As I read through the Scriptures, I am struck by how often the cross was pre-figured in the Old Testament, and how often the results it accomplished are presented in the New Testament. While I have preached on this subject in “bits and pieces” over the years, it was when I discovered The View from Mount Calvary by John Phillips that I realized the fullness and impact of the subject. His subtitle gives us a clue: “24 Portraits of the Cross Throughout Scripture.”

This is a powerful and persuasive way to preach the gospel of Christ, both to believers and seekers. The 24 “portraits” are divided into seven sections:

1. Prehistorical – “Before the Foundation of the World”
2. Pictorial – “Mount Moriah,” “The Sin Offering,” “The Sweet-Savor Offerings,” “The Passover,” & “The Day of Atonement”
3. Poetical – “Dark Calvary” & “Is It Nothing to You?”
4. Prophetical – 8 lessons, including “The Perfect Servant,” “Man of Sorrows,” & “The King with the Nail-Pierced Hands”
5. Portrayal – “The Calvary Miracles,” “A Ransom for Many,” “There They Crucified Him,” & “Cries from the Cross”
6. Practical – “The Old Man Crucified,” “Glorying in the Cross,” & “We Preach Christ Crucified”
7. Perennial – “Worthy Is the Lamb That Was Slain”

Of course, each section starts with the letter P. While it would rush through the material, this could be preached as a 7 lesson series based on the sections. I prefer to preach it based on the individual lessons.

The book is a worthy addition to your library as well as a good resource in preparing the lessons. I highly recommend both this series and the book. Preach the Word!

“Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death…so we too might walk in newness of life”

Author: Richard Cravy

This study outline is excellent for both personal study and group study with an emphasis on those new to Christianity. First Steps features 15 lessons in 4 sections. Each lesson is designed to be self-contained and used as a weekly lesson for a class format.

The four sections of First Steps are:

1. First Steps to Understanding the Bible
2. First Steps in Christian Evidences
3. First Steps to Understanding Salvation
4. First Steps in Christian Living

1. John 3:4: “Can a Man Be Born Again When He Is Old?” This is a question by Nicodemus, not Jesus. The question Jesus asked is in 3:10: “Do you not understand these things?” I chose the first as my title because now, as then, the whole concept of starting afresh before God is just too amazing to imagine for most people. Hear audio of sermon.
2. John 4:7: “Will You Give Me a Drink? – The Story of the ‘Bad’ Samaritan.” It began simply enough when Jesus asked the woman at the well in Samaria, “Will you give me a drink?” Telling the lost of God’s love for them has to begin with a conversation. Hear audio of sermon.
3. John 5:6: “Do You Want to Get Well?” How long will a person struggle against a crippling impediment before giving up hope of change? Hear audio of sermon.
4. John 8:10: “Where Are Your Accusers?” Can the world accept that we can be forgiven? Can we accept each other as forgiven? Hear audio of sermon.
5. John 13:12: “Do You Understand What I Have Done for You?” When Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, he showed them how much he loved them. Hear audio of sermon.
6. John 18:1-11: “Whom Do You Seek?” When the crowd came to Gethsemane that night, who were they look for? A heretic? A rabble rouser? A dangerous man? Hear audio of sermon.
7. John 18:34: “Is That What You Believe?” Pilate let others tell him about Jesus. The Lord wanted to know what Pilate himself believed? Hear audio of sermon.
8. John 20:15: “Why Are You Weeping?” When you don’t know about the resurrection, you have a reason to weep! Hear audio of sermon.
9. John 21:17: “Do You Love Me?” Peter is the story of the second chance. We all can use a second chance as well. Hear audio of sermon.

I did not use all ten questions in the book, and use one or two different than the author proposed. But the book was the catalyst for helping me put together a good teaching series.

Other books in this same series are:

• Living the Questions in Matthew
• Living the Questions in Mark
• Living the Questions in Luke
  

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My practice is to preach almost entirely in series. While not entirely predictable, my general plan is to alternate studies from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and then a topical study. At least one series each year focuses specifically on Jesus – perhaps a gospel or his miracles or his divinity. A separate series is always being pursued at the Sunday evening services.

In this series of posts (yes, this is a series as well), I will present and review some of the series I have found most helpful in teaching and feeding the flock at Tanglewood. For easy reference, the audio file of almost every lesson I have taught over the last 3 years is available on the church’s website. Keep checking back for posts which begin with “Teaching Series.” Perhaps some of our readers who preach or teach will find something useful in this.

In June I replaced my Panasonic with a new Viewsonic, the PJ551D. It cost $585 with free shipping from Buy.com. It included a coupon for a free extra lamp ($250 value). Here are some of the details:

Good:

• Price: $585
• Lumens: 2300
• XGA native resolution: 1024 x 768
• Lamp half-life: 3,000
• Good menu system for controlling the quality of the projected image
• Small remote control

Not So Good:

• Limited inputs, and no outputs: 1 VGA, 1 S-Video, 1 Composite
• Only power and VGA cable included
• No bag included
• No audio inputs, or speakers
• Size of a large phone book and weight of 6.5 lbs.

For me, the Viewsonic is a good choice. The free extra lamp is welcome. I never used either the audio or video outputs on my previous projectors. Since I don’t travel extensively, the weight and size are not objectionable. I am very pleased with its brightness and overall quality of the video and presentation images it projects.

• Brightness — measured in lumens, a projector needs to be bright enough to fill the screen in the auditorium or room where it will be used most often. An auditorium seating 350+ people may well need a projector with 2500 to 3000 lumens. Even then, better results are obtained by at least dimming the room lights in the area of the screen. Those traveling with their projectors often face a variety of environments. Err, if possible, on the side of more lumens, not less.
• Resolution — measured in horizontal and vertical dots, higher numbers of dots produce smoother and sharper images. SVGA (800 x 600) projectors are less expensive but probably should be reserved mostly for projecting standard video from DVD players or occasional PowerPoint style presentations, if the text sizes are large. XGA (1024 x 768) is much better, and even higher resolutions are available to project the new High Definition (HDTV) video and high resolution computer images.
• Size & Weight — less is more. That is, the smaller the size and lighter the weight, the more a projector will cost with comparable brightness and resolution. Frequent fliers prefer both their laptops and their projectors small and light. These two factors are not important if the projectors is to be permanently mounted or used in the same venue over and over.
• Projection Controls — manual zoom, keystone adjustment, a remote control, elevation adjustments — are all important to adapting the projector to work in the environment in which you are teaching and preaching. Some inexpensive projectors in the past had only “digital zoom” which made the image more pixelated as it was enlarged onscreen; avoid digital zoom. Keystone adjustment allows the user to adjust the image when the projector and screen are not exactly at a 90 degree angle to each other. This produces the telltale keystone image which is wider at the top and/or one side.  Elevation adjustments allow to raise the front and side of the projector for better projection of the image onto the screen without placing a songbook under it.
• Inputs — what can be input into the projector for display. Multiple VGA inputs means more than one computer can be attached at once and the projected image switched between them. Other video inputs such as composite, S-Video, and sound give greater versatility. Some new projectors now longer accept sound input since the speaker and amplifier in the projector is seldom sufficient to fill even a medium size room with good sound. S-video connected to a DVD player gives a much better video image than composite.
• Warranty & Price — Some projectors have one year warranties with 90 days on their bulb. Others have two or three year warranties with up to one year on their lamp. The better choice should be obvious. Replacement lamps vary in price from $190 to $450 dollars! A short accidental drop or sudden bump to the projector while it is running can rarely mean the end of a bulb. Otherwise, bulbs should be replaced when they are significantly less bright than when new. Many projectors even list a “lamp life” and keeps track on it in hours in the menu system of the projector. The lamp life gives the manufacturer’s estimate of how many hours of use before the lamp/bulb is outputting half of its original lumens. It really should be replaced at about two-thirds of that number. Price – everyone wants the most features for the lowest available price. Using internet based businesses like Amazon, Newegg, and Buy.com will result in a lower purchase price.
• Reviews by other users — projectors listed on Newegg and Amazon usually have input by previous purchasers and users of each model. Searches on Google.com using the projector name and model plus the word “review” will often turn up articles written by others.

One of my favorite sites to get many of the specifications listed above about almost any projector on the market in www.projectorcentral.com. One last comment – if the projector is primarily to be used for watching videos (DVD, blueray, etc.) in a home theater environment, a slightly different set of criteria should be used, which I am not fully knowledgeable about.

Next article: a review of the projector I purchased, and what influenced my choice.

• NIV Family Bundle — the NIV, TNIV, and NIrV Bibles are available for $29.99 through eStudySource
• Nelson’s New Bible Manners and Customs is available for $9.99 through eStudySource
•  A Word for the Day by J. D. Watson is $10 from AMG Publishers
• See many more resources available on the eStudySource website

As I normally teach from the NIV, the first download was more than welcome. A Word for the Day provides a daily word study from the Greek, and provides good insights useful for teaching and illustration.

While e-Sword itself is and always has been free, the above resources and a number of others cost money because their copyright holders need compensation for that which they own — in this case books and Bible translations. If these resources would be of use in your Bible study, and you are already using e-Sword, I really recommend them.

Here is an example scenario. Say I am doing a PowerPoint (or similar) presentation on great buildings of the ancient world. So I need some kind of illustration of the Parthenon in Athens and the Coliseum in Rome. Just for good measure, let’s also find a map of Italy to use.
1. Go to http://office.microsoft.com and find their CLIP ART tab at the top of the web page.
2. On the CLIP ART page go to the search box at the bottom.
3. Check the boxes under each piece of art you want, then select DOWNLOAD.
4. The art will be downloaded to your Clip Organizer program.
5. You can now access your new art within any MS Office program, or even open the Clip Organizer directly to “copy and paste” the file(s) to somewhere else on your computer such as the MY PICTURES folder.

Try it! You’ll like it! By the way, the three pieces of art illustrating this article all came from Microsoft’s free clip art. We chose one photo and one bitmap (in JPG format, and one line drawing map (WMF format). A search for “Coliseum” produced 40 pieces of art, “Parthenon” 27, and “Italy” had 8 hits under the Map category.

The possibilities are numerous for using these pieces of art: print publications, PowerPoint slides for lessons, mission promotional materials, bulletin illustrations, and even website art (as here on our site).

An earlier version of this article was posted in April, 2007 on our www.RichardCravy.com website.