Paul says God hath made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Being seated is not the believer's location, nor merely his posture, but his position — a finished, shared, heavenly, and permanent place in the risen Christ, a seat that is also a throne. Here is what the seat means, and what it does not.

A boom in fitness and body-building ministries has made a single Pauline phrase newly awkward — bodily exercise profiteth little. But Paul is not scorning the body, nor blessing its worship. Read against the ancient games, he is doing something more useful than either the ascetic or the athlete expects. He is setting a priority.

Salvation and reward are not two names for one thing. One is a free gift that cannot be earned or lost; the other is a wage for service that can be gained or forfeited, yet never touches the gift. Rightly divide the two and the trembling conscience and the careless heart are answered at once.

The deepest problem with Reformed theology is not any one of its five points but the method beneath them: a Bible read flat, without rightly dividing the word. Sort the texts — Israel's national election from the Body's election in Christ, predestination from selection, sovereignty without the caricature — and the system dissolves, leaving a God mo…

Paul's words fallen from grace are taken as proof the saved can be lost. In their setting they mean almost the opposite of misbehavior: a fall toward law, not into sin. Rightly divided, the standing in grace cannot be lost — what falls is the walk, when a believer trades grace as his operating principle for the law.

Matthew 10:33 and 2 Timothy 2:12 sound like the same threat to a trembling believer, but rightly divided they stand worlds apart. The Lord's warning belongs to Israel under the kingdom program; Paul's word to the Body touches the reward of faithful service, never his salvation, and never the reign that grace has already made his — all of which rest…

Why would God create man, knowing he would fall — and would it not have been kinder never to create at all? Answered on the only ground where it can be answered, the revelation given to Paul: God made the world to display the exceeding riches of His grace, and grace must have something to redeem. The fall was man's, not God's; the cross is God ente…

Much of what Christendom calls prayer was given to Israel — kingdom petitions, conditional forgiveness, and an anxious checklist of unanswered prayer. Paul gives the Body of Christ its own doctrine of prayer, continual and thankful and interceding, asking chiefly for wisdom and the inner man, on the ground of a finished work.