If you’re not guilty, you will be.

Steve Brown:
If you’re not guilty, you will be. After this edition of Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life here to let Christians know that God isn’t mad at them. Keep listening and you’ll hear that because of what Jesus has done, you’re welcomed home into the family of God, because of his radical grace, free from the penalties of sin and never alone in your suffering.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Well, we’ve got two more days, today and tomorrow, and we’re going to be ending this multi months study in the book of Galatians. And I don’t know if you have learned anything, but I’ve learned a lot of things. And we saw yesterday that the apostle Paul, when addressing the Galatians has a great concern for Israel, and I do too. And that’s God’s concern. God has a great concern for Israel. And we as Goyam, the Gentiles have been grafted on to the tree of God’s covenant people. And we got to remember that, and we got to remember that God never changes his mind about covenants. And I don’t know the implications of that, but pray for Jerusalem. Pray for Israel. Pray for your Jewish friends, because they gave you a precious gift and that was Messiah, and a lot more. Okay, now what I’ve done and I said, I’m going to make you feel guilty. I really don’t want to do that, but I think it’s important that Christians sometimes measure themselves by applying the questions that are asked by Scripture. And I need to say two things. The first thing is this, if you’re not a believer, these questions do not apply to you. So go listen to some music on your radio, cause this will make, these are not for you. These are for God’s people. And Paul kind of makes these questions stand out, you extrapolate them from the text. And the second thing, I want to say, especially if you’re gonna, if you have a tendency to be a legalist, is that you are not saved by your answer to any of these questions. They’re simply ways that you go before God and say, show me myself, show me where I really am. Show me, show me, and then make me different. I pray almost every morning, Lord, could you, I confess all my sins and I say, Lord, don’t leave me this way. Make me more and more like Jesus, grant that I would increasingly love you and follow you and glorify you and honor you and serve you and know you, believe in you and trust you and have faith in you and lean on you. Make that grow in my life. Make me different. And God is doing that. I’ve got a long way to go. And that’s the important thing to remember, you do too. And God loves you anyway. You’ve heard me articulate the principle before. Let me give it to you again, because it’s important.

The only people who get better are people who know, if they don’t get better, God will love them anyway.

And if you don’t know that, you go with the unbelievers and listen to music on other stations. I have a friend, who’s a pastor, who was going to teach some pretty hard things. And he said, before I start these things, I want to tell you that God loves you. And he loved you before you were ever born and made up his mind then, and he loves you now. And he’s going to love you forever, no matter what you do or where you go. But if you want to get better, let’s look at this text. Well, I would say exactly the same thing about this final text. Alright, enough chit chat, let’s look at some of these questions. Question number one. Where is the emphasis of your life, Galatians 6:11.

See with what large letters I am writing you with my own hand.

Now at this point in the letter, Paul has taken the completed letter from one of his secretaries and he’s adding a rather long postscript. Incidentally, it is the longest of the New Testament, usually Paul only signed his name. There have been a number of reasons given for this statement of Paul, one is that he had bad eyesight and that was his thorn in the flesh. And thus he wrote with large letters. Another is that he was not skilled in writing and therefore wrote rewards letters, much as a child would when learning to write. But by and large scholars agree, Paul was saying, look at the emphasis I am putting on these last sentences. Read them carefully. They’re important. In other words, the boldness of his handwriting matched the strength of his convictions. Phillip says that there’s an old Greek usage of what Paul said, that could be translated as, note how heavily I press on the pin in these words. Whatever. Paul is giving emphasis to the things he thought important. And we’re going to see as we go through this, that his life was focused on Jesus. I love my family. My wife is the best thing to ever happen to me, my daughters and granddaughters are wonderful. Now, I don’t really have to talk about them all the time. I have other interests. I don’t bring them up in conversation, every time I talk to someone. But one of the major emphasis of my life is my family. And if you hang out with me very long, you’re going to know that, because you’re going to see it. Well, that ought to be true in terms of where Christ is in our life. Where is the emphasis of your life? There are a lot of things that are important. There are a lot of things that are needful, but what is the emphasis of your life? For the apostle Paul it was the gospel. For him, it was Christ Jesus and him crucified, for him, it was what he taught in Galatians. By faith you’re saved by grace. What’s the emphasis? You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
Thank you Steve. And as Steve mentioned tomorrow is it, the day we land the plane on our exploration of Galatians. Of course, every square inch of the Bible has value for us, but the book of Galatians really does have a special place in Steve’s heart. So, thanks for joining us on his journey. Speaking of the Bible, we recently spoke with author Dan Kimball on Steve Brown Etc. Dan told us that some young people now are actually being led away from Christianity by the Bible itself. More specifically, they’re being led away by Scripture, intentionally taken out of context. Take a listen to part of that conversation, then I’ll be back to tell you about a special free offer.

Matthew Porter:

Tell us what’s the premise of the book. Who’s it written for?

Dan Kimball:
The book it’s written for, it’s for both Christian and non-Christians, but it’s mainly for, I would say primarily for Christians that are, as they finally read the Bible and we can talk all about this, there’s things in the Bible that many have not realized, have been in the Bible. And when they do read it, it catches them by surprise and many don’t know how to respond. So, it’s looking at some of the more difficult and disturbing things, even in advance before people may necessarily read them. So they’re prepared when they do see them. What to think about it.

Matthew Porter:
What motivated you to write this?

Dan Kimball:
Yeah, I’ve been serving in Santa Cruz, California for almost 30 years. And being in the same town, same churches, listening to the different issues that younger generations especially are faced with and going through, you know, over a couple decades, you see different patterns and trends and the latest trend that keeps surfacing more and more, is you’re hearing stories of younger people especially, that have been growing up in churches and had great Bible stories. A lot of felt need applicational teaching. They know all of the more happy, nice verses in the Bible. But as they move into the stages of faith, where they start exploring things more in their own, questioning what they grew up with, which is natural and very good to do. And they start hearing, seeing on the internet or reading the Bible themselves verses that are extremely violent, extremely anti-women sounding, very anti-science, looking at Scripture. So, all of these things are hitting them. And then the stories of deconstruction start happening, doubting faith. And so it’s addressing that. And it was something that I almost felt I couldn’t help, but write, because it was coming up so often in conversations and online.

Matthew Porter:
You mentioned the young folks and current culture and memes. And I grew up, there’s a comedian, Dennis Miller. I think he’s a fellow in Northern Californian, very sarcastic and smug, self-assured and funny, but kind of biting. It’s like memes and the internet have allowed everybody in the entire world to be a Dennis Miller of like, let me hold this up for ridicule, blah, blah, blah. And it’s not just, like you said, it’s not just mocking it. It, for young people who are trying to make sense of their world in the Bible, it does raise some like very salient questions, which are good questions, but you even have them at the beginning of the book, the Bible doesn’t mention the cats at all. But there’s one translation of the Bible that mentions unicorns nine times. We’re going to get into it, but just as an appetizer, what in the world is the unicorn thing about?

Dan Kimball:
If you were to type in a Google search, unicorn and Bible, you will see a bunch of memes that actually have Bible verses, you know, written part of the memes and there’s the word unicorn in them. So the question is, as you’re looking at those, were mythical unicorns written in the Bible? And that’s the question.

Matthew Porter:
Yeah. You have a whole explanation of what that is all about, but on its surface, you’re like, golly, does it say that? I think I need to back up and kind of do a little research on this. So, as you set the table for the book early on, there’s four facts that you bring up that kind of create a framework, and guide the reader as they read the Bible. Those are kind of controlling thoughts. I wonder if you could list out what those facts are, and how they help us.

Dan Kimball:
The good news in all of this, is the Bible has not changed, you know, in other words, these aren’t new things that suddenly no one has ever noticed before. And, a lot of it, in my opinion, is due to a lack of training overall in general Bible study skills.

Matthew Porter:
And all of that conversation was about Dan’s book, which is called How Not to Read the Bible. Knowing you would want to hear this full show, we just went ahead and put the whole thing on a CD that we can drop in the mail to you today. We just need to know where to send it. So, call us right now at 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That’s 1-800-539-5433. You can also e-mail [email protected] and ask for the magazine. If you’d like to mail your request, send it to

Key Life Network

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Just ask for the CD featuring Dan Kimball. Finally, if you’re able, would you give to Key Life? You can charge a gift on your credit card. You can include a gift in your envelope. Or just make it easy, grab your phone and text Key Life to 28950. Key Life is a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. And we are a listener supported production of Key Life Network.