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Bible Study Magazine is a print magazine (not an emagazine) published by Lexham Press. Six times a year, Bible Study Magazine delivers tools and methods for Bible study as well as insights from respected teachers, professors, historians, and archeologists.
Read pastor profiles, author interviews, and stories of individuals whose thoughtful engagement with Scripture has shaped their thinking and defined their ministries. Bible Study Magazine reveals the impact of God’s Word in their lives—and the power of Scripture in yours.
We have a limited supply of back issues of the November–December 2014 Bible Study Magazine. Get your copy while you still can!
When Dr. Eric Mason—church-planter, pastor, and author—began the process of planting a church in inner-city Philadelphia, he envisioned himself as an itinerant minister who spent a couple of years getting things running before moving on. But he soon changed his mind: “I found that with inner-city ministry, you have to be in it for the long haul because these are extremely relational communities. When you’re actively involved in an inner-city neighborhood, you develop a ‘trust capital’ that provides a pipeline for ministry. Building that trust takes time. People aren’t going to connect with a brand.”—Jessi Strong
When training his students for ministry, Russian pastor Andrey Kravtsev recalls his early days serving the church, before he felt any sense of God’s calling to leadership. “In Russian, the word for minister is the same as the word for ‘serve.’ If anyone doesn’t know how to serve, he cannot learn how to minister, because they are the same thing. You start serving in small things, serving people where they are and doing whatever is needed for your church or community. Then, when the time comes, God gives faithful servers more responsibility—and then more responsibility. But it all starts with humble readiness and availability to serve wherever you are.”—Jessi Strong
Loving people is complicated. It can hurt. It is messy. Because of this, we tend to insulate ourselves from the very people who need our love. First John calls us to push past the fear of making mistakes or getting hurt. It calls us—Jesus’ followers, God’s children, and the Spirit’s vessels—to love others not “with word or tongue, but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18).—Carrie Sinclair-Wolcott
While reading the golden calf story in Exodus 32, many of us miss the point of the lesson. We may regard the Israelites as quite silly. They have participated in a series of “signs and wonders”—the 10 plagues in Egypt, the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, and the awesome divine display on Mount Sinai. Yet after a mere 40-day absence of their leader, Moses, “they made for themselves a molten calf and bowed down to it and offered sacrifices to it” (Exod 32:8). Where did this bizarre idea come from?—Craig C. Broyles
More than 100 years after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the famous detective, his classic tales are still being refashioned into popular movies and TV shows. Biblical authors recycled stories, too. Picking up on earlier biblical narratives, biblical authors used them to express God’s truth. One central event that shows up multiple times in the Bible is the Passover and the Israelites’ subsequent exodus from Egypt.—E. Tod Twist