Gospel.com Blog

Is it possible that a 2000-year-old book could be relevant to people today? Christians hold up the Bible as the ultimate source of truth… but why would anyone believe that a collection of stories and parables from ancient Mesopotamia would be a reliable source of information about God and the human condition?

On the surface, it sounds like a shaky claim—and when critics of Christianity lay out their cases against the faith, it’s often the reliability and accuracy of the Bible that they take special aim at. But there are solid reasons to believe that the Bible is more than just another piece of literature. Listed below are essays from around the Gospel.com alliance that tackle the question “How can we know that the Bible is true?”

• Is the Bible true? And if so, how could I possibly know for sure? from International Bible Society, who know an awful lot about the Bible.
• Why do Christians believe the Bible? There must be something more than just the Bible’s own claims to truth, right? What reasons do we have to believe in it?
• Why should I care about the Bible? What makes it different from the countless other books throughout history that have claimed to contain the ultimate truth?
• “And God Said” Thoughts about the Bible’s accuracy at Answers in Genesis.
• How can I be sure of the Bible’s moral and spiritual reliability? Another take on the question, from RBC Ministries.
• Isn’t the Bible just a bunch of fables? How do Christians respond to common criticisms of the Bible?

The question of the Bible’s accuracy and reliability have occupied theologians and everyday Christians for centuries—but these essays are a good starting place to think through the question for yourself.

What causes a church to grow? And if your church or ministry is considering “planting” a new church, what will cause it to take root and flourish?

Those are big questions, and the answer certainly involves a lot of prayer, strategic planning, and wise leadership. But on a more fundamental level, there is a critical relationship between church growth and the Bible. An article at the Lausanne World Pulse argues that whether you’re a church worker or a missionary, it’s important to understand that there is a strong relationship between church growth and the Bible:

To plant or grow a congregation, two basic things must repeatedly occur: people must come to know Jesus and they must become members of his body. The first step can happen in an evangelistic instant. It is the miracle of faith born during a gospel presentation. What follows is most effectively accomplished through an intentional program of Bible study. House churches, cell groups and small groups are used to incorporate new believers. At the center of each one is a time of Bible study.

The article goes on to list seven specific ways that a program of Bible study strengthens a church and helps it expand. Certainly something to keep in mind—the questions of logistics, money, and leadership are all of obvious importance in growing or planting a church, but at the heart of your church’s success lies the Bible, and the willingness of your church to delve into it.

Presenting information in a different way can do wonders for our understanding of it. People just learn in different ways. For me, seeing ideas side by side can provide the clarity I need to order them in my mind.

Uplook Ministries has a number of charts and introductions to some of the books of the bible that you can find here. I found this side by side comparison of the Gospels interesting.

Click on the image to see the full version (PDF):

Don’t we all.

Sometimes reading the bible in a systematic way can be difficult. It’s far easier to just pick and choose and never study the bible. On occasion, I know that I’ve benefited from a guided approach. Luckily, the internet is making those guides even easier to access with places like Into Thy Word, which has a dearth of helpful information for you.

This is what they have to say about their studies:

These curriculums have been carefully exegetically prepared with careful steadfast inductive analysis and word studies of God’s most precious Word. We do not add anything to God’s Word that is not already there nor do we take away insights and ideas that are not there.

This landing page is a good place to start to see all the studies they have available. And if you’re looking for a place to jump in, Matthew is always a good place to start.

[the picture is from flickr.com user crunklygill]

There are an awful lot of Bible reading plans out there, and if we keep talking about them here on the Gospel.com blog, we’re going to start sounding like a broken record. But there’s a new one out from Back to the Bible that’s well worth checking out: it’s called Powered by 4.

What’s with that name? Well, if you read up on Bible study strategies, one thing that comes up repeatedly is that when you’re starting out with reading the Bible, taking small but regular steps is much more effective than well-intentioned but overzealous plans that involve a whole lot of daily reading. In other words, if you can get into the habit of spending just a few minutes reading the Bible a couple times each week, you’re better off than trying to read the Bible for an hour each day and inevitably giving up when that becomes too much.

And that’s the theory behind Powered by 4: you make a commitment to yourself to read the Bible just four times a week, for less than ten minutes at a time. You might not have time in your schedule for an hour of Bible reading each day, but most anybody can carve ten minutes out of their daily schedule—and once you get into the habit of reading the Bible four times a week, you’ll find it’s much easier to increase your reading to whatever level you feel comfortable with.

The Powered by 4 site lays out the basics and lets you sign up to receive your Bible readings via email. Give it a try!

I’ve been using my navy blue, leather-bound Bible for years. Flipping through it shows the marks of my relationship with it: the frayed bookmark, the pocket I added to the back and the scuffed cover that make it mine.

If you were to browse through Matthew, you would see where as a senior in high school I underlined my way valiantly through the wisdom of Jesus’ words. You can achieve a similar look to your copy of Matthew by taking a black pen willy-nilly to the bottom of every fifth verse.

Thing was, at that time, I could have cared less about the translation. I was full of the vitality that comes along with a renewed interest in one’s faith. You could have given me the Precious Moments Bible, and I would have loved it.

Which raises an interesting question to me now: What would I be doing if I didn’t speak English?

Well, your options become severely limited, or you don’t have any options to begin with. If one speaks English they have a myriad of choices to read the Holy Bible (most of which you can find on a little site we call BibleGateway.com).

If you’ve ever wondered if a country does have the Bible, let me point you towards WorldMap.org. They’re a ministry that publishes evangelistic statistics, including whether or not the country has the Bible in their language.

Take Angola for example. There’s still a large chunk of that country that needs a translation of the Bible, which was news to me.

There are a few ministries in the Gospel.com community that are devoted to the gargantuan task of Bible translations like IBS and the Lutheran Bible Translators (check out their list of translations).

If you’re interested at all in this part of spreading the Word of God, you might want to check them out so you can know how better to pray for them and support them. You can also read some of their efforts in other langauges via the BibleGateway.

So you’re interested in reading the Bible… where do you start? The Bible’s not like a novel, or a history book, or most any other book—it’s a collection of many different stories, in many different literary genres written by a wide variety of authors, each with a unique background and motive for writing.

In other words, while it’s certainly possible to start reading on page 1 of the Bible all the way through to the end, that’s a pretty challenging undertaking even for a dedicated reader.

This question “how do I go about reading the Bible?” is one we’ve talked about here in the past. Here are a few highlights to help you get started actually reading the Good Book:

• Scripture Union has a nice series of articles about how to read the Bible. They start with the basics and move on to more in-depth Bible reading.
• The Navigators has an essay that suggests the best way to read the Bible is in very small chunks, rather than trying to dive through numerous chapters and books all at once. They recommend spending seven minutes (no more, no less) of time in the Bible each day—you can increase the time later if you want, but if you’re just starting out, the most important thing is to make it a daily habit.
• Dr. Jim Samra of Calvary Church has a four-part series of audio messages about how to study the Bible. You can listen to them for free in MP3 format.
• Many people find it helpful to follow a Bible reading plan as they make their way through the Bible. Such plans usually spread the task of reading the entire Bible across a year, so that after 365 days you’ve made it all the way through. One nice thing about many Bible reading plans is that they organize your reading according to a set theme (chronological, topical, historical, etc.) rather than telling you to just start with Genesis 1 and read straight through. We’ve collected a lot of links to free online Bible reading plans from around the Gospel.com community; there’s almost certainly one that matches your reading preferences.

Once you take a look through some of these resources and get started reading the Bible for yourself, you might find yourself surprised at how easy and enjoyable it is to read the Bible—far from being a laborious literary task, it can be a refreshing and inspiring way to start (or end) each day on the right spiritual note. So don’t be scared away by the Bible’s page count—dust off that old family Bible and try fitting some Scripture reading into your daily routine.

Two Testaments. Over sixty books. Hundreds of chapters. Tens of thousands of verses. Hundreds of thousands of words. It’s a book full of wisdom and full of truth.

Christians have been trying to sort through the myriad claims made about it, and from it, in order to discern how to live for thousands of years. It’s a book that changes you.

From an outside observer, the Bible might just be a collection of stories. But, of course, we at Gospel.com think it’s far more than that. The Bible is the history of God’s people. It’s the way in which we know about Jesus Christ. And it has been consistently backed up by history and practice. It’s a book that is scrutinized with both critically focused and franticly searching eyes.

Personally, I’ve spent more time writing, talking and thinking about this book than anything on this earth. It’s simply a fascinating book. And ever so challenging. But most importantly, it shows me how God has worked and is working on this earth.

Pretty much every resource and page in the gospel.com community has something to do with the Bible, but this week we’re focusing on the Bible itself. There are plenty of links to resources to get started with in the header above. You can also check out more at our Bible topic page.

And of course you can always read the full text of the bible in more translations than anywhere else on the internet at The BibleGateway.

So what exactly does the bible say about singleness? Should everybody yearn to be married? At times in the church it might seem like the answer to the latter question is a resounding, “Of course!” But, of course, it’s not that simple.

In fact according to Albert Hsu from the Discipleship Journal, in the United States the increasing percentage of single people is a relatively new phenomenon:

At the beginning of the 20th century, about 95 percent of the adult population in America was married. Life expectancy in 1900 was only 47 years, and most people married in their teens. Divorce was nearly unheard of, and those who were widowed remarried quickly. So for the most part, being an adult was synonymous with being married. Being single was by far the exception. As a result, most churches spent most of their time and resources ministering to the needs of married couples and families.

At this end of the century, however, the landscape is quite different. Now nearly half of the adult population is unmarried. About 45 percent of today’s adults have never married or are divorced, widowed, or separated. One in four adults has never married. People are staying single longer, no-fault divorce laws are available in every state, and rising life expectancies mean that widows and widowers often remain unmarried longer after the death of a spouse. Now, singleness is almost as likely to be the current status for American adults as marriage.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:7-8 talks about his own singleness as a gift:

I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am.

It’s always interesting to note that Jesus and his direct followers remained single their entire lives; a tradition which has continued in the clergy of some of the Church today. Luckily, churches are increasingly ministering to the single people in their congregation.

And this PDF titled, Singleness: The Misunderstood World of Single Adults from RBC talks talks about singleness in the church.

Again here’s Albert Hsu:

Today we need to rediscover the balance of valuing both marrieds and singles. Some of the greatest leaders of church history lived their whole lives as singles: Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Thomas À Kempis, Bernard of Clairvaux. More recently, Protestant leaders such as Methodist circuit rider Francis Asbury, missionaries Amy Carmichael and Helen Roseveare, and German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer were all single. C. S. Lewis was a bachelor for most of his life, married at age 57, was married for only four years, and remained a celibate widower after his wife’s death. British theologian John Stott, now in his 70s and never married, has had a significant worldwide ministry. Mother Teresa spent seven decades serving the poor in India as a single woman.

A truly Christian view of singleness and marriage will honor both without disparaging one or the other.