Randy Alcorn

A few years ago I was a guest on Desiring God’s Ask Pastor John podcast. In this episode, host Tony Reinke and I discuss the question, “What age will I appear in Heaven?” The following is a lightly edited transcript, and you can also listen to the audio of our conversation.

Si vous êtes en proie à des phobies particulières, si vous avez régulièrement peur que vos proches, ou vous-mêmes, soient blessés ou tués, si vous avez peur pour n'importe quelle autre raison, voici quelques idées pour apprendre à les maîtriser.

Thirty years ago I spent many hours in a Portland library reading and photocopying article after article in years of original issues of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. I was shocked at the blatant racism I found.

I respect friends who hold to the gap theory and day age and the variants, and appreciate their insistence on inspiration. Yet when I listen to Hugh Ross and others, including Walter Kaiser, I’m still left feeling it’s obvious that no one would ever have come up with such interpretations except to solve a problem. And how many problems of one era disappeared on their own, only to leave believers with a strange biblical interpretation the text doesn’t and never did support?

Over the years, I’ve talked to many parents who experience guilt over the struggles of their grown kids. The following are some thoughts I’ve shared from time to time, including with friends who have grown children who aren’t following Christ and making wise decisions.

Last Friday, J. I. Packer, one of my favorite writers and favorite people, went to be with Jesus just five days short of his 94th birthday. I will always love that man. He had a huge impact on me, particularly through his books Knowing God and The Quest for Godliness.

God does not love us on our preferred terms, but on His own. We think to “love” means to “do no harm,” when it really means “to be willing to do short-term harm for a redemptive purpose.” A physician who re-breaks an arm in order for it to heal properly harms his patient in order to heal him.

I listened to Sean McDowell’s interview with Lee Strobel, talking about how he as an atheist journalist came to believe in Jesus, through studying whether the resurrection of Jesus ever happened. I think it’s all great, but even if you don’t have time to watch it all, the first 11 minutes or so are terrific.

In this blog I’ll address some difficult issues that some will misunderstand or be offended by despite my efforts to speak accurately and carefully. There are many balancing statements in this blog, which partly accounts for its length. If you take one statement out of context without those other balancing statements you can misunderstand anything I’m saying. I hope you don’t.