Tools for Soul Development

by Tom Goodman

What are the best “tools” for developing your soul? Last Sunday, we began a series of Sunday messages designed to answer that question.

Across the next few weeks we’ll show you how to…

…explore the Bible,

…explore prayer,

…explore church, and

…explore grace

We begin this Sunday with the role that the Bible plays in soul development.

Maybe you’re stalled in your spiritual search or your spiritual growth because you doubt the Bible's dependability. Anne Rice was like that. For 30 years she was a popular writer of novels involving vampires and witches. She said her writing “reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God.” And then Anne Rice came to Christ.

It began by studying the Bible during her frequent periods of depression. But even after placing her faith in Jesus, she wondered about the reliability of the Bible. So Rice began to research the New Testament era. She started with the writings of skeptical and liberal historians, perhaps assuming like much of our culture that they would be more objective than conservative scholars. She said she “expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud.”

The opposite occurred. “What gradually came clear to me,” she wrote, “was that many of the skeptical arguments -- arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts -- lacked coherence....Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.”

This Sunday, I'm going give you five reasons you can be confident that the Bible supplies reliable information about the life and teaching of Jesus. I’m going to show you why you can trust that…

…contemporaries of Jesus wrote the New Testament

…the Bible was faithfully copied

…archaeology verifies the stories of the Bible

…the presentation of truth is consistent throughout the Bible

…the church carefully selected what writings counted as “scripture”

The Bible faithfully gets you straight to the words and deeds of Jesus. Come Sunday at 10 to find out more.