Jonathan's Bible Study Site


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What's New?

  • November 27, 2009: Added an "Advent" section under Bible Studies for scripture passages and meditations about the birth of Christ Jesus.

  • August 9, 2009: This site is now on Twitter! Follow JMBible for announcements of the weekly meditations.

  • November 28, 2008: Added an RSS feed for weekly meditations

  • November 25, 2008: Added English Standard Version (ESV) as the preferred translation; because scripture is displayed directly from the ESV web site, the publisher has a generous copyright usage provision.

  • October 19, 2008: Rebuilt the web site on top of a database, which will allow new features in the near future. This has changed the URLs of the pages on this site.

  • February 3, 2005: Past Weekly Meditations, a listing of the past weekly meditations by date

  • September 20, 2004: Priorities, a pragmatic guide to ordering our activities so God can work through us more readily.

    • New scripture meditations are added weekly.

    Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. -- Mark 12:30

    Welcome to my Bible study web site!

    All of us are directed by God, both in Deuteronomy and in the verse above from Mark where Jesus quotes the Law, to love God completely, with all that we have.

    Fortunately, that command is a personal one: I am to love God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength. God doesn’t expect me to love with your strength, so if I am much less able to lift bricks and hammer nails, I know God wants my “strength” in soldering small wires. Since I have difficulty expressing my emotions, God is willing to accept my heart and soul as it is, and not expect from me the same emotional outpouring I see in some of my favorite contemporary Christian singers. God wants all of me, and God doesn’t want from me anything that isn’t me. I am enough!

    It seems to me that, just as we all have our weaknesses, we also all have our strengths. I believe God uses those strengths to lead the rest of us along the Way. Don’t misunderstand me -- there is only one way to heaven, and that is in the person of Jesus, the Messiah, the Lamb of God, the one who died and rose again. But, there are as many ways of serving God and knowing God as there are individuals.

    For me, it seems to work better to approach God first with my mind. I seem to need to ponder the scriptures first before my mind will let my spirit meditate on them, before my heart can rejoice in them, before my strength can put them into action. You may be different -- you may need to experience a message from God emotionally and feel the joy of God’s presence before your mind can grasp that message. I have good friends for whom hard work is a more effective way to open themselves to God’s messages. I have others who grown spiritually by quieting themselves in meditation as the beginning of how God speaks to them. Of course, God can use all these ways to speak to me, too, but the one that best seems to show my “wiring” is approaching God through Bible study.

    In this site, I am sharing some of the Bible studies I have developed over the years, and some studies I am developing now. They are on this site because they have been a tool for God to use to guide me, share with me, and bless me. I hope that God will bless you, too, through these thoughts.

    I would love to hear from you! I’m more than willing to share thoughts with you on questions you have, or to start a series of meditations based on your request. Just email me below.

    Thank you for your interest!

    Jonathan


    Comments? corrections? suggestions?
    Please email me at jon@jmbiblestudy.com.


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