Gary Shogren's Blog
The doctor has paid a house call and left, shaking his head. The diagnosis? American Christians have come down with a bad case of the Woulda-Dones. The symptoms? We are irresolute about making tough, righteous decisions today, but we know exactly what we bravely and clearly and boldly “woulda-done” if we had faced the moral... Continue Reading →
Download the article as a pdf: Shogren_The Emperor Constantine the Great – a villain or a hero, or something in-between To many, the Emperor Constantine was a saint: in the Orthodox church he is one of the “Equal-to-Apostles” (isapóstolos) a title given to people (such as Patrick, Cyril the evangelist of Russia and others) who were... Continue Reading →
[Readers might enjoy my essay, "How to Calculate When Jesus will come - without even being a prophet!" In it I deal with people who keep making false predictions.] If I didn't know better, I would have guessed the announced Bible, below, was a hoax. It is not. The demonstrably false prophet John Hagee is not only making... Continue Reading →
Paul taught: I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue. (1 Cor 14:18-19) Paul is not making a mathematical statement that five clear words are better than 10,000 unknown... Continue Reading →
Devotional given at Wycliffe Associates for the assembled Translation Team, on Oct 7, 2015. I am doing two tasks for Wycliffe at the moment – with my online group we are writing translation notes for 1 Corinthians and we have reached chapter 10. Here this week our group is working on Revelation and we are... Continue Reading →
It appears to be the busy season of people telling us when Jesus will return. I have seen five dates for the period of September-December 2015 and others for 2016 or 2017. Four of those dates have already passed us by. Whether these date-setters claim to be prophets or not, they all transgress the Lord’s warning... Continue Reading →
Download the entire article here: Shogren_How to calculate when Jesus will come I originally wrote this as a response to the outbreak of Blood Moon Fever and the Shemitah Virus - remember those false panics? - and more broadly, to the rapidly-spreading epidemic of predictions of Jesus’ near return between 2015-2017. And people predicted 2018, 2019,... Continue Reading →
My name is Gary, and I am a recovering compulsive kidder. Yes, it’s true. No fooling, I mean it. Probably my ultimate attempt at “pranking” took place at the university. See, what happened is, I managed to get my hands on some official college stationary. I didn’t boost it, by the way! It seems to... Continue Reading →
Note: These are sermon outlines, not full messages. 7 For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. 8 Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit. 9 Now about your love for one another we do... Continue Reading →
Open Our Eyes, Lord! 