What you need to know about salvation, repackage: 12 Lessons That Can Change Your Life (What You Need to Know Study Guide) - Softcover

Anders, Max

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1418550302 ISBN 13: 9781418550301

Verlag: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Bad news first: everyone is born lost. Now the good news: Jesus saves! Simple enough. But today’s secular and new age optimism blinds many to the reality that we need a Savior. And even some who come to Christ don’t fully understand the stupendous treasure God gives when He saves them. What You Need to Know about Salvation will fortify your confidence in the salvation you’ve received and help you experience more of its infinite riches. You’ll thrill at the drama of redemption as it unfolds through Scripture: the glory of creation, the tragedy of sin and the Fall, the provision of salvation in Jesus Christ, and its application today through the Holy Spirit. And you’ll be moved to worship your Savior and share the good news with others.

Features include:

• 12 lessons you can complete in under one hour each
• Real-life application of biblical truth
• Explanations of prominent Christian views on the topic
• Easy-to-teach resources, including previews and summary features
• Questions for discussion
• Core teachings on Christianity that will challenge any seeker, new believer, or veteran believer looking for a stronger foundation

 

What You Need to Know study guides sold to date: More than 200,000

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Max Anders is the author of over 25 books, including the bestselling 30 Days to Understanding the Bible, and is the creator and general editor of the 32-volume Holman Bible Commentary series. He has taught on the college and seminary level and is a veteran pastor.  Max provides resources and discipleship strategies at www.maxanders.com to help people grow spiritually.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SALVATION

12 LESSONS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE By MAX ANDERS

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2013 Max Anders
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4185-5030-1

Contents

Introduction to the What You Need to Know Series..............................5How to Teach This Book........................................................7Chapter 1 Who Are We, and Where Did We Come From?.............................9Chapter 2 What Is Special about Humanity?.....................................23Chapter 3 What Went Wrong with Creation?......................................35Chapter 4 How Has God Chosen to Fix a Broken Creation?........................47Chapter 5 Do I Really Need to Be Saved?.......................................61Chapter 6 What Must I Do to Be Saved?.........................................75Chapter 7 What Happens When I Am Saved?.......................................87Chapter 8 What Is the New Life?...............................................97Chapter 9 How Amazing Is Grace?...............................................107Chapter 10 What Is My Relationship to the Body of Christ?.....................121Chapter 11 Am I Secure in God's Love?.........................................133Chapter 12 How Do I Pass On the Good News?....................................147Bibliography..................................................................161Master Review.................................................................163About the Author..............................................................169

Chapter One

WHO ARE WE, AND WHERE DID WE COME FROM?

When God scooped up a handful of dust, And spit on it, and molded the shape of man, And blew a breath into it and told it to walk—That was a great day. —Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

A radio commentator for the Metropolitan Opera, after giving a plot synopsis of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, made an interesting comment. She remarked that she felt the opera was appealing, in spite of its tragedy, because it was asking life's basic questions: "Who am I?" "How did things get so bad?" and "Who is going to come and rescue us?" Even though she was speaking from a completely secular viewpoint, and offered no indication that she had any idea of possible answers, she was right about the basic questions. Those are the questions that every human being asks, sooner or later. We feel a deep need to know whether we are here for a reason, whether anyone cares, and whether this life is as good as it gets. We seem to have an innate recognition that "all is not as it should be," but we may not be sure what's missing.

Foundational in the search for meaning and purpose is the understanding of where we came from. Did we come about by accident? Or did Someone put us here on this earth for a reason? How can we know?

WHERE DID WE COME FROM?

Human beings and the world in which we live are God's special creation, not the result of random, impersonal chance.

Today, anyone who has gone to school knows that we basically have two choices to believe in when we look at the question of origins. Either we came about by chance—random processes, following some kind of mysterious "Big Bang" that started the universe in motion—or we were specially created by God. Of course, attempts have been made to meld these two opposing views, but it is not the purpose of this study to examine those options. Rather, let us look at the two ideas: (1) God does not exist, and man came about by chance, or (2) God created man.

Some dedicated Darwinists carry their thinking out to its logical conclusion and deny both the existence of God and the idea of there being any meaning at all to the universe. One of the most articulate of these, Richard Dawkins, puts it thus:

Theologians worry away at the "problem of evil" and a related "problem of suffering." On the day I originally wrote this paragraph, the British newspapers all carried a terrible story about a bus full of children from a Roman Catholic school that crashed for no obvious reason, with wholesale loss of life. Not for the first time, clerics were in paroxysms over the theological question that a writer on a London newspaper (The Sunday Telegraph) framed this way: "How can you believe in a loving, all-powerful God who allows such a tragedy?" The article went on to quote one priest's reply: "The simple answer is that we do not know why there should be a God who lets these awful things happen. But the horror of the crash, to a Christian, confirms the fact that we live in a world of real values: positive and negative. If the universe was just electrons, there would be no problem of evil or suffering."

On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither know nor care.

DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View Of Life, 132–133)

While this viewpoint does eliminate any possibility of an uncomfortable responsibility to a Creator, it still fails to answer a very important point. If the universe is really "just electrons" and there is "no evil and no good," then where do our ideas of evil and good come from? Why do humans long so passionately for justice, if there is no such thing? Dawkins is absolutely correct that in a universe of "blind, pitiless indifference" we should expect to see senseless tragedy. The point the priest was making seems to have been missed. If the universe were really just electrons, we would have no problem with the pain and suffering around us. It would simply be, neither good nor evil. The fact that we do have a problem with it, that it makes us question and struggle, is one of the things that point us to looking for deeper meaning to our existence than mere chance random processes.

C. S. Lewis puts it like this:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because a man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thomas Nelson Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1418550302
• ISBN 13: 9781418550301
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland