Nov 16, 2010

Bible Studies at Parish


Every morning at Parish before we get busy working we take time to study the Bible and pray.
Lately in our study of the Bible, we have been working through it book by book.  When I first started working here we began by looking at Proverbs. Before I arrived the men worked through Ephesians and before that the Gospels. After Proverbs we decided to start making our way through different parts of the Bible to get a better background of the story and history of the Bible.  We started working through Genesis and then Exodus.  Our study of Exodus made for many interesting conversations on worship and how God describes in great detail how He wants the temple to be built.  After Exodus we made our way through Acts and studied the beginning of the Christian Church. Following Acts we went back to pick up after Exodus in reading through Leviticus.  In our journey through Leviticus this question often came up, “If God required these things to be perpetual, why don’t we continue doing them today?”  In an attempt to answer this question, I decided to ask another question, “Why did the pharisees want to crucify Jesus?”  Also, “Why did they want to kill Paul?”  Now we are making our way through answering that question. To show the cohesiveness of scripture, we start by looking at Jeremiah 31 with the promise of the New Covenant. We sat down to listen to Jesus in his sermon on the mount where he made a point to say that He did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.  After that we took at look at Jesus’ initiation of the Lord’s supper and claiming that his own blood was that New Covenant. We followed that up with a skim through Galatians that ended today.  Galatians will prove to take much time in deep study to understand the depth of what Paul is getting in the contrast between the law and the promise. For instance, “what does it mean that we are free from the law if we are in Christ?” Before we dig in deeper through Galatians we plan to study the book of Hebrews to understand more about who Jesus was and what the Bible tells us about Him.

Nov 15, 2010

Happy Birthday!



We celebrated Sam's birthday last week. Meg worked super hard and made it a fun party.

Resurrection Hope

Why does the Christian perspective seem so weird? Why does gospel teaching seem so disconnected and impractical? It is only weird and impra...