giving away three of these handy […]

Church History: Martin Luther and the Ninety-Five Theses

27th October 2016

On October 31, 1517, a monk and professor named Martin Luther sent a document entitled Disputatio Pro Declaratione Virtutis Indulgentiarum to the archbishop of Mainz. This Disputatio consisted of ninety-five theses for theological debate. Perhaps on October 31 or more probably a week or two later, Luther hammered the theses to the door of All Saints’ Church […]

Leadership: Five Practices that Every Leader Needs

25th October 2016

According to Daniel Montgomery and Jared Kennedy, effective leadership calls for the practice of five principles in the life of the leader:

Church History: The Church Council that John Calvin Rejected

24th October 2016

On October 23, 787, the last session took place of the last church council that brought together church leaders from both the eastern and western halves of what had once been the Roman Empire. Centuries later, one of the key Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century would reject what these church leaders decided. What brought church leaders […]

Family Ministry: Caring for Your Pastor’s Children

12th October 2016

Pastors’ children see the best and the worst of the church. My father served as a pastor throughout much of my childhood, and my oldest daughter spent her first several years in our household as a pastor’s child. Although I no longer serve as a paid pastoral staff member, I teach and preach frequently in […]

Church History: How William Tyndale Changed the World

6th October 2016

On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was burned at the stake. He was only forty-two years old or so at the time, but the work he had already accomplished in those four decades of life would change the world. You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker: “If you can read, thank a teacher.” Another bumper sticker—or […]

Family Ministry: Teaching Your Children How We Got the Bible

5th October 2016

This week, 480 years ago, William Tyndale was strangled to death and then burned. One of his offenses was the translation of the Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek—a capital crime at that time. Not even death, however, could stop the impact of Tyndale’s translations. The words that Tyndale left behind would reshape not […]

Leadership: “No, You Idiot, Your Team at Home …”

4th October 2016

Dayton Moore, general manager of the Kansas City Royals, had a friend who asked him from time to time how his team was doing. Moore would begin talking about his baseball team and the friend would respond, “No, you idiot, … your team at home”—reminding Moore that his faithfulness as a husband and father mattered […]

Giveaway: Win a Free How We Got the Bible Timeline

3rd October 2016

This week, 480 years ago, William Tyndale was executed and burned at the stake. Tyndale, perhaps more than any other individual, helped to make the Bible accessible to English-speaking people. And so, I’m giving away three timelines this week to help you to understand how we got the Bible! You’ll need a Twitter account and […]

Theology: The Price of Trying To Be God

29th September 2016

To sin is to use a gift that God provided for the purpose of pointing to his glory in a way that the Creator never intended. That’s how God’s good gift of relaxation degenerates into vacations that end in frustration because they fall short of our self-centered expectations. That’s how God’s gifts of food and drink […]

Family Ministry: How a Parent’s Role Changes through the Stages of a Child’s Life

28th September 2016

If you’re a parent, what’s your goal for parenting? My parenting purpose statement is simply this: Our purpose is to leverage our children’s lives so that people in every nation will receive multiplied opportunities to respond in faith to the rightful King of kings.

Apologetics: The Earliest Surviving Listing of the New Testament Canon

26th September 2016

The claim has been repeated over and over that the first person to list the same twenty-seven books that we find in our New Testament today was Athanasius of Alexandria, in the year 367. When this claim comes from the lips of a skeptical scholar, it’s typically followed by a long leap to the conclusion that […]

D6 Conference: Planning Your Time in Louisville

20th September 2016

Beginning tomorrow, hundreds of church leaders will arrive in the city of Louisville to attend this year’s D6 Conference. If you’re not familiar with D6, it’s far more than a conference; it’s a place where ministry teams can gather each year to learn, worship, pray, and strategize about how to embed God’s truth in the lives of the next […]