Everything You Wanted to Know About the King James Bible
The NIV has been under attack lately because people say it “deleted verses” from the Bible. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear that accusation is the question, “What exactly did they delete? Why?” Turns out that the early English translations were based on a few dozen Greek manuscripts and only a […]
If You Want To Understand Church, Start With Jesus
If you want to wrap your mind around church you can’t just stick with Paul, you have to go to Jesus. If you want to wrap your mind around Jesus you can’t just go to the Gospels, you have to go to the Old Testament. The story of Scripture from cover to cover is amazing […]
Habakkuk and Lessons for Today’s World
Habakkuk starts not with God’s charge against Judah but Habakkuk’s. He complains that God’s people have been wicked, vile, corrupt, and dishonest. He cannot tolerate watching it any longer and he doesn’t think God should or could either. The opening verses of the book of Habakkuk are a call on God to punish his people […]
Three Gardens
The opening scene of humanity is set in a garden..the perfect place. All is provided. Man and woman in perfect harmony. Naked and unashamed. God walking with man and woman…unhindered. Enter serpent, temptation, the desire to be like God…tranquility broken…unashamed no more. Sin had entered into the world starting in a garden and so…like all […]
What it Takes to get on the path toward meaningful outreach
I just posted this over at Wineskins and invite you to give it a read. I think we have some real issues to overcome here and am confident we will get over this, Resurrecting Evangelism…Calling a Kingdom of Priests. Let me know what you think and pass it along if you think it is helpful!
Exploring the First Century Church: Mission (Part 1)
Jesus began his ministry with his baptism by John and calling disciples. Jesus ended his ministry telling those disciples to make more disciples by teaching and baptizing others. Jesus’ ministry didn’t just start and stop his ministry with mission. Jesus was constantly on mission and he wanted his disciples to do the same things they […]
Exploring the First Century Church: Instruction & Teaching
The last post talked about the Bible proper. This post is going to be exploring how the early church went about making instructions and teaching from what they had. As was already mentioned, completed New Testaments took some time to be compiled, copied and circulated as a whole for the churches in the ancient world. […]
Exploring the First Century Church: Bible & Canon
There could be a whole dictionary written on interesting terms in the Bible vs how they are used or understood today. I want to take a few posts to examine a few of these so that we can move our understanding of these things closer to theirs. Bible Do a word search of the […]
What Is Your Favorite Commentary?
If you had to pick one commentary, which is your favorite? I know that is hard to pick so if you want to do favorite Old Testament and favorite New Testament that works! Here are mine: OT: Robert Alter’s “The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary” NT/Overall: Ben Witherington’s 1 & 2 Corinthians Commentary […]
Reading the Bible Contextually: Be Familiar With the Metanarratives
Metanarrative is the concept that in life we have larger stories that we see our lives fitting into. On a personal level it may be that things that were said to you as a child still impact you today…the words your father said or didn’t say still impact the value you see in yourself. On […]