Category: Top articles

The joy of the Christian life

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

God’s forgiveness brings freedom, and believers are called to enjoy the inheritance He has given them in Christ. The Christian life is meant to be marked by joy rather than a constant appearance of burden and sadness.

Faith is not simply a list of activities or duties. It is the reality of Christ living through His people. Because God has set believers free, they can live with gladness and confidence in Him. A joyful life reflects the work of Jesus within and serves as an example for those who have not yet come to faith.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

Galatians 5:1

The Rogers Family isn’t slowing down

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

The Rogers Family isn’t giving anyone time to catch their breath. Barely a month after “A place to spend the night” hit Southern Gospel airplay, and just weeks removed from the stately “Secret place,” the Horizon Records group is back again, this time with a reimagining of the classic “When Jesus comes in the clouds.” Three releases in the span of a few months is a good pace for any group, but for the Rogers Family, it’s become the norm.

The track opens with studio veteran David Johnson’s fiddle and Samuel Shields’ electric guitar, setting a lively tone from the first note. Samuel handles lead vocals on the opening verses, with sisters Hannah and Rebekah trading harmonies behind him and a banjo threading through for extra old-timey flavor. Soon the energy edges even higher, as Rebekah steps into the lead for the final choruses, and by the time the track winds down, the arrangement has climbed to a full boil, the kind that makes it nearly impossible to stay seated, let alone keep from tapping a foot or singing along.

“We are enjoying putting our own spin on this great classic red back song,” the group said in a press release to radio. “It’s been sung in many, many churches across the country, and we are excited to keep it going. It has the true southern gospel sound we love so much, and we’re anxious to share it with you!”

There’s a reason the song hits differently for this particular family. Long before it was a single, “When Jesus comes in the clouds” was a memory, one stitched into childhood church pews and Sunday mornings. “It takes us back to hearing it as children,” the group notes, “and it serves as a fresh reminder that all sorrow will be past, when Jesus comes in the clouds.” That kind of continuity, between what a song meant growing up and what it means now standing behind a microphone, is at the heart of what makes the Rogers Family’s music feel lived in rather than performed.

That sense of continuity runs deep in the group’s history. The Rogers Family traces its roots back to Northeast Georgia, where Ray and Helen Rogers first raised their voices in local churches, their daughter Kim playing piano alongside them. It was at a church in North Carolina that Kim crossed paths with Sammy Shields, and the two married in 1999, eventually settling in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they raised three children: Rebekah, Samuel, and Hannah.

When Ray passed away in 2010, the family’s music ministry didn’t fade, it evolved. The next generation stepped into more prominent roles, with the children increasingly taking the lead while Kim and Helen remained steady, passionate fixtures within the group. Today, the Rogers Family, Helen, Kim, Sammy, Rebekah, Samuel, and Hannah, travels together sharing their love of Southern Gospel music, with Kim still anchoring the sound from the piano bench.

It’s a family that has weathered loss, generational change, and the natural growing pains of six people building something together, yet they’ve come out the other side with a sound that feels both classic and current. “When Jesus comes in the clouds” isn’t just another single for the Rogers Family, it’s a torch passed from one generation to the next, carried by voices that grew up hearing it in the very pews they now sing from.

Should Christians engage in civil disobedience?

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

You may feel tension when you see the state of the world. Governments pass unjust laws. Authorities act corruptly. Culture drifts further from the values of scripture. And in that tension, a question rises: is it right, even righteous, for Christians to resist, to protest, to engage in acts of civil disobedience?

Paul wrote to the Romans about this. He spoke of the Christian’s relationship to governing authority in all of the New Testament. Paul writes with clarity: be in subjection to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God. He goes further. Whoever resists the authorities, he says, resists what God himself has appointed. That is a statement with weight. It does not simply ask us to tolerate government; it grounds governmental authority in the ordering of God himself.

Paul returns to this theme in his letter to Titus, instructing believers to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable and gentle, showing humility to all people. Notice the posture Paul is describing. It is not passive indifference to injustice. It is an active, costly peaceableness. It is the disposition of someone who remembers what they once were, foolish, disobedient, deceived, driven by various lusts, and who now lives differently because of grace. We were once like those whose conduct we might be tempted to condemn. That memory ought to soften us, even as it emboldens us.

Now, this does not mean that Christians are called to silence. The call to avoid rebellion is not a call to abandon conviction. We may vote. We may stand publicly for what is right. We may uphold morality, speak the truth, and above all, carry the gospel into every corner of society. These are legitimate, honourable means of engaging the world and its systems. What we are not called to be is rebels. We are not called to take up the spirit of the age, which shouts and protests and tears down, and wear it as though it were a Christian garment. It is not. We are a force for peace in a world convulsed by conflict.

The deeper question underneath all of this is one of testimony. What does the watching world see when it looks at the followers of Christ? Do they see people who have been transformed by a grace that makes them peaceable, humble, and gentle, even under pressure? Or do they see people who have simply adopted the tactics of whatever political movement they most favour, dressed in slightly different colours? The apostle’s vision is far more subversive than any protest: a community of people so changed by the gospel that they stand as visible, living evidence that another way of being human is possible.

Let your gentle spirit be known to all people. The Lord is near.

Philippians 4:5

The only rescue from a hopeless sentence

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

There is a kind of honesty about the human condition that takes genuine courage to speak aloud. To stand before God and say: I am a sinner. I have broken your law. I have earned judgement. I deserve the consequences of my own choices. There is nothing I can do to rescue myself. That is not defeat. That is clarity. And it is the beginning of everything.

Because the gospel does not begin with good news about human potential. It begins with an honest assessment of human failure. We are all implicated. Not one person has kept God’s law perfectly. Not one person stands before heaven with a blameless record. The sentence is just. The judgement is deserved.

But the story does not end there, and this is precisely why the gospel is called good news. Jesus Christ entered history with a specific purpose: to take upon himself what you could not carry. Your sins. Your judgement. The death that your choices had earned. He did not come to applaud your effort or encourage you to try harder. He came to stand in your place, to absorb in his body what should rightly have fallen on yours.

This was not a transaction of obligation. It was an act of love, the most extravagant love ever demonstrated in the history of creation. He came because he loved you, knowing full well what you were.

That is the heart of the message. And it is available to you, not as a reward for improvement, but as a gift to be received.

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all time, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit;

1 Peter 3:18

The foundation beneath every believer’s hope

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JEFF TURNER

Strip away everything secondary from the Christian faith and you eventually arrive at the thing upon which the entire structure depends. That thing is the atoning death of Jesus Christ at Calvary and the forgiveness of sin made possible through his blood. This is not one doctrine among many; it is the load-bearing wall without which nothing else stands.

Your faith and mine rest on one central confidence: that Jesus Christ died as a substitutionary sacrifice, that his death was sufficient to satisfy the demands of divine justice, and that through his blood, genuine and permanent forgiveness of sin is available to all who come to the Father through him. If that death did not occur, if that blood was not shed, then on what basis could anyone approach God and expect to be received?

Jesus came in human flesh precisely because our condition required it. He entered our world at our level, clothed in the same humanity we wear, so that we could hear him, understand him, and through him, come to understand the nature of the God he came to reveal. The incarnation was not a theological abstraction; it was God making himself accessible to the people he came to save.

To live without this foundation is to live without a floor beneath your feet. Those who have not come to Christ through faith, given by God, have no settled basis for hope, no reason to believe that the weight of their sin has been addressed, no assurance that what awaits them beyond this life is anything other than the consequences of their own record.

But for those who have received what Christ accomplished, the ground is firm. Here is where we stand: on the cross, on the blood, on the risen Saviour who now intercedes for us. Nothing in this life or the next can remove that foundation from beneath us.

For no one can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 3:11