Posts by Ben Hicks

The Christmas story is a very Jewish story. There’s a Jewish man, engaged to a Jewish woman, who gives birth to the Jewish Messiah, come to the Jewish people as predicted in the Jewish Scriptures. All of this takes place, of course, in the ancestral home of the Jewish people. But within this story are…

Few topics are as controversial today as immigration. The world and the Jewish community in particular are reeling from the attack in Australia where a Pakistani father and son gunned down dozens of innocents while they were celebrating a Jewish festival. Americans have been shocked by the scope and size of the recently uncovered Somali…

Do you ever wonder why God doesn’t bless us more? After all, if God is all-good and all-powerful, then He can do whatever He wants. If He loves us, and wants to give us good things as Jesus teaches (Matthew 7:11), why does He not simply shower us with all the blessings we could imagine?…

How should we approach God in prayer? Few things are as important for Christians as knowing what makes for effective prayer. After all, prayer connects us to our Creator by giving us the opportunity to make our thoughts, hopes, and sorrows known to Him. That’s not something you want to get wrong! Fortunately, God did…

My guess is that during the holiday hustle and bustle you have slightly less time to read blog posts, or at least I hope you do because I have slightly less time to write them. So rather than a typical post I want to share a few scattered thoughts about the topic of giving thanks.…

If you pay attention while reading the Bible you will occasionally bump into passages that surprise you. Passages that you immediately reread, assuming you must have missed something. Passages that, even after being reread three or four times, still say the surprising thing they said the first time. Often the confusion is not knowing what…

Paul warns parents to not provoke their children to anger. We see this warning in both Ephesians 6:4 and Colossians 3:21. Ephesians goes on to give us the positive side of parenting, “bring them up in the nurture and instruction.” But in Colossians, the only parenting advice we get in Colossians is, “Don’t provoke your…

Jesus was a masterful teacher. One of the ways He demonstrated His skill as a teacher was through His ability to say a whole lot with just a few words. Novice speakers often think that the more they talk the more likely they are to change people’s minds. Sometimes that method works, but often saying…

Should we build our theology off the teaching of the apostles or the teaching of Jesus? Probably, to most of the people reading a post like this, such a question sounds absurd. Why would we need to choose? Jesus and the apostles were both inspired writers of Scripture, so everything they say agrees and it…

“I don’t know.” I was stunned. A couple of Mormon missionaries had swung by, so I had invited them in for cookies and a frank discussion. I had asked questions and we had some good back and forth, but they seemed hesitant to commit to things where they knew they didn’t have a good answer.…