Bucket Full of Grace

What does it mean to be born again? Jesus told Nicodemus it was an absolute necessity — but new research reveals that Christians across denominations disagree about who qualifies. Here's what the Bible actually says. It is one of the most recognized phrases in the English-speaking world — and possibly one of the least understood. "Born again." You will find it on church marquees and bumper stickers, in political surveys and census forms, in the names of ministries and the titles of memoirs. Gallup has tracked the statistic for decades. Researchers debate what percentage of Americans qualify. But here is the thing that should give us pause: Jesus said it to one man, in the middle of the night, in a private conversation — and that man had absolutely no idea what He was talking about. Recent data from the 2024–2025 Cooperative Election Study reveals just how widely the term is interpreted across the American church. Among Assemblies of God members, 92% self-identify as born-...

The theology of Paul explained: grace, justification by faith, union with Christ, and the gospel he suffered shipwreck, prison, and execution to proclaim — and why it still changes everything today. He had every reason to be confident in his own righteousness. Paul — born Saul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen, a Hebrew of Hebrews, trained at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the most respected rabbis of the first century, a Pharisee of the strictest order — was by his own account blameless under the law (Philippians 3:6). He knew the Torah. He kept it. He was so zealous for Israel's God that he hunted down followers of Jesus and had them killed. And then, on the road to Damascus, he met Jesus. And everything he thought he knew about righteousness, about God, about how a human being stands before their Creator — it all collapsed and was rebuilt from the ground up around a single, staggering reality: grace. The theology Paul spent the rest of his life articulating — in letters to churches in Ro...