Pursuing a holistic expression of Christian faith that is true to the Bible and applicable for today’s world.
Once Reserved for Prophets, Now All People Can Have Visions from God A friend asked me about hearing from God and of visions from God. I often think about hearing from the Holy Spirit, but I infrequently consider visions, even though visions are one way that God communicates with us. Visions in the Bible Mentions […]
In Baptism, We Turn from Sin, Follow Jesus, and Receive the Holy Spirit Another concept that only appears in the New Testament is baptize and baptism. Baptize occurs fifty times, and its counterpart baptism appears twenty-one times. These two words often show up in the Bible’s four biographies of Jesus and especially in the book […]
When We Take Communion It’s to Remember What Jesus Did for Us The Lord’s Supper is another phrase found only in the New Testament. This isn’t surprising since Jesus instituted this practice when he taught it to his disciples at Passover. Most Christian churches follow Jesus’s command to celebrate the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:19), though […]
Some People Blindly Accept Church Rhetoric, but They Risk Going Down a Dangerous Path We’ve all heard stories of people taken in and indoctrinated by cults. Though some stories end happily after they extricate themselves from the control the cult, too many situations end badly. There are many common characteristics to help us identify cults […]
The Broken Bread at the First Communion Represented Jesus’s Body The phrases breaking bread, break bread, and broke bread only appear in the New Testament. And they only show up eleven times, appearing in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, and 1 Corinthians. Should we understand this idea of breaking bread as a euphemism for Communion or […]
Discover the Origin of Having a Local Place of Worship Another interesting word that occurs only in the New Testament is synagogues. Appearing sixty-six times, it’s in all four gospels, a lot in the book of Acts, and twice in Revelation. That’s it. Notably the word synagogue does not appear in the Old Testament. Where […]
Disunity Today Hurts the Cause of Jesus In our consideration of words that appear only in the New Testament, we come across Pharisees and Sadducees. Two related words are Zealot and Nazarene, along with Essene. Pharisees Appearing ninety-nine times in the New Testament, the Pharisees receive the most attention. They were a righteous group of […]
Some of the Bible’s Most Significant Words Don’t Appear in the Old Testament I use the Bible to study the Bible. That is, I tap one passage to help breathe understanding into another. Sometimes when investigating a specific term, I do a word search to find out where else and how else Scripture uses it. […]
At a meeting, someone mentioned “the Acts 15 experience.” Everyone else seemed to comprehend the reference, so I chose to not interrupt by asking for an explanation. Since then I’ve read Acts 15 and searched online for answers. (An online search provided only a handful of matches, which weren’t helpful.) As I contemplate this, I’ve […]
I recently visited a church that upheld Acts 2:42-47 as their model for church. Shocked, I checked the passage to make sure I remembered it correctly. Here is what the Acts 2 church looks like: Their Four Keys The church in Acts 2 has four priorities: studying good teaching, hanging out, sharing meals, and praying […]