Thought Exercise on New Testament

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A Life of Discipleship

Author

Keywords

Scripture

Colossians 1:28, Romans 12:2, Acts 11:26, Luke 9:23, John 17:3, Matthew 28:19-20

Jesus didn’t tell his friends, “Go into all the world and make Christians.” But he did tell them to go into the world and make disciples. In fact, the Bible uses the word disciple 269 times. As Dallas...

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We are Artful Dodgers

Author

Søren Kierkegaard

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 29:13, Amos 5:21-24, Proverbs 1:7, James 1:22-25 , Matthew 23:27-28, Psalm 51:16-17

We artful dodgers act as if we do not understand the New Testament, because we realize full well that [if we let on that we did] we should have to change our way of life drastically. That is why we in...

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The World in which Jesus Lived

Author

William H. Marty

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 12:1–3, Exodus 3:1–12, Isaiah 53:, Matthew 22:15–22 , John 4:1–42 , Acts 17:16–34

The world of Jesus was not the Old Testament Hebrew world. Like the United States now, Israel was multicultural, including a combination of Aramaic, Greek, and Roman influences. The people looked Jewi...

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A New Language

Author

William H. Marty

Keywords

Scripture

Ezra 4:7–24, Daniel 2:4–49, Nehemiah 8:1–8, Mark 5:41 , John 19:19–22, Acts 2:1–13

One development of the exile was an additional language for the Jewish people. The Babylonians and Persians spoke Aramaic, and out of necessity the Jews learned it. Some even became more conversant in...

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40,000 Amalekites

Author

Phillip Yancey

Keywords

Scripture

Deuteronomy 25:4, 1 Samuel 15:2-3, Ezekiel 37:1-14, Matthew 5:38-48, John 6:66-69 , Psalm 103:8-12

The experience of Barry Taylor, former rock musician and now pastor, suggests a reason. He told me, “In the early 1970s my best friend became a Jesus freak. I thought he was crazy, so I started search...

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The Meaning of God's First Covenant

Author

Paul E. Little

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 12:1-3, Genesis 15:4-7, Luke 1:72-73, Galatians 3:8, Matthew 26:28

Testament means “covenant,” an alliance between two partners, an “agreement,” a “promise.” The Old Testament covenant was brought to fulfillment in the New Testament. Through Israel, the entire world...

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A Criticism for Higher Criticism in Biblical Studies

Author

Craig Evans

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 55:8-9, Job 38:1-4, Proverbs 3:5-7, Colossians 2:8, John 20:27-29, Psalm 19:1-2

The New Testament scholar Craig Evans makes a compelling observation about how the academy can sometimes hinder the church through overly skeptical scholarship: Some scholars seem to think that th...

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The Resurrection: The First Fact of Our Faith

Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Resurrection

To preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection. Thus people who had heard Paul’s teaching at Athens got the impression that he was talking about two new gods, Jesus and Anastasis (i...

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Sin in the New Testament

Author

Richard Plass and James Cofield

Keywords

Sin

Scripture

Galatians 5:17, 1 Peter 2:25, Romans 8:7, James 4:4, Ephesians 2:1-2, Isaiah 59:2

In the New Testament sin is not merely an individual, privatized transgression of a moral standard (sins is typically used for specific transgressions). It is far more radical than that. Sin is a mist...

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Thirty-one New Testament Descriptions of Sinful Mankind

Author

L. Meredith

Keywords

Sin

Scripture

Ephesians 4:18, John 12:40, 2 Corinthians 4:4, 1 John 2:11, Romans 8:6, Matthew 7:17-18, 1 Timothy 6:5, Matthew 6:23, John 3:19, Romans 1:21, 1 John 1:6-7, John 5:24, Colossians 2:13, 1 Timothy 5:6, 1 John 3:14, Titus 3:3, Isaiah 64:6, Titus 1:15, 2 Peter 2:20, Revelation 22:11, Romans 1:18, Matthew 7:23, Ephesians 2:3, James 4:4, Matthew 6:22, John 3:20, Matthew 7:26, Ephesians 5:15, 1 Peter 2:25, Matthew 6:2, Romans 2:5, Hebrews 3:8, 2 Thessalonians 2:12, 2 Timothy 3:4, 1 John 2:15, Romans 1:30, 1 Timothy 6:4, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5, John 3:35, 2 Timothy 4:4, Acts 7:51, John 8:44, 2 Timothy 3:2, Revelation 3:17, John 3:34, Romans 6:16-17, Romans 1:25, John 8:33, Romans 7:7, 1 Corinthians 6:9

Alienated from God (Eph. 4:18). Blind (John 12:40; 2 Cor. 4:4; 1 John 2:11). Carnally or fleshly minded (Rom. 8:6, 13). Corrupt (Matt. 7:17-18; 1 Tim. 6:5). Darkened (Matt. 6:23; John 3:19; Rom. 1...

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Christ’s Authority is of the Greatest Significance

Author

J. Norval Geldenhuys

Keywords

The fact as such that Jesus possesses supreme divine authority is, even apart from its being acknowledged by all New Testament authors and by the whole of the Early Church, of the greatest significanc...

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An Unfinished Story

Author

Vaughan Roberts

Keywords

Old Testament

Andy’s children are avid readers. He has just bought the latest whodunnit for Matt. Lizzie announces that she wants to read it too. The bookshop is out of stock and Lizzie will accept no substitute, n...

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A Christian Alzheimer’s Disease

Author

Sandra L. Richter

Keywords

Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly,...

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The Surprise and Celebration of Easter

Author

Wesley Hill

Keywords

New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright recalls being at a party once when someone decided to read a portion of the seventeenth-century Prayer Book for laughs. The Prayer Book includes ...

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The New Hunting Dog

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Luke 10:38-42, Matthew 14:28-31, Philippians 3:13-14, Proverbs 4:25-27, James 1:6-8, Hebrews 12:1-2, Matthew 24:13

As we travel through the New Testament, it becomes clear that Jesus’ disciples often get distracted, almost like they have a case of spiritual attention deficit disorder. They quickly lose focus and w...

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His Tree, My Tree

Author

James Merritt

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:1-17

Every year at Christmastime, the world looks back two thousand years to the birth of a baby. But for more than four thousand years, people living on the other side of that birth looked forward to the ...

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Who Were the Amelekites Anyway?

Author

Keywords

Old Testament

The experience of Barry Taylor, former rock musician and now pastor, suggests a reason. He told me, “In the early 1970s my best friend became a Jesus freak. I thought he was crazy, so I started search...

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The Good Fight

Author

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Keywords

Sanctification

The New Testament calls upon us to take action; it does not tell us that the work of sanctification is going to be done for us. . . . We are in the ‘good fight of faith’, and we have to do the fightin...

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An Attempted Refutation of the Gospel

Author

N. T. Wright

Keywords

Scripture

Mark 16:15-16, Philippians 1:6, Acts 16:31, John 1:12-13, Ephesians 2:8-9, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Romans 1:16

[In the middle of the twentieth century a] young Russian communist went to a meeting one night where he heard a Christian expounding his faith. The communist was angry. How could anyone still believe ...

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The Early Church Used “New Technology”

Author

N. T. Wright and Michael Bird

Keywords

Technology

Jesus’ first followers were at the forefront of a new kind of textual technology. From quite early on they used the codex, with sheets stuck together to comprise something like a modern book, rather t...

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Tear it out!

Author

Bryan Chapell

Keywords

Dr. William Evans, who pastored College Church from 1906–1909, was an unusually accomplished man. He had the entire King James Version of the Bible memorized as well as the New Testament of the Americ...

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The Definition of Repentance

Author

Frank Viola

Keywords

Scripture

2 Corinthians 5:17

If you could reduce the gospel to one word, most scholars would choose metanoia—the Greek word translated “repentance” in the New Testament… Most of the time we translate both “meta-noeo” and “meta-no...

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The Place of the Dead

Author

Matthew Y. Emerson

Keywords

When the New Testament speaks about “the dead,” it has a specific background, one that affirms “the [place of the] dead” as a location containing the disembodied souls of both the righteous and unrigh...

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Jumping out of the Bible

Author

Francis Chan

Keywords

The Bible

Scripture

Acts 2:42-47, Matthew 25:35-40, Isaiah 58:10, Luke 14:13-14, James 1:27

In Francis Chan’s latest book “Letters to the Church,” he shares about his first year after leaving his large church in suburban Los Angeles to start something new. It was something Francis himself wa...

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The Lamb at the Center

Author

Derek Vreeland

Keywords

A few years ago, my daily Bible reading had me in Revelation, perhaps the trickiest New Testament book to read and interpret. As I have taught this book in small groups and in sermons, I often advise ...

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A Missional Hermeneutic

Author

Craig Van Gelder

Keywords

James Brownson describes what he calls a “missional hermeneutic” as observed throughout the New Testament: I call the model I am developing a missional hermeneutic because it springs from a basic obs...

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Two Words for Life

Author

Stuart Briscoe

Keywords

Scripture

John 10:10, John 11:25-26, John 1:4, John 14:6, Romans 6:4, 1 John 5:11-12

The Greek language, in which the New Testament was written, has two words for life. One ( bios ) means “mere biological existence”; the other ( zoe ) means “lie in all its fullness.” What we are being...

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Defining Epiphany: A Manifestation

Author

Fleming Rutledge

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 42:1-9 , Exodus 4:1-17, 1 Kings 18:20-39 , Matthew 3:13-17, John 2:1-11, Psalm 72:18-19

Epiphaneia in New Testament Greek means manifestation. An effective method of teaching the content of the faith, not often enough used, is to instruct congregations in the texts of the seasonal hym...

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Ekklesia: The Work of the People

Author

Mike Cosper

Keywords

The Greek word for the gathered church offers some insight into how the apostles saw their gatherings. Though the language offered a variety of options for words to describe the gathering church, the ...

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The Global Church Stewarding Resources Together

Author

Brian Fikkert & Russell Mask

Keywords

Scripture

Acts 11:29 – 30, Romans 15:23 – 33; 1 , 1 Corinthians 16:1 – 4; 2 , 2 Corinthians 8:9, Romans 15:30 – 31, 2 Corinthians 8:13 – 15

The Bible envisions the global church as one body with no national or geographic boundaries. This one body is called to steward all of its resources — spiritual, human, technological, theological, org...

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