Want to grow and mature in Christ? Read this list. Here are some bible-reading tips that will help you, no matter how mature you are in Christ or how new-born:
- Read your bible every day, obviously, because, as Jesus said in Matthew 4:4, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God." It's helpful for me to read my Bible specifically early in the morning: Charles Spurgeon and John Wesley practiced this method, as well as Ray Comfort. Daily reading of the Bible will inform your prayer life, order your thought life, equip you for ministry (1 Tim 3:17), build up your judgment for making wise decisions, help you to always know what God's will is (Proverbs 3:5-6), help your morality to know what's right to do given the present age, and train you in what the Holy Spirit is teaching you using life experiences for maturity (Hebrews&nb sp;5:14).
- By reading the bible, though it may not seem that way, you are actually growing in maturity, spiritually. As the Holy Spirit said through Peter said in 1 Peter 2:2, "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord [is] gracious." This isn't just true for new believers, but this verse also applies to believers that have some mileage under the belts in Christ. Whether you've been saved for 5 minutes, 5 years, or 5 decades, scripture always has something for you.
- If you don't understand the 'thus' and 'thou' in the King James Version, start with the NIV, NASB, or NLT and read one of these translations/versions until you're ready for the King James - their translation is in an English that is a closer approximation to the English we speak day-to-day today and it will help you to understand and become familiar with the verses until you're able to read any version, having built up your understanding on a translation easier for you to read.
- If you don't understand a certain word (such as 'justification,' 'epistle,' or 'apostle,') find a good bible dictionary such as Easton's Dictionary and look it up. This will help you to understand the verse and you will build a good understanding from that passage for when you encounter that word in another area of scripture. Another plus is that when you look something up you tend to remember it very well. It personalizes that verse (and remember, older translations such as King James may have an older definition of an English word, so find a good 1611 dictionary or King James dictionary).
- You can even look up the original Greek or Hebrew. In that case, find a concordance, like Strong's Concordance.
- If you're reading a verse and you encounter a particularly interesting topic or subject that you'd like to look into, use something like Torrey's Topical Dictionary.
- One thing Pastor John Piper says is to not jump around the text, reading random passages, but to systematically go through the bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse. This helps because you always know where you are in your reading of scripture, and if you deviate on another study, you can pick up where you left off. It's helpful for some people to do a Bible-reading Plan. There are plans available where you can read your bible in a year, 6 months, 90 days, etcetera.
- Here's an important quote: “When Istudy the Bible, I prepare myself to talk to others. When I read the Bible, God talks to me.” —D. L. Moody This is a very helpful, safe, and effective practice. Make sure that you're hearing from God: commit time for reading scripture so that you're being nourished yourself, then separate time for studying to minister to others than the time when you read for your own nourishment.
One of the people that helped disciple me once taught me not to confuse my specific times alone with God reading scripture with the reading I do to minister to others. It encouraged me to practice letting the Holy Spirit feed me out of the Word first, then to do separate reading for being built up to talk to other people. This is helpful because then I've been encouraged and built up to talk to them as well as equipped. Don't confuse the two: allow the Holy spirit to build you up first before giving you what to say to other people. Make sure that you're fed by the Word first before building sermons, doing studies, and so on.
- Commentary is good, but not to be a substitute for reading the passage and getting clarity based on the context of the passage as to its meaning.
- Very importantly, DO NOT interpret scripture by what your pastor or any other teacher even close to you says. This can lead to confusion, wrong thinking, and serious error (that even the person you're listening to may not have intended). Instead, test what preachers, pastors, and teachers are saying by seeing whether the context of the scripture that they quote agrees with their interpretation of it. This way you're deriving the meaning of scripture, rather than assigning it based on outside sources. Once you have understood not only the quoted passage but the context by which the whole chapter or book uses that passage, then you can test to see if what you've heard them say is really what the bible is laboring to tell you also. If they're properly handling and 'dividing' the scriptures, the bible will agree with what they're saying. Otherwise, their preaching may be mistaken (or an error in their own interpretation). When asked why you do this, tell them the bible teaches it in 1 John 4:1-2 - test the spirits to see whether they're of God. When someone quotes a verse, go back and read the whole context to see if it is sound interpretation. This practice also familiarizes you with scripture and builds up your memory of scripture. Knowing the passages and being familiar prevents people in your hearing from being able to abuse them.
- If you don't remember a particular verse, look it up, because constantly recalling, reciting, and looking up scripture builds up our memory of it. It is stored in our minds and hearts. If it's stored in our hearts, we can meditate on it and the Spirit can further use it to minister to us when we're away from the text (at work or school). No one can take it away from us, and it's ready for use in alarming situations or persecutions. Also, you might just plain forget scripture. But, if you're constantly looking it up, it becomes easier.
- Though a particular verse has many applications, it only has 1 meaning. All of scripture was authored by the Holy Spirit through holy men throughout the ages (2 Peter 1:21, 2 Tim 3:16). So, though there many writers, there was but one author, God. But, because God used men (like a King dictates to a scribe), it's helpful to read a verse to see the intended meaning of the writer - what did the person with the hand to the pen intend for me to understand as he wrote by the Holy Spirit? What were they thinking? What was their understandnig of what they wrote? Asking these help to see scripture past our own system of thought.
- It's helpful to see whether your interpretation of a verse is orthodox and has been interpreted the same way throughout the history of the Church by reading what men from Church history wrote about it. For example, if you're reading Matthew 13 and come up with a meaning to Jesus's parables that Martin Luther, Augustine of Hippo, Charles Spurgeon, Whitefield, Newton, Wesley, Pink, Towzer, or any of the early 1-4 century Church Fathers didn't come up with, most likely you need to check if your interpretation is biblical. Check the context of the passage and other scriptures. The Bible says, 'Out of the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established’ (2 Corinthians 13:1b, Deut 19:15). Church history is helpful as a guide to interpretation of key passages because many times our 21st century thinking paints our entire concept and thinking of what we're reading, and we can misunderstand the 1st century mind and thinking of the original authors of the New Testament. This keeps us from serious errors in interpretation, but also helps to assure us that the Holy Spirit is teaching us - all these men, even from different centuries and completely different surroundings within their age, all came to the same conclusions that you did when reading the same passages and the same text! The same Bible that produced the Great Awakening or caused Augustine to write The Confessions is the same Bible God is teaching you from! Each sucessive generation of the Church is made stronger by the work of the previous generation of the Church being available to them. Abandoning your own presuppositions when reading scripture is hard, but seeing how other men did it in ages past is a big help.
- It's also important to look and see how people in the bible interpret scripture. The New Testament requotes the Old Testament directly over 300-600 times and refers to it in speech over 4,000-5,000 times (very modest statistics). So, you can read and see how Jesus, Peter, or Paul all handled or interpreted the scriptures, then go look up those same verses in the Old Testament and read their contexts. This can be helpful.
- Pray - Allow the Author of scripture Himself properly guide your interpretation of the passages - the Holy Spirit. Ask God to reveal to you the meaning of scriptures you might not understand (and even the ones that do), and then ask the Lord to teach it to you in practice. A great way to mature is to do what the Bible is telling you, not just to read it. This help in reading it. Sometimes whole areas of scripture that were once not as clear to me begun to open up once I started practicing them (not to say that any area of scripture is in any wit unclear to the understanding of its readers, but that God was teaching me something specific in my walk with Him).
- Nothing binds and blinds people from understanding the scriptures more than sin. Confessing sin and asking God to reveal scriptural truth to you as well as relying on the fact that the Holy Spirit is revealing it to you are good approaches to scripture, because ''...the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned." And one of the ministries of the Holy Spirit is to teach, declare, and reveal Jesus's teaching to us (John 16:14 - Jesus's words).
- If you see something really amazing revealed to you in scripture, don't be surprised that it was put there on purpose! :-D God is amazing! He speaks to us through His Word! Want to hear the voice of God? Read your bible out loud!
http://www.blueletterbible.org/" title="http://www.blueletterbible.org/" target="_blank"http://www.blueletterbible.or... - Blue Letter Bible - This is a good bible specifically for looking up the original Greek and Hebrew. It also has a tool for finding related verses to one verse, audio and video commentary by trusted Christian leaders and ministers, a lexicon, text commentaries, pertanent imagery, and even old hymns that pertain to whole passages of scripture from Church history. The Koinonia House ministry has provided this bible online for quite some time. Their websites were some of the first websites on the internet. I use this one alot.
http://www.swordsearcher.com/" title="http://www.swordsearcher.com/" target="_blank"http://www.swordsearcher.com/... - Here's a helpful piece of software that I use even to today. It costs money, but I emailed the author and he gave me a key to use the trial version unlimited. This is good just for searching for scripture when all I have is a part of a verse, a word, or a few words. Software like these also come packaged with dictionaries, maps, commentaries, and other tools. Other good bible software can be put on phones, PDAs, laptops, or mp3 players for Bible-on-the-go.
Feeling the tolerance! Watch for the "Stop Hate" sign.
Make sure you listen very carefully to what the anchor says at the end! Side 1 = Angry crowd of homosexual men. Side 2 = Little old lady with a cross. Which side do you think displayed the most hate? I don't watch TV, could someone tell me how publicized this was? You know what I realized just now? These gay men have no marriage rights taken away from them - they have full rights under the law to marry any woman they choose!
Wowza.
- 1.4 million babies are aborted in the United States every year. - Of those 1.4 million, only 1% of them were conceived by rape or incest - 3/4 of the women who abort say that they're doing it because the child would 'interfere' with their work life or personal life. - 50 million abortions worldwide every year Source: Hinlicky, Sarah E. Roe v. Wade Happy Birth Day? - The 2004, 10 leading causes of death in the US were heart diseases to unintentional injuries to septicemia. The number of US abortions per year far outweighs the death total for any leading cause of death on this list. (see it here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005110.html" title="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005110.html" target="_blank"http://www.infoplease.com/ipa...)
A lot of people think that a woman should have a right to have a baby-abortion because of rapes. If a woman is raped, shouldn't she have the right to be free of a baby she didn't choose to have? But, did you know that only 1% of US abortions are from rape? There are 3,700 abortions per day in the United States, this is even greater than the number of people that died in the 9/11 Attack, which was about 3,000. So, statistically, the Twin Towers 'fall every day' because an even greater number of people die every day from baby-abortion. In fact, most people abort their babies because of an uncomfortable lifestyle, not because of rapes - 3/4 of women do it because the child 'would interfere with their work or personal life.' The 1.4 million people that die every year is greater than any leading cause of death in the US, including heart disease. What's worse is that 50 million deaths by abortion take place a year worldwide.
Unfortunately, the numbers are accurate.
A conservative estimate of abortions since Roe v. Wade is 44,000,000 dead. If one were to dig a graveyard and set 2 x 3 foot caskets side by side - the expanse would cover almost 10 square miles.
I woke up very rudely to someone I hadn't spoken to in a while telling me 'happy barack obama day' at 12:58 in the morning. I then told him I was supporting McCain and he got mad. I told him it was because he's anti-abortion and he said that he agreed. Then, because he was for Obama, he quickly tried to think up a pro-choice argument. 'Well, he's for choice.' I tried to carry on with the conversation and just say, 'Well, the baby has a right to choose whether it should live or die, too.' Then, I shifted to how he was doing. But, his tone changed for the rest of the conversation. It was remarkably saddening to have him quickly close the conversation and hang up. But, he assumed that because I was black (and he was black) we'd be Obama supporters. He wasn't for-abortion (and no one really is), but he supported Obama. But, I'm a single-issue voter and I esteem the issue of abortion as a weightier matter than my race. I consider it so important, that I'm willing to support the candidate that is at least remotely anti-abortion over the one that is one of the most pro-abortion political candidates ever to run for president, Barack Obama. But why am I willing to vote for McCain because of anti-abortion issues? Why do I think abortion is wrong?
Is the destruction of human life, especially the life of a child, ever justified? When an abortion is performed, is what is being aborted human life or can it be so easily discarded as just genetic, biological material in human form? Since abortion was made legal in the United States due to the Roe vs. Wade case, abortion has been a hotly debated topic, and the moral and ethical basis behind it has always been disputed. Mostly everyone will agree that a human being has value and worth and no one has the right to “abort” a human being, but abortion is considered a different matter because what is being aborted has not yet been born. The issue is that if what is unborn is alive, even though it hasn’t been declared born, then it is to be considered human, with human rights, and treated with worth. What is in the womb is not biological material apart of the woman that she has rights over, but from fertilization a potential human being that should have its own rights. Abortion would then be unethical. It could even be considered murder and those that perform abortion as monsters. Though this contemporary issue is hotly debated, one can still come to a conclusion and decide that abortion is morally wrong. Once we can decide that what is in the womb is human with intrinsic moral value and worth as a human being, the arguments for abortion end, and abortion becomes a massive destruction of human life that should once again be outlawed. And because of the serious extensiveness of abortion today, abortion then becomes a silent holocaust.
Some would argue that an embryo or fetus is small, and therefore shouldn’t be considered a human being. This argument is not logical. Shaquille O’neal and Yow Ming are very tall basketball players with large shoe sizes to prove it – would their heights make them any more human than an average-sized human being? Would it give them more value? It is certainly unique for them and provides them an advantage in basketball, but it does not contribute any more to the fact of their humanity than it would a toddler or a normal child. Someone would then point out that in its early stages an embryo cannot think, feel, take care of itself, or have sensation of its own existence. They argue these points as if it takes away the humanity of a developing embryo. Yet, many disabled people also cannot think nor have sensation of their own awareness anymore. Does that mean they can be aborted, though they are fully developed? Children can’t take care of themselves. Many children, in fact, would die without the proper care of loving parents over them, because they are small and not as fully developed as an adult human being. Does this sap them of their right to be called human and declared as humanity? It is often argued that an embryo only has dependency on one person – the mother – in its development, and thus is apart of the mother biologically and has no rights of its own. The level of dependency should never be a contributing factor to this argument considering almost everyone has depended on someone else at some point. We depend on other drivers to stop and obey the signals so that our lives aren’t extinguished at the wheel. We depend on grocers to stock their shelves with safe food products we can eat and allow us on their private properties in order to purchase them. We depend on doctors to give us proper diagnoses and not just their intelligent opinion. We depend on the president we elect to do their job and represent the people. A fetus developing dependently on its mother subtracts nothing from its rights to life. To oppose abortion seems to give a sinister, more parasitic view of an unborn fetus. No one seems to look at a toddler or an 8-year-old that way and they are just as dependent on their mothers for nutrition and well-being as a developing child still in the womb (if not more, considering they can wander away and have financial needs such as toys and clothing).
An unborn child has a different environment, which may begin in the womb. Does it change in any way its perception of being “alive”? “It doesn’t interact with you and I like a toddler does, but [he interacts] with his mother in exactly the way someone at his stage of development should” (Wagner, 2007). Steve Wagner of Stand to Reason writes that an unborn child breathes into its lungs amniotic fluid. Though a fetus cannot withstand our out-of-womb environment for very long on its own at a certain stage of development, can we survive in their environment? If an embryo is left on its own to use its resources it develops into a fully grown human being. Shouldn’t this be protected and sheltered from abortion? In Taking Sides, one author argues that the sperm and egg cells, though sex cells, don’t have the propensity to develop on their own into a fully formed human, and neither do they have this function. He adds to this the fact that even sex cells die off upon fertilization. However, the human embryo “possesses from the beginning the internal resources and active disposition to develop himself or herself to full maturity” (Lee and George, 2004). Biologically, the fetus is its own being. Gametes unite to form the embryo. Gametes are reproductive cells that are themselves apart of the mother and father, with their DNA, and come together in fertilization. But, once they unite together and fertilize they form a cell that has neither the mother nor the father's DNA. Nor is it biologically apart of mother or father. But instead what's formed is a living cell with DNA that uniquely belongs to the child, and that unlike its parent's DNA, the same as a fully developed human being. I had asthma all my life, since the age of 1, and had to carry an inhaler around with me every where I went, yet today I’m now getting a college degree. One could say I've developed pretty far since I was 1. If some unsuspecting doctor would have told my mother I’d have a chronic disease all my life he may have deprived me of my right to live and write this paper. Yes, it's true that a rape or incest victim has undertaken a great tragedy. But, this doesn’t mean that she should inflict a second tragedy by ending the life of her unwanted child, who also has rights of his or her own (Monahan, 2006). The rapist first does a crime to the unsuspecting mother akin to murder. But, then again, the victim then becomes the villain as she commits a second crime by aborting her unborn child.
Once we consider that a developing fetus has moral value as a human being, it is monstrous to even consider destroying its struggle to live. The baby even has its own blood type and takes on human shape in its development. Shouldn’t we give the child rights to decide if an abortion is necessary or not? If this could be done, I don’t believe abortion would be legal anymore. When the abortion argument is brought up or presented, consider the humanity of the unborn person when making ethical or moral decisions on its legality.
Works Cited
Lee, P., & George, R. P. (2004). The wrong of abortion. Taking Sides. Blackwell Publishing, Ltd..
Monahan, M. (2006). Quick facts about abortion. Retrieved June 6, 2008, from Abortion Facts Web site: http://www.abortionfacts.com/...
Wagner, Steve (2007). The SLED test – four top arguments. Retrieved June 6, 2008, from Stand To Reason Web site: http://www.str.org/site/DocSe...
Brothers and sisters,
As we await the results of the election today, may I remind you that the results are already in. God wins! Nothing and no one can throw off or hinder God's plans. No matter who wins the election, it is God who puts them there. Fortunately, it is not like God is taking a nap from the control tower for a while and will return in 4 years. He is intimately acquainted with every detail of our lives and he rules over the affairs of men.
I read the back of the book and GOD WINS!! His kingdom will come and His will will be done.
Now think about this:
Satan is wise with his time. He knows that he is on a limited time scale before it's all over and he's done. He uses all the time he has to steal, kill, destroy and deceive. How much more then should we use every bit of time for the glory of God? Our time is running out as well. We need to use our time to serve the Lord passionately. This is all we've got.
God can and will use you to make an impact in your world, but you have to step out.
Don't take a break in serving the Lord.
Satan doesn't take breaks!
(Credit: Written by Josh Page)
Regretably, this morning I had to drop a course. I was working hard in it, but my test scores were too low. The highest grade I could get was a B, if I aced the next two tests. But, my advisors advised to protect my GPA. Have to listen to their wisdom... But they're also saying I have no chance at getting the MD, the very thing God is apparently calling me to do, which wouldn't be very wise to stop pursuing. I... 'must be about my Father's business.' I'm a debtor to not only finish school, but to spend my spirituality praying to get in, to exhaust myself studying so that my remaining credit hours are high enough to be considerable, to deplete my credit on MCAT prep, to very heartily pursue what may be the will of God with all my might, knowing that it's God who is working within me both to will and to do if His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). So, I'll continue to do this. What's impossible with man becomes possible with God. And God can make anything possible (Matt 19:26), even medical school. Despite how low my GPA may be.
