The Bible did not fall from the sky, written in “Ye Olde English” with the words of Jesus in red print. It came through the story and struggles of the early church. The Holy Spirit drew it together from the diaries they were keeping, the sermons they were preaching, the problems they were facing ...

If it had been up to a human strategist to plan the successful entry of God into history, it is unlikely he or she would have chosen locations like Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee. It would be far-fetched to believe such a strategist would choose a time in history with so much radical political ...

When we see Jesus announcing the kingdom of God, we also see him doing all kinds of things like healing people and celebrating with all the wrong kind of folk—and then explaining this is what it looks like when God becomes King. *It is not what people expected.* Jesus did not come into this world...

The resurrection of Jesus surprised everyone in the ancient world. Even those who held a belief in some kind of afterlife did not imagine that a person could come back from the grave after being crucified and buried. *No one saw it coming.* The moment Jesus rose from the dead, everything changed....

Paul the apostle, the traveler, the Roman citizen, the letter writer, and the theologian is the one who invented something we can call *Christian theology.* In Paul we have a man who not only left his mark on the church but also shaped a movement that would eventually subsume the Roman empire and...

The early Christians believed in the one God. They believed in covenant and creation. They believed this had all come to a climax in the Messiah. They had received the Spirit . . . they were the beneficiaries . . . they were the recipients of the promises of Israel. They organized their lives aro...

The church has always been a missional community. Wherever Christians have gone, they’ve taken their faith with them and shared the good news about Jesus. But they not only spoke about it—they also
lived it out in concrete ways. The reason is simple: it’s a direct imitation of Jesus or a direct ...

When God gave people his Word, the Bible, he did not give them the finished puzzle. In a sense, he gave them the box filled with so many pieces that it took centuries for them to put it together. It wasn’t just one person who worked on this puzzle, but countless individuals from a rich mix of tim...