On Expedition +

NO, NOT BASKETBALL …

You may or may not know that in addition to my role with Global Training Network and Divine Expedition training, when not traveling, I lead a Bible study called the NO BS BS.

Most recently, we paused from our study of Peter’s first epistle and spent several months going though Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel shedding light on “Progressive Christianity.” Progressive Christianity is not “another Gospel;” it is a distortion of the historic, orthodox, evangelical, biblical faith that was once and for all entrusted to the saints (1st followers of Jesus).

Jude 1:3 tells us we are to “contend” for that faith, which is why our NO BS BS alternates between study of Scripture and a study of issues facing the church and Christians today. Prior to the studies mentioned above (1 Peter and Another Gospel), we did a four-year study of “Big Issues We Face Today.” That’s where the full-court press comes in.

… BUT BIG ISSUES

The thrust of Big Issues is to examine where the Western World (that includes us) turned off from a Judeo-Christian Theistic worldview. It took us more that one-hundred sessions to examine this.

My hope is that the finished product will show the missteps and fallacies that have led to the secularism (in its many forms) underlying our culture today. But I also hope to show how God keeps interceding and raising up true believers, who keep pulling us back to Christ and the salvation that comes through him.

Here’s where the full-court press comes in. In the past year I have chipped away at editing the 100+ studies of the Big Issues. At the rate I have been going given everything else on my plate, it was going to take me another lifetime to complete, so I am picking up the pace by taking July and August to get as far as I can.

I am up to chapter 51 as of today. I haven’t figured out if I will bundle it all in one volume, multiple volumes (there are eleven sections), or both. The main focus right now is to get it all edited…full-court press.

BACK AND FORTH

Starting from the Early Church (what we turned off from), I alternate back and forth between the distortions of those who were turning away from the Gospel and then the renewal and reformation brought by those rediscovering and spreading the Gospel anew (often costing them their lives).

The most positive thing for me in this study are the many, many, many lives of men and women who, over the centuries, were transformed by the Gospel, willing to be persecuted and even die to proclaim it. Following are a couple of excerpts from just one hero of the faith from chapter 51 of the Big Issues manuscript.

THE CASE OF JOHN BUNYAN (THE PILGRIMS PROGRESS, JOHN BUNYAN)

Another example of the crackdown against nonconformists [under English King, Charles II] was that of John Bunyan (1622-1688). Bunyan was not a well-known or well-educated Puritan. He was a tinker by trade, someone who traveled around mending pots and pans.

He was a big muscular, reddish hair man, with an exuberant personality. As a tinker, he wandered from village to village carrying on his back the hefty seventeenth century tools of his trade, including pots and pans, and a sixty-pound anvil.

Bunyan’s conversion is recorded in a work entitled, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In it, Bunyan describes how he used to despair and was tormented by his unworthiness, believing that his sins were not within the bounds of Christ’s pardon.

Then one day, fearing all was not right, the following sentence suddenly fell on his soul: “Thy righteousness is in heaven!” Bunyan says he saw with his soul, Jesus Christ standing at the right hand of God and realized, ‘There, I say, is my righteousness.’

After this, Bunyan began to preach, and it was this message of grace and righteousness in Christ that permeated his preaching and attracted crowds. It wasn’t his ability to preach; it was his message that was so exceptionally good.

Bunyan was arrested in 1661 for illegal preaching, and charged under a law that made it an offense to attend a religious gathering other than at the parish church with more than five people outside their family. Held in prison until his trial, Bunyan was indicted for having “devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church [Anglican Church, that is] to hear divine service,” and for having held “several unlawful meetings and conventicles (gatherings), to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom.”

Bunyan was sentenced to three months imprisonment to be carried over if at the end of this time he didn’t agree to attend the parish church and desist from preaching. Bunyan refused to agree to give up preaching, so his period of imprisonment was eventually extended to 12 years.

This brought great hardship to his wife and four young children, one of whom was blind. Wrestling with leaving his wife Elizabeth to raise their children, Bunyan nevertheless remained resolute, saying, “O I saw in this condition I was a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his Wife and Children; yet thought I, I must do it, I must do it.”

“I will stay in prison till the moss grows on my eye lids rather than disobey God.”        —John Bunyan

In prison, Bunyan had a copy of the Bible and of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, as well as writing materials. It was in jail that he wrote Grace Abounding and started, The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegory about the journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.

Shortly after Bunyan’s release after twelve years in prison, King Charles II declared the Act of Indulgence but then removed it four years later. Bunyan was again imprisoned—this time only for six months, during which time, he completed The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Well, that’s what I’m doing. Editing…putting on a full-court press…hoping God will use it to help others understand where the Western world turned off, equip and strengthen Christians  to contend even more effectively for the faith and salvation that our Redeemer Jesus alone provides.

As always, thank you for being part of it with me/us.

Standing on the foundation of Jesus, his Word, and on the shoulders of all who have trusted Him from the beginning to now,

Linus, for the GTN Divine Expedition Team