Coming in Future Issues

Most Bible study helps are heavy on the “what is.” But what people need every bit as much is the “why” of the Bible. The “why” leads to understanding, and understanding helps increase faith. So get ready for a journey into the faith-building “why” and “how” of God’s Word.

• Spiritual life: the prerequisite for forgiveness.
• How the Bible teaches us that we are not “forgiven or washed into a state of spiritual aliveness,” but rather “made alive into a state that can receive washing and forgiveness.” This distinction is vital and eye-opening—and scriptural—and is not being taught today.
• Why does belief matter? What makes belief more important than personal merit?
• Everyone should be a landlord at some point in his or her life, if only for the lessons it teaches about human nature.
• The Cowboy Way and why our nation could use more of it.
• The decline in church numbers: its cause and its cure.
• Why sin costs us spiritual life but lack of faith costs us Heaven.
• The marginalization of the faithful in American society.
• A review of Tony Denton’s new commentary on the Book of Hebrews.
• A review of Jim Olsen’s book, My Cowboy Heroes.
• The lost art of attribution: why journalism is in decline everywhere.
• The difference between spiritual aliveness and righteousness, the latter being what we need to enter Heaven. Spiritual life does not get us Heaven. Righteousness does. (“None are righteous”? None are righteous without Christ. But righteousness is achieved with Christ, and righteousness is a different thing than spiritual aliveness.)
• Is spiritual life an activity, like a social life or some kind of “fellowship,” or is it a property/entity/thing that is bestowed upon us, or implanted in us, at conversion?
• The misunderstood word “believe.” Belief in facts does not benefit us. Belief in truth does. Truth and factuality have a vital difference. Understanding that difference helps us to see the virtuousness of believing—that is, of having faith. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.”
• How “doublethink”—the church’s biggest doctrinal hindrance—is subverting Christian doctrine. How to recognize it and remedy it.
• The modern church’s flight from doctrine and what these changes, if unreversed, mean for the future. Plus, how we can make a difference.
• How the Web is revitalizing Bible study—and discipling Christians faster than congregations are.
• Why persistent, pervasive religious error has its source more in the heart than the head, in our own time as it was in Jesus’s time.
• Why and how it is that not all spiritual life is the same spiritual life. How scripture teaches us that the spiritual life we acquire upon conversion is different from the spiritual aliveness that we were born with (and that we lost when we sinned and became spiritually dead, i.e., “lost”). We don’t “wash off” that old, original life. We bury it. The “old man” who is killed at baptism does not come up out of the water, cleansed into a righteous state, to go on living. He is drowned like the sinners beneath Noah’s ark (baptism drowns sins), and is buried during that baptism, and we get new life. The new spiritual life we get is something different than the spiritual life we had before. This new life is “washable.” That old life was not – that’s why the “old man” is not resurrected. These and other neglected themes are explored in a multi-part series.
• Why the old-time preachers’ distinction between covenant sins and alien sins never should have been quietly dropped from discourse.
• Why the Bible insists that the gospel had to be kept a mystery. The answer has to do with free will. And with the timing of the Son’s acquisition and exercise of “all power in heaven and on earth.”
• Why and how faith-by-testimony is superior to faith based on miracles.
• Why and how the Law of Moses was fulfillable, but the Law of Sin and Death was not. The Father needed a fulfillable law on earth if He was going to raise up a Savior.
• The misunderstood gospel.
• Today’s “Necessary Silence” of Heaven, and what it confirms about the Word. A study in what testimony really is.
• Interviews with opinion-shapers in the church and society. Future issues will include Q-and-A’s, profiles, and other personality pieces. Your suggestions for interview subjects are welcomed. Also watch for book reviews and trend analysis, as well as commentaries/editorials on current politics and public affairs.