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Sabbath School

The Controversy

10 October 2017 | Karon Powell

Your word is your bond. That saying is often followed by the idea of a firm handshake that signifies a promise or vow that will not be broken. As time has progressed we have created formal ways to acknowledge promises and covenants including writing them down in contracts. Why? As humans, we tend to break our promises. We fail to live up to our word and make excuses.

The Daily Bread of the Soul

2 October 2017 | G.D. Williams

In 1552, Martin Luther wrote in the preface to his Commentary on Romans:

Boasting in the Cross

28 September 2017 | Carl Cosaert

Boasting in the Cross

Lesson 14: September 23–29, 2017

LISTEN:

Drs. Carl Cosaert and Paul Dybdahl provide the commentary for this week’s lesson. Listen to the audio file below.

Lesson14-BoastingInTheCross.mp3

Leading Question:

Audio:

Lesson14-BoastingInTheCross.mp3

Hope for the Hopeless

22 September 2017 | Marvin Wray

Isn’t this portion of Scripture the true crux of our spiritual journey as a church family? We have seen, in Galatians 5:16-25, a list of the “acts of a sinful nature,” and there are certainly some major league issues listed there. I am feeling pretty good as we get started into the list. But then we get to “sins” that impact our relationships. Paul seems to be saying to me that “moral failure” is more than adultery or acts of public depravity. He gives even more space to acts and attitudes that make me stop and take inventory.

The Watermelons of Generosity

11 September 2017 | Nancy Lecourt

When I was very small, two or three years old perhaps, my mother would put me in a play pen on the back lawn, under a tree, and give me sweet slices of fresh peach. As I grew up, she always tried to have a ripe white peach from the garden for me on my birthday in early May in southern California. Peaches are still my favorite fruit. And my earliest memory is of sun through leaves, of that sweet moment of anticipation.

Luther on Galatians

7 September 2017 | Martin Luther

Verse 13. For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.

The Covenants: Two Kinds of Relationships

30 August 2017 | Jean Sheldon

Many of us read the Bible in linear fashion in which every narrative, piece of poetry, legal text, and other forms of prose merit equal weight to every other, with every text representing God’s ideal will equally. As a result, we have no defining way to resolve texts that conflict with one another. Consequently, we often take sides supporting one set of “key texts” over against another set.

From “Foolish Gentiles” to “My Little Children”

25 August 2017 | Warren Trenchard

In the first two thirds of the Letter to the Galatians, Paul is engaged in a frank and sometimes angry, rhetorical defense of his apostolic authority and the gospel that he had been proclaiming among the Gentiles. In these sections, Paul argues that he is as much an apostle as Peter and his colleagues in Jerusalem and that his teaching—that Gentiles could become Christians and live accordingly outside the context of the Jewish law—is true and biblically valid.

A New Paradigm for Understanding Galatians

11 August 2017 | Kim Papaioannou

“Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses”(Acts 13:38-9 ESV).

Problematic Approaches

In the Face of Law and Grace: Adventist Views on Salvation and How We Speak About Them

4 August 2017 | David Trim

This week’s Adult Bible Study Guide quotes Ellen White: “The law of God, spoken in awful grandeur from Sinai, is the utterance of condemnation to the sinner. It is the province of the law to condemn, but there is in it no power to pardon or to redeem.” (SDA Bible Commentary, VI, 1094). God’s power “to pardon and to forget” is, as the influential Adventist theologian G. D.