Category: Top articles

8th Street’s Jonathan Thompson on the struggle behind Here Comes The Promise

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AMY TURNER

On 8th Street in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, there’s a little church called Pentecostal Mission where three boys grew up learning about Jesus, and about harmony. Jonathan Thompson, Ivan and Byron came up singing together in that building before life pulled them in different directions. Careers, families, distance. The kind of things that quietly end a lot of groups before they even start.

But in early 2017, something brought them back. They found themselves standing next to each other again, singing the same songs they’d grown up on, and the group that would become 8th Street was born from that reunion, named for the road that led them to church as kids.

Their latest single, “Here Comes The Promise,” carries that same thread of return, of finding your way back to something solid when life gets heavy. Thompson wrote the song, and he says the meaning isn’t buried too deep.

“The second verse of this song kind of goes more into letting everybody know that we’ve all been there,” Thompson explains. He’s talking about the moments that knock people sideways, the ones that feel unmanageable in the middle of them. “We’ve all had those things in our lives that come up that just feel like something we can’t handle.”

The verse he’s describing speaks to a friend caught in a struggle, unsure what to do, trying to carry it alone. It’s a scenario Thompson knows from the inside. “I’ve been there,” he says. “I’ve done that.” He admits there’s something almost stubborn in how people, himself included, keep reaching for their own solutions. “Sometimes I don’t know why, when we’ve got an almighty God, that we just want to try to do it our way.”

The answer the song offers is simple, and it’s the whole point of the title. Cast your cares on the master, it says.

“That’s exactly what we need to do,” Thompson says, “because I think when we do that, we just feel those arms encircle us, and we know that he is there for us, and those promises are going to come through.”

That sense of promise fulfilled isn’t just a lyric for 8th Street. It’s the arc of the group itself: three friends from a small church on a small street, who walked away and found their way back to the same harmony they started with.

What 2 Peter 3:9 actually means when it says God is not willing for any to perish

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JEFF TURNER

Second Peter 3:9 says that God is not willing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance, and on the surface that verse seems to create a tension with the idea that God is all-powerful and always accomplishes what he wills. If God wants everyone to be saved and he has the power to make it happen, why is not everyone saved? The answer lies in paying close attention to who Peter is actually addressing in that passage.

Peter is writing to believers, referring to them as “beloved” in the verses surrounding that statement. When he says God is not willing for any to perish, the “any” and “all” he refers to are the same people he has been calling “us” throughout the passage. He is saying that God will not allow any of his people to be lost. Every person he has set his love on will come to repentance.

Isn’t this a promise that God will bring all of his elect safely home?

Everything that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I certainly will not cast out.

John 6:37

The Dunaways Return With New Single “That Sounds Like God To Me”

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Some groups have a confidence that comes from decades of experience. The Dunaways have that kind of confidence. So does Les Butler, the Hall of Fame producer who’s been in their corner since the songs started climbing charts back in the early 2000s. Now the two are reuniting for the family group’s first new single in years, and by the sound of it, nobody involved is treating this as a comeback so much as a continuation.

“That Sounds Like God To Me,” set to hit Southern Gospel radio in late summer 2026, was written by Tammy Dunaway and Marcia Henry after a real-life moment convinced them God’s fingerprints are all over the ordinary stuff of daily living. It’s not a flashy premise. It’s a familiar one, delivered with the kind of warmth that’s made the Dunaways a fixture in the genre since the turn of the millennium.

Butler, who produced the track, doesn’t hide his enthusiasm. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to create new music with one of the most talented families I’ve ever been privileged to work with,” he says. “The Dunaways are special. If you don’t believe me, go check out the catalogue of music we produced together, 2000-2020. It will bless your soul!”

That catalogue is substantial: number one songs, national radio play, and multiple placements on Gaither Music Group’s “Shout” series, the annual showcase of Southern Gospel’s best. It’s the kind of resume that makes a reunion feel less like a gamble and more like a homecoming.

For Randall, Tammy, and Kanah Dunaway, the sentiment runs both ways. “We are honored to once again partner with Les Butler and Family Music Group,” Tammy says. “Les has been a faithful friend and supporter of our ministry for many years. We are grateful for this opportunity and pray, ‘That Sounds Like God To Me’ will encourage hearts, strengthen faith, and remind listeners that God is always at work around us.”

The track features Kanah Dunaway on lead vocals, a choice that signals where the family’s sound is headed even as it stays rooted in the harmonies longtime fans know well. It’s a melody built for radio, and given the group’s track record, it seems likely to find its audience fast once it starts reaching stations this summer.

Through it all, the throughline stays the same as it’s always been for the Dunaways: Christ centered music, close family harmony, and a ministry that’s spanned churches, concerts, and conferences across the country for more than thirty years. New single, same mission.

What Jesus was really saying in Matthew 7:1 when he said “judge not”

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JEFF TURNER

Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that you be not judged,” is probably one of the verses most often pulled out of context in everyday conversation. Many people use it to argue that Christians should never criticise anyone or declare one view better than another on any topic. But that reading falls apart the moment you look at what Jesus said just a few verses later in the very same passage, where he tells his listeners to watch for false teachers and identify them by their fruit.

Jesus was not telling his listeners to stop making judgements. He was addressing people who believed they had the authority to render final verdicts on others, specifically the religious leaders of his day who saw themselves as the ultimate judges of all people. His point was that God alone holds that position, and anyone who tries to claim it for themselves will face divine judgement for doing so. Discernment, evaluation, and even calling out false teaching are all things scripture encourages. What Jesus was pushing back against was the arrogance of placing yourself in the seat that belongs only to God.

Do not judge by the outward appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

John 7:24

Leviathan, the beast, and the God who holds all things

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JOHN COPIC

Scripture has never been afraid of monsters. From the primordial depths of Job’s poetry to the apocalyptic visions of John on Patmos, the Bible sets before us a creature of terrifying proportion: Leviathan, that coiling, fleeing serpent, that dragon in the sea. Do not mistake this for mythology borrowed carelessly from surrounding cultures. This is the language of sovereignty, pressed into poetic form to declare a truth that no philosophical argument could carry so forcefully: chaos has a limit, and that limit is God himself. In Job 41, the Lord asks with quiet thunder, “Who then is he who can stand before me?” No human hand can hook Leviathan. No harpoon can pierce him. Yet the God who made him holds him as a man holds a sparrow. The monster that terrifies creation is, to its Creator, a creature on a leash.

What Isaiah prophesies in chapter 27 is not a quaint mythological aside; it is the thread that, pulled carefully, unravels all the way to the book of Revelation. The beast that rises from the sea in Revelation 13, with its ten horns and seven heads and blasphemous names, is Leviathan wearing a new face. It is the same chaos, the same devouring power, the same human wickedness dressed in political and religious authority, demanding worship it was never owed.

And yet here is the startling thing. The vineyard in Isaiah 27 is tended. Every moment, the Lord waters it. He keeps it day and night. While Leviathan coils and the beast rages and false religion spreads its flattering poison, God is quietly, persistently, sovereignly keeping his people. The exile to Babylon was not abandonment; it was purging. When the scattered people of Israel returned to their land, the Asherah poles were gone. The altars to Baal had crumbled. Idolatry, that stubborn weed, had been scorched from the soil. The exile that looked like catastrophe was the very instrument of cleansing, the fierce east wind that removed what gentler breezes could not. God’s severity and God’s tenderness, it turns out, are not in contradiction. They are both expressions of his love for his vineyard.

The fruit that Israel failed to produce has now been scattered across the earth through the gospel of Jesus Christ. What Colossians 1 captures so beautifully, that the word of truth is “bearing fruit and increasing” throughout the whole world, is the fulfilment of what Isaiah saw from a distance.

The final word, however, belongs to Revelation 20. The devil who deceived, the beast who dominated, the false prophet who flattered, all are cast into the lake of fire. And then death itself follows. What remains is order, the order of a new heaven and a new earth, governed by the God who never once lost control. We are, right now, living in the middle of this story. The chaos is real. But the verdict has already been rendered, pronounced from before the foundation of the world and sealed at an empty tomb on the third day. The one who said “I will raise him up on the last day” will do exactly that. Come then to him, be reconciled to this God, and find yourself on the right side of that last and final morning.

For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death.

1 Corinthians 15:25-26