Bible Studies/Downloads

The Code Key

All God wants from us is to believe–to bet our lives on all that He has said, especially what He has said about who He is (Yahweh) and who we are to Him. From start to finish, our experience and relationship with God is about faith: actively believing the truth.

Are you tired of what seems to often be just a one way dialogue with you crying out and praying to God and there seems to be just silence on the other end of the line? Are you frustrated at not knowing whether or not God is even listening to you, must less responding to what you are saying?  Maybe you are facing some very important decisions in your life and you just want Him to tell you which way to go: either to the right or to the left. Maybe you are a person who wants to do what God wants you to do, but you are not sure how to get His attention.

To the surprise of many, God wants to have an in-depth personal relationship with us, which requires active and ongoing communication. And yes, God does speak. He wants to talk to you about everything in your life, but learning to hear His voice and understand His leading comes by way of an active relationship that is rooted in belief.

We are commanded by Jesus to love each other. In fact, Jesus equates our loving each other with the fulfillment of all of His commandments.

Love is to be our life and the very fulfillment of all that God desires of us–all of His requirement for perfection is attained in this one verb–to love. In fact, we are never more like Jesus than we love each other with God’s divine agape love. Therefore, it is extremely important that we understand this word–agape–and what it means in all of its vast context so that we might love as we have been loved.

The gospel of John is simply stunning. It is a story which depicts intimacy, trust, communication, relationship, love, and obedience, as Jesus only did what the Father wanted Him to do, only said what the Father wanted Him to say, and only went where the Father sent Him, and then only WHEN the Father wanted Him to do or say something or to go somewhere. This story will change your life one-way-or-another. and introduce you to the kind of relationship that Jesus wants us to have with the Father.

A look at the book of Ephesians through the lens of the Song of Solomon. In the book of Ephesians we get a perspective of who we are from God’s vantage point; it’s a top down view of His love for us from eternity past. Whereas the Song of Solomon captures this love and expresses, in our language, the passion and absolute adoration God has, and has always had, for us.

This letter was written because of the great oppression and persecution from friends, family, and community members, which these believers lived under. It was a letter of encouragement, HOPE, and exhortation that despite the horrors they were enduring, they had chosen not just the better path, but the best path. They followed the one–Jesus–who is incomparable and greater than all. Therefore the thought of returning to religion, to a system that was dead and dying, in an attempt to end the pain was beyond foolish despite its physical and practical benefits. There is so much HOPE in knowing that many had walked this same path through the valley of the shadow of death, and had decided that it was worth it to know Jesus and the fellowship of His suffering so they might live in the power of His resurrection.

1 Peter is filled with critical truths which the Spirit of God wants to cement deeply in our hearts and minds. The truths will not be new, but the Spirit wants us to own and completely possess these truths. He wants them to be to us a firm-bedrock, a solid foundation, upon which our lives and our fellowship is built.

Peter said he wrote to 1) encourage believers, and 2) assure them that what they were experiencing in their lives was truly a part of God’s grace for them. As such, he exhorted these believers to stand firm in this grace. It is clear that these believers needed a perspective shift. They were suffering, going through life’s troubles, and they did not understand why they had to continually experience such difficulty. They were seeing the events of their lives through the lens of this world and what they hoped to get out of this life. The Spirit, however, wanted them to see all things from a heavenly perspective—by fixing their eyes, minds, hearts, and souls on who they are to God and the glorious destiny that awaited them.

Jesus spoke a lot about His Kingdom and how it invades this physical realm on earth. Yet, even then, this concept of the Kingdom, what it is, how to describe it, who belongs to it, how it operates on this earth, how it relates to humanity, how it relates to the enemy, how it relates to the Beloved, and so on, can seem like a very amorphous and intangible concept. Not surprisingly, the subject matter of the Kingdom is linked tightly to the study in 1 Peter and what it means to live like an alien and stranger in this world. We belong to an entirely different kingdom that not only exists in a different realm but operates within this realm with entirely different rules and priorities.

The Lord wants His Kingdom to become so real to us and so firmly tangible that we live in this world like so few have ever lived. He wants us to understand it, grasp it, embrace it, and live in it. He wants us to see it as He sees it and enjoy it the way it is to be enjoyed.