Mitchell Landress

I do not understand everything in the Bible. That thought alone bothers me, but it is a fact. It is a fact that I am certain will never go away. I am not, however, willing to use this fact as an excuse to never think about or attempt to understand hard things. That is called laziness. Thinking about difficult things is good for the mind. Predestination is one such difficult item. This week it surfaced in my mind again, as it has dozens of times. I immediately threw the old arguments at it like I always do, hoping some new insight would break forth in the process. Usually it does not. On this day it did. The word ‘predestined’ occurs five times in our Bible (Acts 4:28, Romans 8:29,30, Ephesians 1:5, 1:11). If it did not appear in the Bible I would avoid it. But it does, so I cannot. To say, “I do not believe in predestination” is to say “I do not believe the entire Bible is true.” I will never say that. I believe the Bible is without error and true in all that it affirms. So if I were t...

Pastors are notorious for airplane stories. In college and in seminary visiting preachers would often introduce their sermons with a story about a conversation they had with the person seated next to them on the airplane. So predictable is this phenomenon that you might think it to be a class taught at seminary. It’s not by the way. But this past week as I flew to Wake Forest for class, I felt compelled – almost obligated – to strike up a conversation with the people next to me on the plane. The first person was a well dressed young man from Atlanta, returning home. He was in the music business and wanted nothing more than for the guy beside him to stop asking him questions. When he put his headphones on I took it as a clue that he wanted me to shut up. The next lady was a thin, gray haired great-grandmother from Indiana. She was headed to North Carolina to see her great-grandson graduate from college. She quickly picked up on the fact that I was a preacher (maybe because I was reading...