Meyer Witness Essentials

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8308-6979-4
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten

Reihe: The Essentials Set

We know the radical difference the gospel of Jesus Christ makes, and we want others to see and enjoy its benefits. In fact, we don't want them to just pray a prayer and move on to the next interesting thing. We want them to sink their roots deeply into the grace of God. So often, though, we feel that we are inadequate to this important task--that we don't know enough or that we will offend our friends. Daniel Meyer has provided the tools you need to move forward: - the basics of the gospel message - the role of life change in our witness - how to present the good news The Bible studies, exercises and readings in this book will deepen your personal faith and equip you to minister to others with a new sense of confidence and calling.

Daniel Meyer (M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary) is senior pastor at Christ Church of Oak Brook in Oak Brook, Illinois. Dan's sermons are heard weekly on Chicago radio and television stations. They are also frequently featured in Christianity Today's Preaching Today resource. Additionally, Dan is the host of television's Life Focus news program. He serves on the Dean's Advisory Board of Fuller Theological Seminary's School of Intercultural Studies. He has been an adjunct teaching resource for the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meyer, Daniel

Leseproben

1

Believe in the Call and Power of God

Looking Ahead

MEMORY VERSE: Acts 1:8

Bible Study: Hebrews 11:1–12:3

Reading: The Spreading Life

 Core Truth

What is the life-changing call and promise that Jesus gives to his disciples?

No less than the first disciples, we are called by Jesus and empowered by his Spirit to play a personally active role in the ultimately unstoppable expansion of Christ’s life-redeeming influence, until that coming day when God completes the renewal of his creation. There is no vocation more significant and satisfying than being a witness to the life-changing love of Jesus Christ.

1. Identify key words or phrases in the question and answer above, and state their meaning in your own words.

2. Restate the core truth in your own words.

3. What questions or issues does the core truth raise for you?

 Memory Verse Study Guide

Copy the entire text here:

Memory Verse: Acts 1:8

The last words that people speak before leaving loved ones are often very significant. On the last day of his earthly ministry, Jesus issued a specific charge and promise to his disciples concerning the role they would play in his ongoing work in the world. These words are of profound significance for all of us who seek to follow Christ today.

1. Putting it in context: Read Acts 1:1-11. What do you imagine the disciples may be thinking and feeling as they stand with Jesus in this scene?

2. According to Acts 1:1-3, what reason would the disciples have for trusting the promise that Jesus makes to them in verse 8?

3. In verses 4-5, Jesus issues a very specific instruction to his disciples. Why was this command and promise important to the work he would ultimately do through them?

4. Jesus tells his disciples that they will be his witnesses. When you read that word, what images come to mind?

5. In verse 8, Jesus describes four spheres in which his disciples are to be his witnesses. What are those spheres?

6. What might be the equivalent environments in your life?

7. How have these verses spoken to you?

Inductive Bible Study Guide

Bible Study: Hebrews 11:1–12:3

The book of Hebrews describes the glorious heritage of faithfulness to God and by God in which followers of Jesus stand. This history is instructive to believers in the present as we face the challenges and opportunities of witnessing to Christ in our time.

Deep in our hearts, we all want to find and fulfill a purpose bigger than ourselves. Only such a larger purpose can inspire us to heights we know we could never reach on our own. For each of us the real purpose is personal and passionate: to know what we are here to do and why.

Os Guinness

1. Read Hebrews 11:1–12:3. How would you define faith and its importance in light of Hebrews 11:1-2?

2. What are the common characteristics (e.g., circumstances, convictions, conduct) of the faithful people described in chapter 11?

3. Review Hebrews 11:39-40. These verses suggest that though they did not experience the fulfillment of all that God had promised, these disciples kept their faith. How easy or hard do you find this kind of faithfulness in your life?

4. Review Hebrews 12:1-2. What are the specific instructions we are given in these verses and the realities the writer cites to motivate this behavior?

5. Review Hebrews 12:3. What are the two dangers the writer is trying to warn us about as we seek to be like Jesus and the “cloud of witnesses” who have gone before us?

6. As you consider your calling to be a witness in the cause of Christ, what could make you “grow weary” or “lose heart” (Hebrews 12:3)?

7. What questions or issues does this passage raise for you?

Reading: The Spreading Life

The Seed of Death?

When it comes to sharing the gospel today, many of us frankly feel somewhat apathetic or insecure. One reason for this deficit is the absence of a clear and accurate picture of the role that the Christian mission and people like us have played in the great sweep of history. Renewing that vision is the aim of this chapter.

This quest for the truth becomes more urgent in light of the particular version of history being advanced by a variety of articulate atheists or “anti-theists” today. They assert that a seri-ous study of the past demonstrates that Christianity—along with other religious beliefs—is not benevolent, or merely benign, but actually bad. It is antiquated, superstitious and ultimately destructive. It is responsible for incalculable bloodshed, unforgivable injustice and mind-numbing ignorance. Far from being a blessing to human civilization, “faith” has been a blight to human advancement. One of the “new atheists” sums up the conclusion this way: “I can’t believe there is a thinking person here who doesn’t realize that our species would begin to grow to something like its full height . . . if it emancipated itself from this sinister, childish [religious] nonsense.”[1]

Although this opinion is being peddled with fresh packaging today it is hardly new. This view of history first gained prominence back in the late eighteenth century with the widespread reading of Edward Gibbon’s book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon caricatured Christianity as having brought down the grandeur of classical civilization—fettering the human spirit and the life of the mind to which Greece and Rome gave birth. As Christ-ianity expanded, says Gibbon, it weakened the Roman Empire, paving the way for the church to take over and subject the Western world to its superstitions and regressive rules.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Proverbs 29:18 KJV

As this storyline goes, the church went on to ban books, suppress science and womanhood, and plunge once-noble Europe into the Dark Ages. Bent on taxing people to fund their material and moral excesses, the church’s leadership crusaded across the Middle Ages, skewering infidels, racking skeptics and burning dissidents. Thankfully, however, some courageous intellectuals finally revolted against the church’s Darth Vader–like grip and birthed the Renaissance. They followed it up with the magnificent Enlightenment, staving back blind religion. In time, thank Man’s goodness, these bright thinkers managed to invent the modern era and bring us to the present moment when—if with John Lennon we dare to imagine—we can be free of the Christian disease once and for all and enter a new age of progress and peace. In fact, we would have had that better world a whole lot earlier if that Easter hoax had never happened.

This is what is being taught as “history.” Can you see why people steeped in this tale might be resistant to the Christian message or discouraged about sharing it with others?

The Enemy Is Partly Right

As we’ll see, however, this storyline is quite a revision of history. Before going there, however, it would serve God’s reputation and our credibility well to make the same confession once voiced by Tony Campolo: “We have met the enemy and they are partly right.”[2] Jesus once said that only the truth can set us fully free to be his people (John 8:32). The painful truth is that atheism has a foothold today in part because there have been many times in history when people of Christian faith (or marching beneath some other religion’s flag) have sinned boldly against God and people. Whether by ignorance, pride, greed or some other deadly sin, they have repeated the very atrocities by which ostensibly religious people crucified Jesus because he threatened their institutional power or personal throne.

Over the centuries, Christians have at times been racially, sexually, politically and socially bigoted in ways contrary to the full counsel of Scripture. We have sometimes looked to our own interests more than to the character of Christ or the needs of the world God so loves. We have justified our actions by selective reading of the Bible. If we’ve grown up believing that the Christian church or our Christian nation or anything other than Christ himself is substantially holier than everyone else, then the attacks of contemporary atheists are actually God’s good gift. They invite us to recall that we too need the Savior and that he is not done renovating our lives.

The greatest challenge facing the church in any age is the creation of a living, breathing, witnessing colony of truth. . . . The challenge is to allow ourselves to be so utterly shaped and filled by the holy culture of the Kingdom of God that wherever we are—whether gathered together in worship here or scattered for service elsewhere—we never lose our distinctiveness. To meet one of us in the...