NowTHINK!AboutIt

Avoiding Hackneyed...Making Sense

7 Truths About The Gospel

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The power of the Gospel, like the power of creation is immesurable.

If You Don’t Share The Gospel
With Your Friends And Neighbors
God Will Find Someone Else Who Will

To start, a definition. A very short one because the Gospel is not complicated.

The word Gospel means Good News. That’s common knowledge so we need to extend the def a little and explain exactly what the news is.

Simply stated, the Good News is the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ for the sins of the world. That’s it! And we in the New Testament era – the last two thousand years – are the recipients.

To be clear, the Gospel did exist before the New Testament. The plan was formulated in eternity but it was definitively revealed only in the New Testament. It was alluded to and anticipated in the Old Testament but only clarified in the Person of Jesus.

Old Testament folks became believers by believing in the anticipated Messiah and if they were paying attention they could have pieced together details of the Messiah’s sacrifice but the information wasn’t as neatly revealed in the Old Testament as it was in the Person of Jesus.

The point, of course, is that the Gospel is brief but don’t let that brevity fool you. The meaning and intensity of the message are greater than the brevity would indicate.

The Gospel Is Power

The Gospel isn’t just powerful.

It IS power.

To say the Gospel is powerful makes it a comparative issue. The Gospel is more or less powerful than other forms of power but that is not how we understand the Gospel’s power. There are no man-made or natural forces that can measure up.

Gospel power compares only to the power of creation. Believers are even referred to as new CREATIONS!

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The Gospel transforms lives completely and forever. Education can transform life to some degree but its effect isn’t very durable. It requires updates to remain relevant.

Food can empower a life physically but only if there’s a constant supply.

One application of the Gospel lasts forever. It’s not like sunscreen. It won’t wear off. [Read more…] about 7 Truths About The Gospel

6 Reasons Personal Evangelism Is Neglected

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If you want to change the world, start with the Gospel!

Not Starting With The Gospel
Is Like Reading
From The Back Of The Book

Evangelism has two parts: disciple-making and disciple training.

The first part involves sharing the Gospel with unbelievers in the hope of converting them to Christ. Every converted person is referred to variously as saved, Christian, believer, and convert all of which are synonyms for disciple.

There are many ways to make disciples but the greatest number of conversions happen through personal evangelism, i.e., one person sharing the Gospel with at least one other person, face to face.

The important point is discipleship starts at the moment of conversion and no one is converted until they hear the Gospel.

The progression is simple: Hear the Gospel -> Convert to Discipleship -> Commit to Training.

We can’t get those things out of order.

Evangelism’s second part, disciple training, includes both instruction and practice.

Instruction lays out the principles taught in the Bible and practice is the hands-on phase where Disciples learn how to apply those principles to everyday life.

Both parts of evangelism are essential but there are problems.

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The training part gets more attention than disciple-making. In fact, some religious groups bypass disciple-making completely, opting to start with baptism, not conversion, which clearly contorts the process and the purpose.

But even churches that believe strongly in disciple-making may occasionally get the process out of balance essentially neglecting disciple-making. The result is personal evangelism is rarely mentioned and the skills associated with it are lost.

There are several reasons this happens. [Read more…] about 6 Reasons Personal Evangelism Is Neglected

4 Reasons Your Good Works Aren’t Enough

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We are equally hopeless if not equally sinful.

Do All The Good You Can
By All The Means You Can
In All The Ways You Can
In All The Places You Can
At All The Times You Can
To All The People You Can
As Long As Ever You Can
But Don’t Expect That To Get You Into Heaven

Two facts most people know but rarely think about or understand fully are:

One, we aren’t all equally sinful. Some people are excessively sinful while others are much less so. We’ll call the really bad ones the 95 percenters. Everyone else will scale somewhere between 95% and 1%. They could be 50 percenters or 30 percenters or on the odd occasion, 1 percenters. Mother Theresa types would fit in the lowest category.

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The second misunderstood fact is, regardless the difference in scale, everyone is still a sinner and that makes us all equal in one respect. No one can earn or deserve heaven. No one deserves eternal life on their own merit.

We Are Equally Hopeless If Not Equally Sinful

You may be good. You may be very good. I have no doubt that most who read this are better than me. At best, I might be a 50 percenter and there are plenty of people who rank better than 50% but that in no way suggests they have a better chance of getting into heaven than I.

That isn’t my idea. The Bible actually teaches this. There are three verses that suggest every person is hopelessly sinful if not equally so. [Read more…] about 4 Reasons Your Good Works Aren’t Enough

The Thing Getting In The Way Of Your Happiness Might Be Your Search For Happiness

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Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.

Guest Post By Tim Pepper
Find Tim’s Music At TimPepperMusic.com

It occurred to me in the parking lot of Kroger. Listening to a podcast of another celebrity talk about their life and the reality that getting the things they thought they wanted never made them happy, it hit me. We don’t know what happiness feels like. None of us do. How are we supposed to recognize the thing we are striving for if we don’t know what it actually is?

Happiness, and searching for it, and the lack thereof, and the fleeting experiences we’ve had with it, is something we all have in common as humans. It’s an intangible feeling that we are consciously, or subconsciously, or maybe even unconsciously searching for. But we don’t know what it really is. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know how to manufacture it. All we really know is that we want it.

Let me be totally clear. We’ve all had happy experiences. We’ve felt it. We know happiness exists. Further, we all think we know what will make us happy. We all think we know how to find it. We all think we know what it is. But we don’t. If we did, we wouldn’t still be chasing it. It comes along, and we either can’t recognize it, or it fills us with anxiety that it might vanish as suddenly as it appeared.

It’s usually in retrospect that we can look at various phases of our lives and say, “Yes! I was happy in those days.”

Tim Pepper is an American singer/songwriter whose work is relatable, emotive, and lyrically driven, hovering between Americana, folk, and rock with a DIY aesthetic.

What accompanied my parking lot epiphany was the idea that we are all under the wrong notion that a life that is a happy one, is all happy. Life is ups and downs. A happy life is no exception. Even in the midst of happiness, there is disappointment, anger, fear, rage, sadness, harsh realities, burdens, and all the other things that are a part of real life. Maybe one of the reasons we find happiness so elusive is that our idea of it is completely and utterly wrong. Maybe our expectations have set us all up for failure.

I’m a newly-wed. We tied the knot 18 months ago and before that, I’d been in very few serious relationships and most of them I’d approached with some level of detachment. The beautiful thing about detachment is that nothing matters. [Read more…] about The Thing Getting In The Way Of Your Happiness Might Be Your Search For Happiness

Bible Inspiration’s Most Important Point

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The Devil's idea is to replace God's idea with a good idea.

Peter Didn’t Understand Inspiration’s
Most Important Point
And That Made Him Vulnerable To Failure

The meaning of inspiration and how it actually worked is not the topic of this post.

It’s an interesting topic and I’ll say enough to establish the basics but the discussion can and has filled volumes. Google it and you’ll get endless pages of search results.

Sadly, most discussions focus so heavily on the meaning of the word inspiration, they fail to develop the most important point:

If the Bible is inspired, it stands alone and needs no help from human ideology.

It’s finished. You can accept it, you can’t change it. It’s God’s Word and His alone.

The Bible is NOT intended to tell us what we already know and it wasn’t provided as a proof text to endorse our pet ideologies.

And God makes that point very succinctly:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. (Isaiah 55:8)

That idea is the motivation of this post.

“Inspiration” Not The Best Word

It should at least be mentioned that the word “inspiration’ is probably not the best word to describe how the Bible came to be.

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The English word has roots in Latin, inspirare, which means “to breathe or blow into” but that doesn’t correspond exactly with the New Testament Greek or with what we understand about how the Bible was written.

More to the point, the word has also taken on new meanings totally unrelated to the Bible. These new meanings have broadened sufficiently to eclipse its biblical meaning.

The Greek word that denotes this process is theopneustos. It is a compound word from “theo” (God) and “pnuema” (spirit) and literally means “God-spirited.” Modern translations, however, are opting for God-breathed instead of Inspiration or God-spirited for obvious reasons.

Inspiration is not a bad word, but with the new connotations, it is no longer the most precise word.

Spiriting isn’t how we express words so God-breathed is a little more relatable to the average person.

However, Inspiration is the word most often used when discussing the concept theologically and I haven’t abandoned the use of it in this post. [Read more…] about Bible Inspiration’s Most Important Point