Dear Friends of Scripture Union USA, We know you share our desire to make the Gospel known to children, youth, and families, as well as adults. Recent Pew and Barna research tells us that approximately half of the youth in America identify as Christian. A quick Google search on Christian youth statistics brings alarming headlines indicating a serious decline in faith and a significant increase in depression and ...

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Incline Your Heart to God "Maintain at all costs a daily time of Scripture reading and prayer. As I look back, I see that the most formative influence in my life and thought has been my daily contact with Scripture over 60 years." Frank Gaebelein, "Character Before Career." The daily practice of Bible reading and reflection is essential for our spiritual health and growth. Yet most people don't read the Bible regularly. One of the ...

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Know the One Through Whom Truth Comes "It's fantastic to realize - and sometimes I think we forget it - that every time we pick up the Bible, we pick up the truth. What a tremendous legacy we have. But we can't take it for granted, and we certainly can't let it just sit around. So the first reason I believe we need to study the Word of God is that it's the source of truth." John MacArthur, "How To Study The Bible." Can we conclude from ...

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The Spirit Gives Life to the Word "It is enormously important that we see the role of scripture not simply as being to provide true information about, or even an accurate running commentary upon, the work of God in salvation and new creation, but as taking an active part within that ongoing purpose." N.T. Wright, "Scripture and the Authority of God." Bible engagement rests on the belief that there should be an unswerving acknowledgement ...

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The Central Theme of the Bible "The entire Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, are unified by a common narrative. And once our eyes are opened to see that narrative, everything in both Testaments gets into a coherent, understandable, and amazing story. And what is that story? It's the story of Jesus Christ." Frank Viola & Leonard Sweet, "Jesus: A Theography." The theme of the Bible is not a principle, concept, set of values, ...

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Purpose of the Word "What I began to see was that the Bible is not essentially, as I had always more or less supposed, a book of ethical principles, of moral exhortations, of cautionary tales about exemplary people, of uplifting thoughts - in fact, not really a religious book at all in the sense that most of the books you would be apt to find in a minister's study or reviewed in a special religion issue of the New York Times book section are ...

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God's Word Transforms Lives "Transformation occurs when scripture is viewed as a place of encounter with God that is approached by yielding the false self and its agenda, by opening one's self unconditionally to God, and by a hunger to respond in love to whatever God desires." Robert Mulholland, "Shaped by the Word: The Power of Scripture in Spiritual Formation." Transformation, the process of change whereby a person becomes ...

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The Supreme Story "Humanity is telling its own story, improvising scenarios, creating roles for itself- for all the other creatures, too, and of course for God! The roles that humanity creates are - in the view of these witnesses to God's story - almost always not the roles intended for it. Humanity does not have any real aptitude for the parts that it writes for itself. Yet it seems to be perfectly at liberty to experiment very ...

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Framing Bible Engagement "Scripture engagement is interacting with the biblical text in a way that provides sufficient opportunity for the text to speak for itself by the power of the Holy Spirit, enabling readers and listeners to hear the voice of God and discover for themselves the unique claim Jesus Christ is making upon them." Fergus Macdonald, Taylor University Center for Scripture Engagement There are 10 theological assumptions ...

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