Thinking Girls Bible Study

Recent events in our world have reminded me of the time in which I grew up. A week ago I was preparing my next lesson to teach the fourth and fifth graders at my church. The designated lesson is about Paul’s third missionary journey. I knew this would be a great lesson to tie in what we had just witnessed with the assassination of Charlie Kirk and his testimony and witness. Initially, I was going to start out by saying how much harder it is for kids today to be witnessing all this violence and hatred and how the world was different for them than it was for me and even my co-teacher who happens to be my daughter-in-law from the Millennial generation. But then I remembered the day when I was nine years old and had stayed home from school because I was sick. I was watching TV when they broke into the regularly scheduled program to announce that President Kennedy had been shot. We had already witnessed the Cuban Missile Crises. Over the course of the next few years, we would live through m...

The biggest fight is here and you are a contender. The book of Jude was written “to those who are called, sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ.” In other words, it was written to believers. Jude started out to write about our common salvation, but was then compelled to exhort us to contend earnestly for the faith which was once delivered to the Saints. As always, we will look at the original Greek and Hebrew words to get a better understanding of this exhortation to believers, beginning with verse 3: “Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Emphasis mine.) The Greek word for exhorting you is parakaleō . In the Blue Letter Bible Outline for Biblical Use we see “to call to one's side, call for, summon. To address, speak to, (call to, call upon), which may be done in the way of exhort...