Parchment & Pen Blog

(Lisa Robinson) Last year, an opportunity opened up for me to teach a group of very-young-in-the-faith believers.   This is not the first time I have worked with new believers but I find that I am taking a different approach this time.  You would think that one of the first things I would teach them was [...]

(Lisa Robinson) I’m sure that the title alone has sparked some questions, raised eyebrows or maybe even some scathing criticism.  But before you judge a book by its cover, please read what I think is a fascinating way that Jared Moore has constructed a guide  in which Christians can learn about God and His world [...]

(Lisa Robinson) Over the past couple of weeks I have listened several times to the latest Newsboys work, God is Not Dead.  I confess, I really like this album.  It speaks of the supremacy of Christ and our receipt of His gift sourced in the love of the Father towards His creation.  It makes me [...]

(Lisa Robinson) I have encountered an expression on a number of occasions that goes something like this…”I don’t follow man, only God”  Sometimes there might be “denominations” thrown in, to emphasize that following God does not mean following denominations.  Of course, that is the sentiment behind not following ‘man’.  By man, I don’t mean male [...]

(Lisa Robinson) I have found one of the biggest differences between good Bible reading and Bible reading that is disjointed or otherwise skews what is being communicated, is how we understand the relationship between what is transpiring through the Bible’s narrative vs what we read as directed towards us.   It is understanding what is descriptive [...]

(Lisa Robinson) As Halloween approaches, you can bet the discussions will increase amongst Christians, as they normally do.  One faction promotes participation while the other faction wants all Christians to see the horrors of Halloween and why they should not participate.  But that is neither here nor there because I believe it is a matter [...]

(Lisa Robinson) Saturday morning, the Facebook app on my Blackberry got stuck.  It seemed the best solution to rectify the problem was to uninstall it and then re-install it.  No problem, that’s exactly what I did, or so I thought.  After re-installing, I went to log in and got the message “unable to connect to [...]

(Lisa Robinson) It doesn’t take long for a Christian to realize that accepting Christ enlists them in a struggle.  We learn very quickly that God has an enemy, Satan.  He can’t really do anything about God’s plans since what God had purposed he will bring about (Ephesians 1:11).  But there is the case for him [...]

(Lisa Robinson) This post is really not about singleness.  Although, by way of getting to something that has me increasingly troubled, I will use singleness as the spring to launch into what I believe is the root of a problem, particularly in American evangelical Christianity.  In contending with my own issues related to singleness, I [...]

(Lisa Robinson) A few mornings ago was one of the those mornings nobody likes.  Everything is going normal…until you turn the ignition key to get nothing in return but a ticking sound.  Ok, so I don’t know much about cars and had no idea what it could be.  I thought it wasn’t that long ago [...]

(Lisa Robinson) Every Sunday morning I have the privilege of serving a small group of very enthusiastic believers who are relatively new to the faith.  We’ve been plodding through the book of John and this morning, our discussion was John 4:1-45.  The number of sermons or other messages on Jesus’ confrontation with the woman at [...]

(Lisa Robinson) It happens to varying degrees.  You are chugging along in your Christian walk, learning and growing.  Mainly, your convictions grow and become firm.   But then something happens to make you rethink your presuppositions or methodology.  You begin an inquiry into a different perspective to test the validity.   The convictions you believed were [...]