By Ed Steele, Associate Professor of Music Leavell College, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

C. S. Lewis spoke how dogs generally won’t look to what you point at with your finger. Instead, they go sniff the finger, missing your intentions.

Worship, for many, is like that. They begin to focus on worship itself, rather than the God to whom all worship belongs.  

Ed Steele Professor of Music in Leavell College at New Orleans Baptist Theological SeminaryAs I teach and converse with students about worship, one of the most common things I find is the fascination of the “feelings” of worship. There is a sense that if they haven’t felt like they had in the past, then it must not have been real worship.

By Bill Warren, Ph.D., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Professor of New Testament and Greek

Question: Is it okay for Baptists to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and if so, why don’t we use it more often in our churches?

Bill Warren NOBTS Professor of New Testament and GreekBill Warren responds: To begin with a generalization, praying what Jesus taught us is always okay.  Christians have treasured this prayer throughout the ages and used it in worship as well as personal devotional lives.

By Archie England, PH.D., NOBTS Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew

Archie England PH D NOBTS Professor of Old Testament and HebrewQuestion: What love is this? God provided a sacrifice. Read Genesis 15-22 for the Old Testament part of this story.

Archie England responds: Abram and Sarai had a son, Ishmael, by her servant Hagar. Abram loved Ishmael, so much so that he sought God’s blessing for him. Later, Abram exhibited serious concern over casting out Hagar and Ishmael.

 Then came Issac. The long-awaited son of blessing, a son of laughter, had arrived. God had kept His word; Abraham and Sarah had the promised son.

By Jason Hiles, Assistant Professor of Christian Studies Louisiana College

Jason Hiles Professor of Christian Studies Louisiana CollegeThe narrative of Daniel begins in the third year of Jehoiakim king of Judah, which is the year that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, captured Jerusalem and carried many of its inhabitants into exile.

Among the captives were a number of young men who had no obvious faults, were handsome, and had obtained a measure of wisdom that apparently drew the Babylonians’ attention (Daniel 1:4a). In short, the victorious king took for himself the cream of the crop from among Judah’s youth, robbing an entire generation of its future leaders and wise men.

Once chosen, the young men were taken into the king’s palace where they were educated in the literature and language of their captors (Daniel 1:4b).

By Archie England, PH.D. NOBTS Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew

Archie England PH D NOBTS Professor of Old Testament and HebrewQUESTION: Broken by sin, are we? When believers choose to sin rather than to obey, ill effects occur. David’s sin with Bathsheba will help us answer this question (cf., 2 Samuel 11; Psalms 6; 32; and 51).

ARCHIE ENGLAND RESPONDS: One more peek . . . , yet King David should just have turned away from that first glimpse of a beauty bathing on the roof top (2 Samuel 11:2). Instead, he lingered. Smitten by lust, David inquired about “her” (11:3) only to discover that Bathsheba was another man’s wife. Undeterred, David had her “invited” to the King’s House (actually, they “took her”). Once there, his lust resulted in adultery: “he lay with her” (11:4), and she became pregnant. Covering up the affair further consumed David, to the point that he devised a sinister plot to have Uriah killed in battle. Joab complied but at the cost of the lives of other valiant men. David’s list of sin here is ghastly: adultery, deception, and murder.

By Jason Hiles, Professor of Christian Studies Louisiana College

Jason Hiles Professor of Christian Studies Louisiana CollegeContrary to popular misconceptions, the gospel message encompasses much more than an answer to the question, “How do you get saved?”

While the gospel certainly answers that question, it also bears implications for the whole world and all who live in it. At the start of the twentieth century, the Scottish minister, James Orr, rightly observed that one who, “with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity.”

By Ed Steel, Professor of Music, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

Ed Steele Professor of Music in Leavell College at New Orleans Baptist Theological SeminaryIn the past several months I have been asked what I thought about the state of church music and where things are going. [I am in debt to Dr. Harry Eskew and his wonderful text, Sing with Understanding, for so much of my experience in the area. Much of what I would like to share come from that text and I would encourage those interested to make it a personal library “must have.”] In terms of where we are in music and worship in our churches today, the following outline might serve as a map much like you would find in a shopping mall that reads “you are here.”

The simplest way to see where we are is to start with imagining the “song of the church through the ages” as though it were a big river, birthed from the Old Testament Psalms, New Testament canticles surrounding the birth of Christ, and the Pauline fragments.

By Archie England, PH.D., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew

Question: Where was Adam when the serpent tempted Eve?

Archie England, PH.D., NOBTS Professor of Old Testament and HebrewArchie England responds: Genesis 3 relates how the first created beings violated God’s command, ate the forbidden fruit, and incurred the judgment of God. This first act of disobedience plunged all of the created order into the fallen estate of sin, thereby shattering the opportunity for God’s creation to exist (live) without sin.

By Bill Warren, Ph.D., NOBTS Professor of New Testament and Greek

Question: I’ve heard that Jesus was actually not born in the year A.D. 1 but a few years earlier. When was Jesus born?  And why is our calendar off?

Bill Warren responds: Let’s deal first with when Jesus was born. 

By Steve Lemke, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Provost and Professor of Philosophy

The doctrine often called the “age of accountability” is one of the most foundational Baptist belieSteve Lemke NOBTS Provost and Professor of Philosophyfs, yet it is also one of the least understood beliefs.

All three Baptist Faith and Message statements (1925, 1963, and 2000) assert that children are not morally accountable until “they are capable of moral action” (Baptist Faith and Message, Article 3).

By Ed Steele, Professor of Music in Leavell College at NOBTS

What are those things that impede worship or make worship more distant?

A list could be made rather quickly: anger, impatience, worry, ungratefulness, and the list could go on. Certainly this is not exhaustive, but I would like to focus on the last: ungratefulness.

By Archie England,

PH.D., NOBTS Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew

“Behold, He is coming!”
– Malachi 3:1.
Messiah is coming: that’s Malachi’s message. God’s anointed one – the seed of Adam, the promised son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the scion of the Davidic covenant, Isaiah’s kingly child, Micah’s Ancient of Days, Zechariah’s regal champion – had become Malachi’s future hope. He would indeed be the ONE they sought and delighted in, because He would attend to His temple and the covenant. What joy might that bring?