Top 10 Posts of 2025

Did any of our most-read posts in 2025 have a consistent theme? Not really.

Well, maybe. Three of our most popular offerings this year concerned so-called believers or former believers some critics accuse of heresy, fraud or spiritual abuse. Three others concerned various church practices. Two more came from our surprisingly successful series on Psalm 119. Who knew readers would be interested in a verse-by-verse breakdown of the Bible’s longest psalm? Not me.

Okay, maybe WiC did. It was his suggestion.

Without further ado, let’s count ’em down!

10. Emotions and Emoting (March 2)

A passage from Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections spurred a few thoughts about authentic emotions in worship.

Emotions are spontaneous. Emoting is calculated. Emotions are genuine. Displaying them for others may easily become just a pose. But feelings for their own sake — even pleasant feelings — are meaningless. They are not an end in themselves, but a by-product of something more important: study, worship, fellowship with Christ, a new understanding of Bible truth.

By Tom

9. Recognizing the Teaching Gift (January 15)

Giftedness is good. Most mature Christians will want to encourage the identification and use of spiritual gifts in others. The trick is how to recognize them. In this post, I suggest four biblical metrics by which we may be able to distinguish the genuine spiritual gift of teaching from seminary training, personal charisma or the natural ability to take the temperature of a room and give people what they want and expect.

By Tom

8. 119: Sin and Shin (March 8)

The penultimate letter of the Hebrew alphabet has two different names, though it’s technically the same letter. Jews pronounce it Shin [שׁ] when it has a dot over the right side, symbolizing kindness, and Sin [שׂ] when it has a dot over the left, symbolizing judgment or severity. In these eight verses from Psalm 119, each of which begins with Shin or Sin, our psalmist considers the subjects of peace and persecution.

By Tom

7. Outside with Christ (September 9)

John 9 begins with an impossible, unprecedented healing and goes on to devote 41 verses to the story of a man kicked out of Judaism for confessing Christ, a man who started his day blind and ended it worshiping Jesus with eyes wide open. What better place to be than outside the camp with Christ, bearing the reproach he would later endure for our sakes?

By Tom

6. He Said She Said, Then They All Said (1) (June 17)

Back in August of 2023, I wrote a post called “He Said She Said” about a century-old Norwegian denomination with over 200 churches in 54 countries. Its point was that finding the truth online is a tremendously difficult task these days. The email responses from members and ex-members proved my point: unusual, intense and exceedingly polarized. This was the first of two posts collecting the feedback for readers who missed it the first time.

By Tom

5. Prophets and Profits (August 12)

Prompted by Sunday School material forwarded by a reader with a conscience, this is one of a short series of posts about men and women in churches today who claim to regularly receive personal, specific messages from God … oh, and they would like your kids to do it too. If you’ve ever wondered how subjective impressions (Is my girlfriend cheating on me? Who’s that Rastafarian?) compare to the words of Bible prophets, wonder no more. Here are a few concrete examples.

By Tom

4. The Laying On of Hands (September 2)

The laying on of hands. Where did the practice come from? What does it signify? How did the early church practice it? Did miracles always accompany it? Amazingly, in almost 4,000 posts published over thirteen years, we’ve never dealt with these questions before. Well, we have now, and readers were unusually interested.

By Tom

3. 119: Samekh (January 25)

Hebrew scholars say the letter Samekh [ס] signifies support and protection. The idea is that the perimeter of the letterform symbolizes the Creator and the interior depicts his creation, surrounded on all sides, upheld and protected by him. It’s a nice thought, and it definitely fits with the eight verses of this fifteenth stanza of Psalm 119.

By Tom

2. Anonymous Asks (342) (February 17)

Our question of the day was about the Christian perspective on Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), a largely secular online movement for men fed up with an increasingly gynocentric society and their own consistently unflattering media portrayal. It’s certainly a reaction to a genuine problem, but the question is whether it’s a philosophy young Christian men can embrace. Reader opinions on my answer were polarized.

By Tom

1. Gadflies and Blinded Eyes (January 26)

By far our most-read post of the year, I assessed Wesley Huff’s YouTube critique of an ex-Baptist apostate passing himself off as a public intellectual and classicist. Ammon Hillman claims the word “Christ” is Greek for applying a drug to your eyes to open them, derived from a verb that means “to be stung by a gadfly”. As with all modern “scholars” who crop up now and then to tell the church that our Bible translators have had it all wrong for the last two millennia or more, I have to wonder whether he’s even serious.

By Tom