By the time I went to college, I had been in church 3 times a week since age 6.
But I had almost no answer to why I believed the Bible was true, nor did I know how to interpret the Scriptures beyond the simple Bible stories I had learned in Sunday school.
While in college I began attending a small, new congregation on the outskirts of Houston.
A mentor and teacher:
The preacher for this small congregation almost immediately started taking me home for lunch each Sunday afternoon – the sure way to a single college student’s heart.
The brother, James Wilson, then began to teach me Christian apologetics, and also modeled how to study the Bible using the method I will briefly present here. Essentially, he challenged me to become a detective discovering “the rest of the story.”
I have always viewed that time as God specifically at work redirecting my life!
On September 8, I had the opportunity to help the Hermosa Church of Christ in Artesia, NM launch their Small Groups study on the “Spiritual Disciplines.” The spiritual disciplines is a term used to describe those consistent habits every believer should have in their life in order to grow to maturity and fulfill God’s desire for us to be Christlike.
Since this was a new subject for many in the class, I created the following handout as part of my introductory presentation.Continue Reading
Part of the unique nature of humankind, God’s highest creation, is language
Language allows both the expressing and transferring of knowledge, feelings, thoughts, dreams, and history
It also allows – through similes, metaphors, parables, and other forms of symbolic expression – the describing of otherwise unknowable things using comparisons to those things that are known
The Bible has many descriptions of spiritual realities by means of this symbolic imagery. Examples: Jesus’ parables and the amazing “pictures” in the Book of Revelation
This imagery is also used to reveal spiritual realities involving prayer
Here we will look at just two aspects of prayer through these images:
Another key character in our story is Goliath, typically referred to as a “giant.”
It is interesting to me that the term “giant” is not actually used in Scripture of Goliath, even though his size clearly would satisfy our modern definition.
Modern skeptics question the whole concept of giants in biblical times.
So, as part of our background research for the story of David and Goliath, we want to look at some of what we find in the text of the Old Testament.
My favorite Bible software program has just had a significant update to v. 12.0.1 for the Windows version. I believe I first discovered e-Sword, this FREE Windows Bible program, back at V. 5 in about 2001. At the time I was giving about equal time to two other packages, Quickverse and PC Study Bible. I soon abandoned those programs altogether in favor of e-Sword because it just seemed so much more intuitive and easy to use.
With this new version by Rick Meyers and his team, some of the features I noticed right way include:
App Themes for changing the color of the basic interface window borders. Before, only gray was available.
The ability to choose low light (soft off-white) and night light (black) backgrounds in addition to the standard white.
A revised Resources Window making access to books in that windows easier to manage and use.
The return of Jesus and the end of the world is a topic as controversial and misunderstood today as it was in the First Century.
Non-believers then and now mostly reject the whole idea of a “doom’s day” – especially one brought about by a Jewish preacher who lived 2,000 years ago.
But even in the Christian community there is a wide diversity of beliefs about His coming… from disbelief (liberal views) to fanatical fascination about end-time signs and predictions.
Paul is addressing this subject and trying to clear up misconceptions and ignorance in his two letters to the Thessalonians.
The Bible Project (www.thebibleproject.com) is a unique and valuable internet resource I greatly enjoy and regularly use for personal study. The project began in 2014 when Timothy Mackie and Jonathan Collins wanted to present the overall story, themes, and beauty of the Bible in a way that would connect with our modern media-centric culture.
Eventually they assembled an entire animation studio which is funded by freewill donations. They describe their misson on their website homepage this way: “We believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus and our mission is to make the biblical story accessible to everyone, everywhere.”Continue Reading
The foundation for effective Bible study (in addition to the Scriptures) is a good library of resources, mostly in the form of books. As a result, most of us who preach or teach have invested heavily over the years in printed books – Bible translations, dictionaries, commentaries, atlases, word studies, original language reference works, etc. My own personal library is comprised of several thousand such books. And my library would be even larger except occasional moves and space constraints have forced me over the years to weed out and give away less-used books to keep the overall quantity down.
Being bi-vocational and working in technology along with teaching and preaching, I have longed for a way to digitally access my most needed resources. This dream first started being fulfilled with the introduction of Bible software packages. I believe I purchased my first such software around 1990, when the interface was still DOS based (black and white text only with no graphics) before the days of Microsoft Windows. And I still own and actively update and expand some 5 different major Bible software packages even today.Continue Reading
In this Preaching Series, we are focusing on people with whom Jesus had relatively brief contact, but which were chosen by the Gospel writers to appear in the records about Jesus. We hope these studies illustrate the use of Biblical research resources to help assemble a coherent and appealing story about each person.
We don’t see Jesus spending much time with people in “high places,” and most of those important people He did encounter produced negative results:
Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas and Annas the High Priests, and King Herod
Sadducees, Pharisees, lawyers, scribes, teachers of the Law, and priests
To the contrary, He was criticized for those He did often keep company with:
Tax collectors (publicans) and “sinners” (outcasts) – Matthew 9:10; 11:19
Prostitutes and sinful women – Matthew 21:31; Luke 7:37; John 4 (Samaritan woman at a well)
Fishermen, common people, and the poor
Non-Jews like Samaritans, a Canaanite woman, and possibly a Roman centurion (Luke 7:1-10)
In this series on the story of David and Goliath we are trying to provide four things:
Demonstrate the value and importance of digging deeper into the context, background, and details of biblical stories and passages.
Create useful research results for teachers and students wanting to see what “digging deeper” looks like.
Make it possible for a teacher or student to use this research to teach others, as well as repeat this process in their own studies of other passages.
Helping the Bible student realize that research and notes created for one study, even if unused immediately, then become resources already in hand for other studies further down the road.
David is one of the major characters of the Old Testament. His history covers half of I Samuel and essentially of II Samuel.Some have observed that we know more about the life of David than any other biblical person except Jesus. As we think about the things we remember about David, perhaps your list is something like mine – shepherd, giant killer, hiding from King Saul who was jealous of him, crowned king, sin with Bathsheba, death of infant child, musician and poet.
The Book of the Psalms has 75 Psalms attributed to David. Two more appear in II Samuel 22 & 23. What both David’s life and his literary legacy show us about him is his great devotion to the LORD. In fact, it would be hard to understand or explain David’s life without knowing that honoring, worshiping and obeying God was always his number one priority. A prime example of this is found in Psalm 145.Continue Reading
I Samuel 17 is recording a war between the Philistine peoples of the southwestern coastal plain of Canaan and the Israelites who occupied the interior of Canaan between the coastal plain and the Jordan River valley. Conservative Biblical scholars use the approximate timeline below for Israel’s history in Canaan before I Samuel 17:
1446 BC – Exodus from Egypt by Israel led by Moses
1406 BC – Crossing of Jordan River and conquest of Canaan begins under Joshua
1396 BC – End of Book of Joshua
1396-1050 BC – Death of Joshua and Period of the Book of Judges
1050 BC – Saul crowned King of Israel by Samuel
1024 BC – 27th year of Saul’s reign; Israel’s army faces the Philistines at the Elah Valley
INTRODUCTION:
On September 8, I had the opportunity to help the Hermosa Church of Christ in Artesia, NM launch their Small Groups study on the “Spiritual Disciplines.” The spiritual disciplines is a term used to describe those consistent habits every believer should have in their life in order to grow to maturity and fulfill God’s desire for us to be Christlike.
The Privilege of Prayer
INTRODUCTION:
INTRODUCTION:
The Bible Project (
The foundation for effective Bible study (in addition to the Scriptures) is a good library of resources, mostly in the form of books. As a result, most of us who preach or teach have invested heavily over the years in printed books – Bible translations, dictionaries, commentaries, atlases, word studies, original language reference works, etc. My own personal library is comprised of several thousand such books. And my library would be even larger except occasional moves and space constraints have forced me over the years to weed out and give away less-used books to keep the overall quantity down.
In this series on the story of David and Goliath we are trying to provide four things:
“Saul and the men of Israel were gathered…”