Spring of Hope

Buy  my books   " Joy in the Journey "  and  " Song in the Night" on Amazon now 20% goes to missions               Experiencing sound quality issues?  Please Click here   Contend for our faith in a confusing world    Letter of Jude We went through several books in the New Testament. We started with the prison letters of Paul, and we finished those. We also included the letter to Philemon, which Paul wrote while he was in prison. He continued all of that so that we can understand each book is written to encourage and empower believers who were being persecuted at that time for their faith. It is still applicable to us today. When we came to the letters of Peter, we talked about several things, including the scoffers and the people who were teaching wrong doctrines. Peter mentioned some things about them and asked the congregations and the people not to follow them. B...

Buy  my books   " Joy in the Journey "  and  " Song in the Night" on Amazon now 20% goes to missions               Experiencing sound quality issues?  Please Click here   One prisoner sets another one free      Paul's Letter to Philemon We have been learning and discussing the letters of Paul that he wrote from prison in Rome to various churches. This particular letter, however, is unique because it wasn’t written to a church—it was written to a person. Paul only wrote a couple of personal letters, and this is one of them. The other is the letter to Timothy. All his other letters were addressed to churches. Paul was imprisoned somewhere around 60 to 62 AD for preaching the gospel. He was imprisoned in Rome because, as a Roman citizen, he had the right to be tried there. He was taken to Rome and held under house arrest, which allowed him some freedom to receive ...

Buy  my books   " Joy in the Journey "  and  " Song in the Night" on Amazon now 20% goes to missions               Experiencing sound quality issues?  Please Click here   Day of the Lord      2 Peter 3:1-13 Peter closes his letters with the reminder that the day of the Lord is at hand. But how long have we been hearing this—that the Lord is coming back? You have been hearing it for the last 2,000 years. But the people, the church in the first century, also had the same problem. They had been hearing about the second coming of the Lord Jesus for less than 100 years in the first century, and maybe another 100 years in the second century. But they started questioning: when is this Lord you are saying going to come back? Peter is answering them: “You must understand in the last days scoffers will come scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say,...

Buy  my books   " Joy in the Journey "  and  " Song in the Night" on Amazon now 20% goes to missions               Experiencing sound quality issues?  Please Click here   Life and Godliness      2 Peter 1:1-11 The letters of Peter are very powerful in defining who we are as people of faith. He gives Christians their identity, not just for those he was directly writing to, but also for us today. At the time Peter wrote these letters, many believers were being persecuted for their faith. They fled from place to place, settling in Asia Minor —what we know today as parts of Turkey and Greece. Even though they were scattered and living in fear, they still gathered together as the church to worship God. Peter wrote to encourage them, and through his words, we too are encouraged. We have already seen that Peter gave us several identities as the people of God. In his f...