Showing posts with label New Living Translation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Living Translation. Show all posts

Thursday, September 18, 2008

War Is Where You Find It

So we're at Target today and I wandered back to the electronics section like a moth wanders to a flame. Perched on an end cap there was a device I had heard of but never seen before - the Sony Digital Book Reader.

Like the Amazon Kindle, the Sony unit is designed to replace the printed book. There are a lot of things that I like about that idea, particularly when you combine it with the ability to keep texts like translations up to date. For example the New Living Translation, which is my favorite, is on its fourth round of changes. Yes there have only been two editions, but during the interim period, changes have been made. All those changes presumably make it better, but the "real book" buyer will not see them unless he purchases a later printing. Apparently this happens all the time, but publishers don't let anyone know.

If you're digital, you can just synch the book with the newer version and you're up to date. So it interests me, this new device, because I can see the uses in ministry. But there are other uses too. In fact the book the display device was showing when I walked up was "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. That author along with other militant atheists like Sam Harris, are attacking Christianity and ridiculing Christians and their beliefs.So I changed the book it was displaying to another work of fiction. :)

If you are interested in reading a great exegesis and apologetic response to Dawkins and particularly Harris, then pick up this book from Ravi Zacharias. It is an excellent help in answering the attacks, as Zacharias leads his readers through the arguments , and then with the help of Dallas Willard, makes a case for God.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Bibles and Bible Study

Last night I finished a small group study of Rick Warren's Bible Study Methods. I was able to find some of the charts he uses online for people to take home with them, which made teaching it much easier.

I went over to my office and grabbed a few of the tools I have used over the years for Bible study. Now I basically am an internet user, but I used to have to pull books like Strong's Concordance, Bakers Bible Dictionary, Robertson's Word Pictures, etc. off the shelf to do serious work. The internet makes that simpler, and good Bible study software like Bible Explorer really helps a lot.

We looked at various study Bibles as well. Remember how awesome it was when the NIV study Bible came out? Then the Life Application Bible, the Hebrew-Greek Study Bible and all the rest really accelerated a person's ability to dig deep without having to carry a library with them.

But which version to choose? Well, I'm an NLT, HCSB, Message man myself. Here's a link though to Wayne Lehman's studies on evaluating English Bible versions.

I came away from last night's group believing that we needed to do a much better job of teaching our people how to study the Word. The people around the tables with one exception had been Christians for decades. They should already be past this and they weren't. Where does that leave the new believer?

We need to help people grow deeper. Next week's project is to develop a vehicle to get that done.