Thanks to all who have conveyed their well-wishes today. Your encouragement means more than you have any way of knowing.

These days, I have a pretty clear idea of the work that is mine to do before my time runs out. So I’d better get busy and get back to it . . .

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

This material grew out of my research for a lecture that I was asked to present at the 2007 Truth Magazine Lectures. Job had always been a favorite study, and I found this lecture fascinating to prepare.

The PDF is 29 pages, containing the original lecture and also the same material in the form of an outline. The PDF is free — all you have to do is download it. The link is:

http://wordpoints.com/bible-study/textual-studies/

Over the next few months, we’ll be adding other PDFs to our free downloads. We hope they’ll be useful in your Bible study.

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

WITH THE PAGES THAT I WROTE TODAY, I AM HALFWAY FINISHED!

I began in May of 1999, and so it has taken me 12 years to reach the halfway point. I hope to be finished by the time I am 70 years old in 2020, so that leaves me only 9 more years to complete the second half of the work. Thanks to the generous financial support of several congregations and individuals, I now have more time to write than I did in the first 12 years, so I believe that I can be done by 2020, Lord willing.

If I finish this work in a total of 21 years, it will have taken me as long to write these books as it took the Egyptians to build the Great Pyramids. Whew!

Well, I’d better go. I’ve got some more writing to do. :)

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

My topic has been an exciting one to prepare. Restoration is a crucially important concept, and many of us have been thinking about it all of our lives. Despite the attention we have paid to it, however, I believe we have a tendency to veer off in two directions: either we suppose that no more restoration is needed (as if the Lord’s church has now been perfectly restored and will remain that way for all time to come) or in our zeal to get back closer to New Testament Christianity, we start fixing things that aren’t broken. The challenge is to CONTINUE the work of restoration without doing things that actually make the situation WORSE.

When it comes to restoration, I believe there are some things that both the “traditionalists” and the “progressives” among us need to hear, and I will try to say some of those things. Following the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, the temple was rebuilt and the worship of the Lord was reinstituted, but by Malachi’s day it was the restorers themselves who needed restoring. So I will suggest the possibility that in our day IT MAY BE WE, THE RESTORERS, WHO NEED RESTORING. It may be our own HEARTS — rather than the externals of our worship services — that need to be worked on.

If you are going to be at the lecture program, I hope that we get a chance to visit. See you there!

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

The problem is that Kinkade has, apparently, departed from his earlier principles and convictions. At least he seems to have been living inconsistently with those convictions, if the news reports are true. As I prepared today’s reading, I had to ask myself, “Do I still quote Kinkade, now that he has dishonored the truths that he used to be known for?”

Well, if I removed the quotation from Kinkade because, as one person said, “he has turned out to be a hypocrite,” I would also have to remove any quotations from Solomon, who became a wicked man and departed from his earlier way of life much more dramatically than Thomas Kinkade.

As a hopeful person, I cherish the thought that Solomon may have returned to God before he died, and likewise, I have chosen not to give up on Thomas Kinkade just because his foot has slipped. I hope that he will repent of whatever wrongdoings he has gotten himself involved in.

But here is what I have decided: the truth is still the truth, even if someone has quit living it. And if someone spoke a truth in a particularly apt way, then those words still stand, even if the messenger has fallen. The beauty and power of the truth do not depend on the personal faithfulness — or the eternal salvation — of the messenger.

And come to think of it, I am mighty glad it’s that way. Aren’t you?

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

Lord willing, 2011 is going to be a BIG YEAR FOR WORDPOINTS. Here is some of what is coming:

• We are now offering a “WORDPOINTS” BLOG that will be an occasional means of keeping our readers, customers, and supporters up to date. This will include not only news and notes, but also random writings and observations from Gary that don’t fit in anywhere else in our publishing program. These posts will not be daily — just whenever there is something to share.
• On October 1, we will publish the FIRST VOLUME OF “ENTHUSIASTIC IDEAS.” This will be the fruition of a project that I’ve been working on privately for over 12 years, and I’m very excited to be this close to offering it in book form. This book is a change of pace in my writing, and it will be interesting to see what kind of reception it gets.
• Also on October 1, we will publish a REVISED EDITION OF “DILIGENTLY SEEKING GOD” AND “REACHING FORWARD.” This will be a cleaned-up edition of both books, eliminating many of the pesky typos and errors that have been in them since they were originally published.

As this year progresses, I will finish writing the second volume of “Enthusiastic Ideas” (to be published in October of 2012), and continue working on “Obeying the Gospel” (to be published in October of 2013). So, Lord willing, we will be offering you THREE NEW BOOKS IN THREE CONSECUTIVE YEARS: 2011, 2012, and 2013.

• I am working on a year’s worth of “DAILY FAMILY BIBLE STUDIES.” These will be posted weekly, as I write them throughout the year.
• I will continue to work on the “SEEKING GOD IN THE PSALMS” lessons and want to have 18 of these done by the end of this year. Ultimately, there will be 52 of these lessons, one for each week of the year.
• For a much-needed evangelistic tool, I am working on a completely new blog that will be called “ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN?” I hope to have this ready to launch in conjunction with the publication of “Obeying the Gospel” in 2013.

Other projects are coming along as well, but these highlights are enough to indicate that this is going to be a big year for us.

Heartfelt thanks to every one of you for continuing to show interest in the writings. To have such supportive readers, I am the most fortunate writer in the world.

My prayer is that you will have a blessed year in 2011, and that you will continue, along with me, to seek God diligently and reach forward toward heaven.

Happy New Year!

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

• You can SUBSCRIBE to this blog — that way, you’ll get each post by email. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE.
• Posts to this blog are NOT MADE DAILY, as is true with our other blogs. There is not any set frequency for these posts, JUST WHENEVER I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

So welcome aboard . . . and thanks for being one of our readers!

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

Perhaps, as busy people, we underestimate the need for preparation. What about you? If you’ve increased the “quantity” of your Bible study, but haven’t seen good results, perhaps you need to work on the “quality” of your study. There is, after all, much to be said for learning HOW to study the Bible.

Here are ten suggestions that will help you get more out of the time you spend studying God’s word. And if you think you’ve advanced to the point where you don’t need these tips, just ask yourself how often you really APPLY these to your own study. Be honest!

1. Read larger sections. We tend to get bogged down in the details of Bible study to such an extent that we lose the bigger picture. There is much to be gained from backing up and reading larger portions of the Bible at one time. Whenever possible, we need to read an entire book at one sitting, especially the letters in the New Testament which were meant to be read just as we today read a letter that we receive from a friend.
2. Use multiple translations. Regardless of which translation you use regularly, get several of the better translations and compare these as you study. When it comes to translations, there is safety in numbers. What is unclear in one translation is often clear in another.
3. Look up unfamiliar words. It’s amazing how many people will come across words they don’t know in the Bible and never make any effort to find out what they mean. Keep an English dictionary and a Bible dictionary handy, and use them every time you need to. God’s word is too important not to know what the words mean.
4. Outline the books. You don’t have to do the kind of detailed outlines your teachers made you do in school. Just learn to see the major sections of each book and how they fit together.
5. Engage all three parts of the mind: INTELLECT, EMOTIONS, and WILL. God gave us all three parts of our mind, and we need to use them all. When you study, bring your emotions and your will to the aid of your intellect. Having learned intellectually what God says, feel emotionally as you ought to feel about it and then use you will to do what you ought to do about it!
6. Study to learn more than what the text does not say. We certainly need to be able to refute false doctrine. But we need to know more about each passage than what it does NOT say. The question is: what DOES it say? And especially, what does it say to ME? What is God saying that I myself need to hear?
7. Look for three things: INFORMATION, INTERPRETATION, and APPLICATION. When we study, we need to get not only the “information” (what it says) and the “interpretation” (what it means), we also need to look for “application” (how we can use what we’ve learned).
8. Bathe your study in prayer. Prayer is the Number One thing we can do to help ourselves in any endeavor, including Bible study. Without a prayerful attitude, Bible study can actually be dangerous. So pray before you study, while you study, and after you study.
9. Be patient. Much of what we need to learn takes time. We must be willing to go over the text again and again and again. Patient repetition, perhaps stretching over many years, is what will yield substantial results. Don’t give up. Just go over the text carefully, put it away, and then go over it again later. Keep doing this for the rest of your life.
10. Be honest and courageous. When we study God’s word, we must strive to lay aside our preferences and preconceived ideas, and be willing to LEARN whatever the text actually says. And having done that, we then need to have the courage to DO what we should about it.

The ability to get quality results in Bible study is not an inborn trait — it is something that can be learned. And the truth is, most of us have a lot to learn about even the simplest aspects of searching the Scriptures; we’re hardly more than children in our study skills. Let’s decide to do better. Which of these ten tips can you make the best use of?

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

This young woman has put all of her eggs in this one earthly basket. She has invested so much of herself in this goal that if she should not make it, I wonder if she could handle it emotionally. When I asked her about that, she laughed. “I don’t consider failure a possibility,” she said. “Contingency plans are for wimps.”

As a Christian, I couldn’t help but think of James 4:13-15: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.’”

Those of us who are familiar with that verse try to have a better attitude about our earthly plans than this young woman, don’t we? We’ve trained ourselves to say “If the Lord wills” at the end of any sentence that contains a statement of our plans. But do we realize what we are saying? Do we really believe that our plans are contingent on the Lord’s will?

I am studying Ecclesiastes right now in my private Bible study, and I have been more strongly impressed than ever before with Solomon’s realistic admission that we are not in control of what happens in this world. We don’t KNOW what is going to happen, and we can’t CONTROL what happens. To try to do either one — know the future or control it — is as futile as trying to “shepherd the wind.”

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make plans or that we shouldn’t pursue our plans enthusiastically. But it does mean that after we’ve done everything we are capable of doing, our plans still may not materialize. Even when we’ve done everything exactly right, the Lord may keep us from reaching our objective. He may have other (and better) plans.

Anytime you and I reach a goal that we’ve been pursuing and things turn out as we wanted them to, that only happened because God ALLOWED it to happen! Nothing happens except by the Lord’s permission, and in our case, He might just as easily have withheld His permission. We could have done all the same things and if He had chosen to do so, God could have brought about a very different result.

So let’s understand that our plans really are CONTINGENT on whether the Lord allows us to complete them, and on those occasions when we HAVE completed them, let’s be very careful in talking about what “we” did. The truth of the matter is, we reached the result ONLY BECAUSE THE LORD ALLOWED IT TO HAPPEN!

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com

Think first about Paul’s statement in Romans 8:20: “For the creation was subjected to FUTILITY, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in HOPE.”

Next, consider the CONSEQUENCES OF THE FALL as they are described in Genesis 3:14-21. In the Garden of Eden, there would have been nothing “futile” about Adam and Eve’s existence, but outside of Eden things would be very different: they would no longer be living in an environment where their desires could be fully satisfied. The LIMITATIONS that God placed on the world outside of Eden meant that, as long as the world remained, human beings would live out their earthly lives in FRUSTRATION, no longer able to get what they needed from this world or accomplish anything of lasting importance here.

In other words, our NATURE and NEEDS have not changed since the Garden of Eden, but our ENVIRONMENT has! God has changed the world such that (no matter what we own or enjoy or accomplish) this world will no longer fully give us what we try to get from it: the satisfaction of our God-created needs. As long as we live here, we have no choice but to endure lives that are to a great extent UNFULFILLED. The decision that every human being must make, therefore, is how to DEAL with that lack of satisfaction, and the decision we make will either lead us back to God or lead us farther away from Him.

In story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9, we have an early example of mankind trying to GET AROUND the futility to which God had subjected the creation. These people were saying, “We refuse to accept that our accomplishments are limited; we will solve our problems, satisfy ourselves, and build an empire that will LAST.” But God said, “No, you won’t. I have subjected the world to futility, and you are not going to change that.”

I’m afraid things haven’t changed much since the early chapters of Genesis. Like the Babel-builders, we also place our confidence in human “progress.” But we (Christians as well as unbelievers) live outside of Eden just as they did, and the things that we can’t do far outnumber the things that we can. Despite our “Yes we can!” attitude, God is saying “No you can’t. I will not permit you to iron every wrinkle out of your lives in this world. When Adam and Eve sinned, I subjected this world to futility, and there is nothing you can do to take the frustration out of it. I want you to ACCEPT the frustration of this world.”

So there is no use denying it: LIFE OUTSIDE OF EDEN IS A FRUSTRATING, DISSATISFYING BUSINESS. God intends it to be that way; His desire is that this kind of world will turn us back in His direction. So what about you? I’m talking to Christians here, not non-Christians. If you are a Christian, have YOU accepted the “vanity” of the things YOU cherish in this world? Honestly now, have you? If you haven’t, I suggest that you get busy working on it.

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com