In the second sermon on Proverbs 5, we learn how to guard against infidelity. In short, verse 19 summarizes for us: always be enraptured with your spouse's love. Find sexual satisfaction only in your spouse. Find that kind of pleasure in the marriage relationship alone. Do not give yourself to any other person than your spouse (or future spouse) and do enjoy the God-given pleasure in marriage. It is not only for procreation, but also pleasure and protection against infidelity.

We continue our series about how the Bible came to us in the modern era with some background on the Hebrew and Greek text, various text families, and how we can "decode" the notes in our reference and study Bibles when those notes have to do with differences between manuscripts.

Paul draws this section of the letter to a close by calling for the readers to be reconciled to God and explains how that can happen. We set out to cover 5:20-6:2, but got only as far as 5:21.

Our long-time missionary partners update us on their work and a recent trip to share the love of Christ and His message to those in need.

The book of 1 Samuel recounts the story of Samuel, his relationship to the first two kings of Israel, Saul and David, and the history of the start of the monarchy. Samuel is the main character and has the roles of prophet (Acts 13:20, 1 Samuel 3:20), priest, judge, and de-facto leader of the nation as it transitioned from the anarchy of the judges to a monarchy first under King Saul, and then to King David.

In this installment of "how we got our Bible" we learned about translation, publication, distribution, illumination, and interpretation. We also saw some interesting (and overwhelming) statistics about the reliability of the Scriptures in terms of manuscript evidence.

Paul is talking about reconciliation, specifically (1) that God through Christ accomplishes reconciliation, and (2) that God assigned Paul and his audience to minister the reconciling message to others.

God has a tremendous thing in sending Jesus to be the reconciling mediator between us. And He wrote a whole bunch of letters to you about being reconciled. Are you storing those letters, unopened, in a box to send back to Him someday? Or are you reading those letters and heeding His call to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ?

Our studies in Zephaniah are drawing to a close. This session, we walked through the book in an outline form, pointed out three verses that are representative of some of the teaching in Zephaniah, and then correlated those three verses with some New Testament verses that touch on the same subjects.

The book of Judges recounts the history of Israel between Joshua and Samuel, about 350 years until God chose Saul to be the first king of the nation. During the period prior to Saul and the Davidic monarchy, Israel was governed theocratically, without a human king but with God leading them through the Law and the priesthood, as well as specially chosen people who were called judges. They were deliverers in times of oppression by foreign nations. This oppression was punishment from God for their violation of His law and in fulfillment of His word that He would punish them in this way.

Our study in how the Bible came to us continues with how the simple formatting like spaces and chapters came into being, how canon was formed, and just a bit about translation from original languages into English or other languages.