Foursquare Pastor Daniel Brown offers useful tips for approaching God’s Word.

All of us have encountered verses and statements in the Bible that confuse or alarm us because they seem to be saying something that sounds so unlike the Lord, so different than how we have experienced Him in our personal life. When that happens, what can we do to at least begin to look at those passages from a more helpful perspective?

Here are a few suggestions for better understanding the Bible:

1. Relax in the assurance that what you do not understand now, you will understand in the future. Don’t get “stuck” on something that you do not fully understand. Just keep reading, and focus on verses that make obvious sense to you today.
2. Read the Bible in light of God’s goodness, kindness and graciousness. Any understanding that paints God in a different light is an incomplete or an inaccurate interpretation.
3. Everything in the Scriptures, if understood correctly, will “build you up”—encouraging and strengthening you—and add to your awareness of all the spiritual resources and provisions the Lord gives as your inheritance (Acts 20:32)
4. Be sure to read the passage in its full context—looking at what has happened before, and what transpires afterwards; those bookends explain a lot.
5. Be careful to catch all the details of the text; what the Bible actually does and does not say is often quite different from what we infer or imagine it says.
6. Look at the cross-references; they will take you to similar or parallel passages elsewhere in the Bible. The whole Bible is the best lens through which to look at any portion of the whole.
7. Get the literal story firmly in your mind before you start drawing conclusions or trying to generalize from a single episode. What happened in one historic situation does not necessarily imply anything about the future situations.
8. Maintain a posture of humility. There may be things that you cannot understand about what God does/says; His plans and activities are often too deep or too high for us to grasp with our limited human brain (Psalm 92:5; Isaiah 55:8-9). Count on the fact that God knows more, loves more and does more that we could ever fully realize.

Image: Aaron Burden

In addition to these specific suggestions, it is hugely helpful to simply pray, asking Jesus to give you the understanding and awareness you need for your walk with Him today. As obvious as it sounds, remember that we cannot learn/know everything at once, right away. We grow in our spiritual understanding; a steady diet of Bible reading will absolutely guarantee that you will digest all the spiritual nutrients you need for a healthy life.

Lastly, train your heart to echo David’s prayer, as he was trying to understand spiritual matters: “Make me know Your ways, O Lord, teach me Your paths; lead me in Your truth and teach me for You are the God of my salvation” (Psalm 25:4-5).

Originally from www.coastlands.org, used with permission of the author.

Dick Brogden: Live Dead was birthed out of a desire to see teams planting churches among every unreached people group (UPG) in East Africa. At the time, my wife and I were leading a multi-cultural church planting team in Northern Sudan and our Area Leader (Greg Beggs) asked that we develop that model so that we could reach all UPGs in East Africa.

As we looked across the area, we realized that the unreached were located in places like Somalia, Djibouti, Northern Sudan, the Comoros Islands, and Eritrea – in other words, places that were difficult to access, difficult to evangelize, and difficult to plant churches. The UPG contexts of East Africa were hostile in climate – both physically and spiritually. We further realized that we needed many missionaries for many peoples.

And in the night, the Lord woke Charity up with that expression: Live Dead

To Live Dead is nothing new. Galatians 2:20 talks about being crucified with Christ. This idea is in John 12:24, being the seed that dies to bear much grain. Paul speaks of dying daily. Every Christian everywhere is meant to take up their cross and follow Jesus. If the crucified life is expected of every Christian, then the missionary called to take the gospel to unreached peoples is not exempt. We felt that by challenging God’s people to live dead we could be honest about the challenge and the difficulty of reaching the unreached, while at the same time be unapologetically Biblical.

PneumaReview.com: What is the primary mission of Live Dead?

Dick Brogden: We have one single-eyed focus: Planting Churches among Unreached Peoples through Teams. We call these our non negotiable aspects (CP – UPG – Team). They are undergirded by 12 values that we collect in three core values: ABIDE (intimacy with Jesus), APOSTLE (take the Gospel where it has not gone), ABANDON (pay whatever price is necessary).

PneumaReview.com: You started in East Africa, where in the world are you operating today?

Dick Brogden: Live Dead has eight areas we are currently active in: Sub-Saharan Africa, The Arab World, Israel and Palestine, Central Eurasia, Russia, Iran, India, and China.

Garrett J. DeWeese and J.P. Moreland, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult: A Beginner’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2005), 170 pages.

Over the last two centuries the confidence of Christians in the reasonableness and credibility of their faith has met significant challenges from a number of quarters. With the almost wholesale acceptance of a naturalistic account of the origin of our species, and a growing conviction that science can explain everything about the world without the need to invoke the “spooky” supernatural, the floodwaters of unbelief have been rising about the Church on all sides, greedily devouring the grounds for faith and certainty. All the evidence, we are told, points to the non-existence of a benevolent God, the obsolescence of religion, and the absence of any justifiable grounds for the Christian hope of the resurrection.

However, the authors of Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult are convinced that the real nature of the challenge that faces us today “is not really scientific or theological or anthropological, but philosophical.” It is how modern man thinks about science and the universe that skews his view of the Christian faith as something irrelevant and outmoded. We wrestle not against evidence from laboratories, but against materialism, against scientism, against the naturalistic worldview of the West, against doctrines and ideas that have become entrenched in the modern mind chiefly through the Church’s neglect of the intellectual life.

Moreland and DeWeese seek to redress this problem by making philosophy more accessible to laymen, and by providing the outlines of a Christian perspective on a number of important philosophical issues, including ethics, metaphysics, the mind-body problem, philosophy of science and epistemology—all that in a mere 170 pages! As one who is still very much a beginner in these things, I am, perhaps, reasonably well positioned to make some sort of judgement as to whether or not they have succeeded in opening up these areas of inquiry to non-experts.

There are, I think, at least two sorts of pits into which a project of this sort may stray. On the one hand, in its efforts to achieve accessibility it may produce something so superficial that it is basically of no help to anybody; its contents are grasped easily enough because it avoids saying anything very important. On the other hand, in its attempts to attain conciseness, clarity and simplicity may be dispensed with altogether; the writers dash from one difficult problem to the next, without ever really explaining to anybody’s satisfaction what exactly it is they are talking about.

Perhaps it is inevitable that such a project as this one should gravitate towards one or the other of these two extremes. Philosophy is a difficult subject, and a genuine grasp of even the basics is not something to be had in a weekend’s read. In my estimation, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult attempts to bite off more than can be chewed in a single paperback of these proportions, producing an uneven volume that varies noticeably in perspicuity and in its level of difficulty across the different chapters. Whilst some sections should be quite comprehensible for the beginner (for example, the chapter on philosophy of science), other parts prove much less digestible (such as the discussion of the mind-body problem) without a prior acquaintance with the subject matter. This is rather frustrating for the beginner, who might have walked away with a better understanding of some of the issues, had the authors contented themselves with saying a little more about a little less.

Norma Cook Everist, ed. The Difficult but Indispensable Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 262 pages.

This book is a collaboration of members of the Wartburg Theological Seminary and includes 21 individual authors. Their goal is not to develop a cohesive, monolithic work, but to examine the (local) church from many different personal viewpoints and academic disciplines. The structure of the book is intended to mirror a local church: diverse, dynamic and didactic.

Wartburg is a seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The terminology and references reflect that background. Still, it’s easy to see how the ideas and concepts would apply to almost all church bodies.

The writers speak their minds freely in their articles. As instructors in theology, targeting Pastors and other church readers, this work is heavily theological and intellectual in its language and approach. Still, there is valuable insight among the pages.

The book is divided into four major parts: individuals, faith foundations, church mission and church diversity. The articles within each part address the subject from a variety of personal and professional viewpoints. The expertise/professions of authors within a specific book section vary widely. Theologians, counselors and church theorists all shine a different, and revealing light on their chosen subject.

“Re-Membering The Body Of Christ,” article 5, examines the nature of an appealing local body. Professor Everist discusses trends among modern church-goers, and the nature of local churches that retain them. Her analysis is based in Scripture and observation.

One conclusion of the article is not unexpected: modern church bodies must be prepared to “reinvent” themselves to appeal to the unchurched. Another conclusion is somewhat surprising: modern churches must cling to the fundamentals of the Gospel fiercely and rely on God’s power all the more.

An interesting analysis of the local church and American culture was made in Article 17, “American Civil Religion: A De Facto Church.” American civil religion is a body of Christian influenced morals, ethics and beliefs that are a quasi-religion in themselves. The unique laws and history of the United States helped spawn this “institution” and our “open society” maintains it.

Professor Fjeld asserts that Christians and local churches are often influenced, or overwhelmed, by “American civil religion.” Willingly linked to the Bible, but not centered in Christ, American civil religion is a competitor with true Christianity. Its “gospel” tends toward wealth and self-reliance, rather than Godly grace or submission to Jesus Christ.

Article 18, “Imagining The New Community In Christ,” examines the issues and challenges of a culturally, racially or ethnically diverse local church body. How does a church body function together when they lack a dominant culture or common history? Is it possible to be effective, vibrant and distinctive under such circumstances?