The Key Teachings of the Bible

BY LES D. CRAUSE

The Key Teachings of the Bible

Copyright © 2012 by Global Business Resources International

All rights reserved

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First printing: August 2012

Published by Global Business Resources International

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All rights reserved under International Copyright Law.

Contents may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without the express written consent of the publisher.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Global Business and Ministry (GBMV) version of the Bible.

Contents

Chapter 01 – From Unbeliever to Newborn Baby              5

Chapter 02 – The Next Level              13

Chapter 03 - Introduction to Ministry              24

Follow GBM International              33

Other Books From Global Business Ministries International              34

CHAPTER 01

From Unbeliever to Newborn Baby

Chapter 01 – From Unbeliever to Newborn Baby

Welcome to the Global Business and Ministry Academy.

In this e-book I would like to introduce you to our new Bible Course. It is a very comprehensive training that starts at the very lowest level, even from unbelievers. And it works its way upwards to the highest level of all – the level of ministry.

What I would like to give you here is simply a skeleton of exactly what we are going to cover in this course. By doing this it will help you to know where we are heading and what you can expect in the future.

It also makes it easier for you to remember everything that we teach. By first starting with a skeleton, as we begin to add on more pieces the picture will start to become much clearer and easier for you to remember.

Becoming a Christian is a complex experience, and you need to realize what is involved before you try and bring somebody to the Lord. Perhaps that is why most Christians have never led anybody to the Lord yet.

The whole process seems so complicated. They feel that they don’t know enough to be able to lead somebody to the Lord, follow them up and get them properly saved.

This course is designed to help you to win souls for the Lord. But it goes even further than that. It is designed to help those that you have brought in to rise up and become mature believers.

You yourself will also learn as you go. No matter what stage of maturity you are at spiritually right now, I think you are going to learn something new.

Most of us were saved a long time ago and we can’t even remember exactly how we felt when we were first born again. As you go through this course, you may re-experience some things and remember what it was like to be a young believer for the first time. It will help you to get back that fire that you first had in you when you became a Christian.

Presenting the Gospel

I would like to start now with the first section which is going to be the actual Gospel. What do we present to the unbeliever? We present the Gospel; the good news of salvation.

Most people don’t even know what the Gospel of Salvation is, so I am going to give you a simple summary of exactly what it is. With this skeleton you will be able to hang some extra flesh on it and give a full, comprehensive teaching. You will also understand yourself exactly what the Gospel is.

Creation of Man

Let’s begin by looking at man. We will develop this into a full doctrine, but I am just going to give you the basics here.

God originally created man to have fellowship with Him. That was the main reason that He did it. God had somebody that He could pour His love onto, and He had somebody who would love Him back again.

There was a beautiful, loving fellowship between God and man. But then somebody messed it up. Who was that? It was man of course. When man sinned he broke that fellowship with God.

When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, they broke that close bond of fellowship with God. And what they created was then passed on to all children, right down to the whole human race. As a result of Adam’s sin, all of us are now in a state of not being in fellowship with God.

We have a problem with sin now and the effect that it had on the human race. The problem is that we cannot easily undo its effects. I can’t by my own efforts reverse that whole process and save myself.

I am in a difficult situation because of sin. It is firstly because of the sin that was bred into me. I was already born with it through the sin of Adam. And then it is because of the sin that I committed, and the kind of life I developed as I grew up.

Because of this we all grow up following our own way of sin. We don’t know God and we don’t know how to get close to Him. That is the plight of every single human being. It is the state of man as a result of sin and it is the first stage of understanding the Gospel. We are all sinners and incapable of saving ourselves.

God

Then we come to God, and we see that He is a loving creator who only wants good things for His creation. If you speak to most people out there today you will discover that they believe the complete opposite. They believe God is a big, judgmental God who wants to hurt them all the time.

But it is not true. God is a loving creator who wants to give us the best. But He is also a God of justice and judgment. He set His law in motion. And because every law carries both a blessing and a punishment, because man sinned God had to in justice uphold His law, otherwise He would not be a just God.

He had to punish sin, and part of that punishment was separation from God. God wanted to reach out and give all the blessings that He had for man, but because of man’s sin He was unable to give those blessings.

God was stuck in a bit of a dilemma if you like. On the one side His loving, tender nature wanted to bless and give the best that He had. On the other hand His nature of justice and doing what was right was preventing Him from doing it.

He was caught in a turmoil in that He wanted to bless but He couldn’t. And so He made a plan. He made a way to reverse it, so that He could once again get back into fellowship with man and begin to bless Him.

Introducing Jesus

God did this by sending Jesus. The Bible tells us that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God. Jesus was God in human flesh.

As a man Jesus understood exactly the problems that we face. But as God He also understood what God was facing. He was the only person who could bridge the gap between the two and reverse the effects.

Jesus came and paid the penalty of God’s judgment. He paid the price for our sin so that we wouldn’t have to do it. And now He brings us back into relationship with God. Through His blood that He shed, Jesus bought for us the way back into fellowship with God.

He comes now because of what He did on the cross of Calvary and offers this to us as a free gift. He offers the opportunity to come back into fellowship with God again; to be restored to that place of blessing that God originally offered to man.

The Rebirth

How does this come about? You might be thinking,

“If He did all that, why can we not just all be restored?”

The trouble is nothing is automatic. There is a process by which we are moved from our current condition through sin, into a place of being restored to fellowship with God.

The Bible calls this the rebirth. You may have heard the term ‘being born again’. What does it mean? It simply means that we have to somehow change our family.

In the natural we were born into a family that was corrupted by sin. That family includes every single person who ever lived. So the only way we can change this, is to somehow change families. We need to come out of the family we were born into and be reborn into a new family. We then become a member of a new family.

How do you do this? You do it by reaching out and receiving the free gift of salvation that Jesus gives. It is a very simple process. All you have to do is acknowledge that you are a sinner, then reach out and receive this gift by faith.

That is basically all that is involved in being born again. It is moving out of that condition of being under God’s judgment through sin, into a place of now being able to get back into His blessing.

Getting to Grips with Faith

The key word in this whole process is faith. You have to receive this gift, but you can’t just say,

“I’m going to take it.”

You have to receive this gift by faith because God always requires faith. But what exactly is faith? Most people do not understand what it is. They think that faith just means giving mental assent to something and saying,

“Yes I believe that.”

Faith is actually a lot more than just saying you believe something. Faith involves at least three things.

1. It involves being fully convinced

2. It involves committing yourself to someone else

3. It involves receiving something from someone else

Faith means coming to the place where you are fully convinced and you know without a doubt that you are a sinner. You know that you cannot save yourself, that God does love you, and that Jesus paid the price for your sin. Jesus has done everything that is needed to bring you back into relationship with God.

Once you come to the place where you are convinced that this is true, then all you have to do is to commit yourself fully to Him. You can then receive His life within you as the free gift of salvation. That is all that is involved in faith.

Sharing the Gospel with Others

If you are a believer, you have already come to that place of understanding about salvation. But for those who do not know the Lord, our job is to bring them to that place by explaining to them what I have told you up until now.

Once you have explained everything to a person, you must ask them if they understood what you shared. It is very important that they understand it. If they don’t understand it they won’t know what they are getting themselves into. And how can they be fully convinced if they didn’t understand the Gospel in the first place?

You don’t have to be concerned though. You can be assured that as you explain it, God by His Holy Spirit will help you to say it the right way, and will help them to understand what you are saying. So you must ask them two questions. The first one is,

“Do you understand this?”

The second question you must ask them is,

“Would you like to receive this free gift now?”

The person has to make a choice to receive the free gift. If they say yes they do understand and they do want this free gift, then you must bring them to what we call the sinner’s prayer.

This is where you get them to pray and to acknowledge that they are a sinner. They must acknowledge that they need the Lord to be their Savior, and that they believe that Jesus died for them on the cross of Calvary. They reach out by faith and receive His free gift of salvation.

Once this has happened the rebirth is complete. The Gospel has accomplished what it should have accomplished and the person is now born again.

It is not a very difficult process. In fact what I have explained to you, you can present to someone in 5 or 10 minutes. And what I have shared with you here is enough to get a person born again and brought into the Kingdom of Heaven.

There is a lot more involved, and as we develop this course we are going to look at each one of these subjects. We are going to expand them and add a lot of meat and clothing to the bones, so that you will understand each part in a lot more detail. This is simply the skeleton; the basis of the Gospel.

If you can do what I have shared here you can lead anybody to the Lord at any time. A lot of people have learned to do this and they lead people to the Lord all the time.

A Responsibility Involved

There is however a lot more involved in getting people born again. You should know by now that making babies is a very simple and exciting process. But once the baby is on the way there is a little more involved isn’t there? There is a responsibility that is involved.

It doesn’t matter whether you are married or unmarried. If you make somebody pregnant you have a responsibility. There is a new child on the way that has come as a result of what you did, and you have a responsibility towards that child.

This is where so many Christians miss it. They miss it in leading people to the Lord in the first place because they don’t know how to do it. Then they may get to the place where they finally lead someone to the Lord. But once they have led them to the Lord they try and dump them on somebody else.

CHAPTER 02

The Next Level

Chapter 02 – The Next Level

You may have managed to bring someone to the Lord. But now you likely don’t know what to do from here.

This Bible Course is designed to teach you a lot more than how to get people saved. You need to now take the person, follow them up, and bring them up to the next level. So here is what is involved in doing this.

Immediate Follow Up

Firstly you must follow them up immediately. Don’t just leave the person and wait to see how they are doing. Don’t contact them a few weeks later and say,

“Remember you were born again recently? How are you doing?”

You must follow them up immediately. It is absolutely essential. You must now take the responsibility upon yourself to lead the person further along the journey that they have begun in their spiritual life.

To do that you need to firstly explain to them what has just happened. It is no good saying,

“Okay that’s it. You have prayed the sinner’s prayer and you are born again. You are on your way to Heaven now. Isn’t that wonderful? Be blessed. Good bye.”

A New Family

A lot of people do that, but you mustn’t do that. You must explain to them firstly that a new spiritual baby has been born. The new birth is just like a natural birth in that it starts with a small, innocent baby that is incapable of doing anything for itself.

Secondly there is now a new family. When a baby is born, it is born into a family, even if it is just the mother by herself. Hopefully there is at least a mother and a father which now makes a family. If there are extra siblings that were born before, we now have a larger family. Either way the new believer has become part of a family unit.

Who then are the parents if we are looking at this spiritually? It is obvious that God is the Father. And we can think of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit as being the parents if you like. We will look at this in more detail later on.

New Parents

There is a problem here and that is that this person can’t see their parents. Who has seen God, especially a person who has been born again for the first time? You can’t just send them off and say,

“Okay, just let your mom and dad take care of you.”

The baby is lying there and it can’t see its mom and dad. Who does this new baby have to look to? If you want to find out the answer, go and look in the mirror. You are the one. You have now become a human spiritual parent to this new believer.

That is a heavy responsibility. Just as it is in the natural, so it is in the spiritual. And don’t think that it is any less important in the spiritual realm. You have now birthed somebody and you must begin by being the spiritual parent to that person.

What about other believers? They are now siblings - brothers and sisters in this new family.

The first thing you must explain to the person is that they have been born again. Tell them that the Lord is now their parent and that you are going to be there like a surrogate parent. You will be there to help them and lead them along the way until they can stand on their own feet.

You must tell them that they have a whole big family worldwide. It is made up of believers who are also born again. All those believers are their spiritual siblings and have now become part of a big spiritual family. You must welcome them now to the new family that they are in.

Prepare to Follow Up

Once you have done this you must immediately start setting a plan for how you are going to work with them in the future. Before the person leaves, you must make an arrangement to see them again and to continue to share with them.

Do not let them go. If it is somebody that you happened to meet on the street, then you had better get their phone number, email address or physical address; some way to keep in touch with them. It is essential to do this.

When you have done that you need to realize something. This person is going to walk away from you with only the knowledge of what you have just shared with them. And it won’t take long for doubts to enter their mind and for them to say,

“Was this all my imagination? Was it a load of nonsense? Did I make a fool of myself praying in front of this person?”

We have somebody to help with the doubts don’t we? He is known as Satan; the enemy. He will start to attack their minds immediately and try to put doubts in them.

Start with the Word

That person is going to come under spiritual attack and have doubts in their mind almost immediately. So before you let them go you need to give them something on which to base this new experience they have just had. You must give them something they can stand on to stop them from being moved.

There is only one thing that you can base the experience on and that is the Word of God. You can’t base it on their feelings, because when a person is born again they often don’t feel anything. Sometimes the feelings only come later.

Some people have a dramatic conversion and they do feel something. But feelings change and go away. You can’t rely on them. So right away before you let them go, you must get them into the Word. Give them just a couple of verses to hold onto.

Give them some powerful promises from the Word to show them that they have committed themselves to the Lord and that they are born again. It will give them the assurance that they have accepted Jesus and are now part of the family of God.

Tell them that if they have any questions, or any doubts or confusions, they must contact you immediately. You must be available to this person from the very beginning. Only now can you let this baby go, to grow and to change.

A New Image

The first thing a baby needs is food. The new baby must be fed, and as it is fed it begins to grow.

It is interesting that when a baby is first born you can usually see some features of the parents in it. It might have dad’s nose or mom’s mouth. Very often you can see some characteristics of the parents in the child. The child itself however doesn’t look exactly like the parents.

But as that child grows up it starts to become more and more like mom and dad. You can see it developing in a family. It is just a matter of time before it happens.

When you consider that it is not a natural, but a spiritual birth that has now taken place, who should they start to look like? What is the goal or the image that every new believer should be aiming for and growing up into?

God has given us the perfect image in Jesus Christ. And so what this person should be doing is they should be growing and changing to become more and more like Jesus.

That is what the spiritual life is about and it is our ultimate goal, so you must explain this to them. You must tell them that you are going to work with them from now on, to help them to grow spiritually and to become more and more like Jesus.

There is nothing complicated about this; no heavy theological doctrines or ramming Scriptures down their throat. It is very simple. You can tell them,

“You have been born into this new family and you are going to become like your spiritual dad now. The Lord Jesus is the ultimate Father. He’s the best and the kind of person we all want to be like.”

Time to Pray

You now immediately give the person some kind of activity that will help them to grow up and mature spiritually. The first activity that you must get them into is the very thing that brought them in, in the first place. It is something they must continue to do every day. They must learn to pray.

But here is where it starts going wrong already. What is prayer? Everybody knows what it is, but few people know what prayer really is.

Most people think that prayer is a religious exercise where they have to speak big, formal words in King James English. Obviously God doesn’t understand normal English. He only understands King James English. So they pray with thee’s and thou’s and all complicated words.

You need to change this. The first thing you must teach this person from the beginning is how to pray the right way.

Talk to Jesus

What is prayer? Prayer is simply talking to Jesus. So you must explain this to the person. Say to them,

“You asked Jesus into your life when you were born again just now. Now you need to practice talking to Him every day.”

That is not so easy to do though because you can’t see Him. So you must teach them to imagine that Jesus is there, and to try and hold a conversation with Him. Tell them to imagine that Jesus is sitting on the chair next to you or standing in front of you. Now say to them,

“Talk to Him using your normal language and expressions. Just talk to Him as though you were talking to a friend; somebody you love and somebody who loves you.”

Explain to them where Jesus is. Most people think that Jesus is up in Heaven a million miles away. And poor little me down here has to send my little prayer rockets up there. I think,

“I am so small and weak and I have to pray so hard to somehow get my prayers heard.”

Some people think they have to shout to the Lord because He is up there. People have weird ideas about prayer. But here is what makes it easy.

Where is the Lord? Is He up in Heaven? No, according to the Bible He is living within you now. As you accepted Him and invited Him into your life, He came to live inside you.

Even the smallest child understands that Jesus is in their heart. To adults it becomes a bit too childish for us to accept and understand anymore. But He is living inside of us by His Holy Spirit, so you must make this clear. Say to the person,

“The Lord is right here in you. He is with you wherever you go. Imagine that He is walking by your side or sitting with you and just talk to Him.”

Different Kinds of Prayer

Now you can give them a short little lesson on prayer.

There are three kinds of prayers that you can pray. Most people think that prayer is simply telling God what you want. Explain that doing this would really not be a good way to hold a conversation with someone. You would not be able to develop a good, friendly relationship with them by talking about what you want all the time. Prayer is a two-way street.

You can teach them the 3 P’s without getting too complicated. What are the 3 P’s? They are Praise, Penitence and Petition.

Praise means that when you come into His presence you start by telling Him that you love Him and how important He is to you. It is the same thing you would do if you were together with somebody in a romantic relationship. You would say,

“I love you so much. You are so special.”

Have you seen loving couples together? They say it over and over again as though the other person didn’t hear it the first time. They say,

“Do you know that I love you?”

“Yes you said that.”

“I really love you so much.”

They can’t say it enough because their hearts are overflowing with love. You can do the same thing and develop a love relationship with the Lord.

And then when you are feeling guilty or bad because you have done something wrong or failed, don’t run away from Him. He is still there with His arms open wide.

Teach people to confess their sins and failures on the run. Say to them,

“Don’t be afraid to come and say, Lord I messed up there. I am sorry.”

Assure them that the Lord will forgive them. And of course they can bring their requests to Him, because He wants to bless them. We can teach the young believer how to start with the basic 3 P’s and have a simple conversation with the Lord.

Time for the Word

There is a problem however with conversation prayer. It can get very boring when one person is doing all the talking. A one-sided conversation is very selfish and boring.

It is a bit like talking to your dog. It can bring a certain sense of satisfaction, but at times you wish the dog would just talk back to you. It can do that in a way by wagging its tail or licking you, but it is just not the same. You want a little more response than that. You would love the dog to come back and say something to you.

When you are dealing with a human being, if somebody doesn’t answer you back after you have spoken to them you feel a bit insulted don’t you? You feel very left out.

We need to teach new believers to not only talk to the Lord, but to hear the Lord talking back to them. Most mature believers are likely to say,

“We’ll get into the Urim and Thummim, and get into spiritual revelation and the prophetic.”

But that is too a high a level. We are not anywhere near that yet. We are talking about an ordinary believer who up until now didn’t know that God existed except in their imagination. Now they are beginning to touch God and reach out. How can they hear His voice?

There is only one way that they can hear it, and that is through His Word. The Bible is all of God’s words written down.

What you need to teach them is that when they read the Bible, they must think of it as being God’s words, not just written to Israel or to anybody else. They need to see the Bible as God talking back to them.

Teach them how to get into the Bible and let the words of the Bible jump out at them and speak to them personally. They must feel that God is really talking to them; that the Lord Jesus is speaking to them straight out of the Word as they read it.

Since we are now trying to teach them to develop a relationship with Jesus, you should encourage them to learn as much about Him as they can. You might say though,

“But what about God the Father and the Holy Spirit? What about the Trinity?”

Don’t ever bring up the Trinity to a new believer. You will confuse them. To them Jesus is God. Jesus is a person; the one who loved them and died for them. They must learn to talk to Jesus and see Him as God. That makes it far less complicated.

Where to Start

To get them started with reading the Bible, the first place they should start reading is in the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Gospel of John is probably the best one to start with, because John’s Gospel is all about Jesus as the Son of God. It is the clearest teaching.

Matthew was written with Jewish Christians in mind. Most of us are Gentiles these days, and Matthew is not the book to start with unless you are dealing with a Jew. It has all the genealogies and lots of boring stuff.

Mark is a great book because it teaches them everything that Jesus did. It has wonderful stories in it of all the miracles, signs and wonders that Jesus did. And Luke is like a full biography of everything that Jesus did.

John is therefore probably a good one to start with, to try and understand some of the spiritual things. It covers a lot of salvation and that sort of thing, so get them reading through the Gospels first.

Daily Readings

You should also encourage them to do a daily devotional and learn something practical. To do this you should get them reading a Proverb every day.

There are 31 chapters in the book of Proverbs, and there are 31 days in the longest months. Teach them to take whatever day of the month it is, and read that chapter from Proverbs and learn something practical. Get them to also read some of David’s Psalms.

That is a very simple Bible reading schedule that you can give to the person. Start with the Gospel of John, then they can perhaps go through Mark, Luke and end with Matthew.

The order doesn’t really matter, they must just read through those first. If they have any questions they can come and ask you about it. Get them to read a chapter from Proverbs and a little bit from the Psalms.

There is a good chapter you could also give them to read every day for a while. It is from 1 Corinthians 13; the chapter on love. It will show them how to develop that love which is like the Lord’s love.

Keep Up with the Times

Encourage them to use an electronic Bible. We are living in the electronic age, and I know that the diehard, religious old-time Christians still want to carry their big Bible under their arms.

But imagine this. Here is a new believer and you want to show him a Scripture in Habakkuk, but he can’t understand what you said. He has never heard of it. He will ask you,

“Where can you find that in the Bible?”

Then he will have to leaf through the index and battle to the find the Scriptures.

I agree that it is nice to have a physical Bible if you have nothing else. But these days if you have an iPod, PDA, computer or any other electronic device, it is so easy to get an electronic Bible. It is easy to look up what book, chapter or verse you are looking for and read it, so encourage the use of modern technology.

CHAPTER 03

Introduction to Ministry

Chapter 03 - Introduction to Ministry

The next thing you must speak to them about is ministry. You may think that this is too early to introduce. But you must realize that what I am sharing with you now are the things you will teach them on an ongoing basis. It will not happen all at once on the same day that they were saved.

You must share with the person the allegory that the Scriptures give us of being the Body of Christ. Show them how all believers together make up what is like a complete body. And each person takes a different place in the body.

Explain to them that they could be a finger, a toe, a nose or a hand. Each person is different and each one has different roles and functions to perform. All of us are very different, and God doesn’t force us into a mold. He allows us to be different and He has a special place for us in the Body that is suited to us.

Help them to realize that as a body part they now have a function to perform. It is a fact that everybody wants to do something. We all have a need for some kind of accomplishment. You might think,

“Now that I am saved what do I do as a Christian? Am I going to sit here and pray and read the Bible all day?”

This is not the case at all. We have something to do as well. What does the new Christian have to do?

It will become clearer as they grow as to what part of the Body they fill so they shouldn’t worry about that. What you can tell them about right away is the one function that every member of the Body has. It is sharing their experience with others.

You can immediately show them how they should now share with old friends, relatives or everybody they meet, what they have experienced and what God has been teaching them.

They don’t have to get all complicated and ram it down their throats. They just need to begin to share their testimony. They will immediately feel that they are becoming active now as a new believer.

That is the beginning of ministry and it is all that a new believer needs. Eventually as they grow you can tell them about the body ministry functions, the Gifts of the Spirit and everything else. That will be at the future higher levels, but for now we are starting at the lowest levels.

Fellowship with Others

You need to teach them about fellowship. No baby can survive all by itself. It needs daily care from somebody else like the help of siblings. It needs the mother to take care of it each day. The baby needs other people around it.

For this reason, what you need to do is invite them to meet other Christians who have also committed themselves to the Lord. Get them to meet some of the bigger family now and the new siblings.

Where is the best place to bring them? What most people do is tell the person,

“I have led you to the Lord. Now I would like you to come to our church on Sunday.”

You now have this new person walking into a big religious church as a complete stranger. They are feeling totally out of their league and you say to them,

“These are your new brothers and sisters.”

The only trouble is they don’t care about you because they are too busy doing their church program. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to be introduced to a family like that.

You need to change it. The first thing you need to do is to invite them to your home meeting. Right around now you are probably thinking,

“I am supposed to have a home meeting? But I don’t have one.”

If you didn’t have one before you do now because you just led somebody to the Lord. You must now invite them to your home. Invite some other people that are also believers to come and join you and to fellowship together and get this person to meet other Christians.

Get them to start fellowshipping right away with the Body of Christ. You need to do this, because sooner or later if this person has had any experience in this world whatsoever, they are going to start thinking,

“Don’t I have to join a church now?”

You must explain to them that this is the church. The Bible calls a church any group of believers getting together in a gathering. The church is not a building. It is a group of people who are all born again, who all the love the Lord and are all part of this spiritual family.

Show them what church really is and give them church in your home, just as the early disciples did according to the pattern that God is showing for the church in these days.

Water Baptism

You will need to teach them about water baptism. You must explain this to them quite early in their spiritual experience, because every new believer should be baptized in water pretty soon after they are born again.

In the early church they baptized them the same day. But baptism already had a meaning to the Jewish Christians, because baptism was part of their ritual of becoming Jews if you were a Gentile. So baptism already had some significance to them and didn’t need to be explained.

Today baptism is a little archaic, and it sometimes takes a while for a person to understand it. So explain to them what baptism is for.

You must explain to them that when they accepted the Lord, they died to their old life. The old person that they were has died and needs to be buried. Baptism is like a burial service where we are burying the old person. Encourage them to immediately set a date to be baptized in water as soon as they are ready.

How do you baptize them? You may say,

“We have to wait until our pastor has time so that you can come to our church and get baptized in the church’s baptismal font.”

No, baptism can in fact be carried out by any fellow believer. You can do it in the bath tub, in the Jacuzzi or the swimming pool, a river or a dam. It really doesn’t matter where you do it, as long as there is enough water to immerse the person completely under the water.

It is great if there are other Christians present with you, so that you make it like a public declaration with people to witness it. Encourage the person to get baptized. Help them to see that as soon they are baptized it is like finally putting their old life behind them once and for all, and walking in the new life that God has given to them.

The Holy Spirit

You will need to teach them about the Holy Spirit. They have never heard of the Holy Spirit before. Show them that now that they are born again, that God has come to live within them. Jesus is now living inside of them through the Holy Spirit. You can’t see the Holy Spirit because He is invisible. But He is still real because the spiritual realm is very real.

Explain to them that the Holy Spirit is there to help them and to guide them. He is there to help them in these areas.

Firstly He is there to help them to understand the Scriptures and how to pray correctly. He helps them to relate to other people and to function as a believer in the Body of Christ. He helps them to overcome sin in their lives, and gives them peace, direction and assurance.

These are all the things that the Holy Spirit will give them.

The Enemy

Sooner or later you also need to teach them about the enemy. If you don’t do this the enemy will get in and totally confuse them and throw them off the track.

Explain to them who Satan is. Most Christians don’t really know who he is. They just know that he is there, but they don’t know much about him. That is why in due course we will develop all of these things in a lot of detail.

It is very simple though, there is an enemy called Satan. How does he work? Tell them that Satan will try to tempt them to sin and then accuse them.

Explain to them that in the name of Jesus we now have victory over Satan. We can resist him and tell him to leave and he has to listen. The Holy Spirit now gives them power to overcome the enemy.

You don’t have to be complicated. Each of these things are what you are going to teach this new believer as they begin to grow up.

To summarize everything so far, we have brought the person to the Lord. We have presented the Gospel and brought them in to a salvation experience. We have now given them a foundation on which to build their spiritual life. They are able to grow and increase spiritually to become mature believers; to become more and more like Jesus.

Most churches and Christians leave it right there. They think that the most important thing in life is serving the Lord, doing your ministry, overcoming sin and the Devil.

Two Opposite Realms

These are the most important things to most believers. But we don’t live in the spiritual realm. We live in two worlds; two different planes. We now have a new spiritual dimension in life that was not there before, but we still live in this physical world.

It is very important that you identify this. You must make the person aware of the fact that these two realms are completely different and can totally conflict with each other.

Most people in the past have taught that you have to separate yourself from the world. You have to separate yourself from the physical life and concentrate only on the spiritual. The trouble is we spend all of our time in this natural world. You must teach them now how to combine these two realms into one complete life.

You must show them that as they look at the secular World System, they must see that it is controlled by Satan and by those who don’t know the Lord. They need to understand how the System is set up.

New Weapons and Tools

The new believer needs some tools and some new weapons that come from the spiritual realm. This will enable them now to succeed and be all they want to be and can be, in this natural realm in which we live.

On the one hand there must be a separation from the World System. We are not going to be controlled by the way they do it anymore. But on the other hand because we are in this world, we must now bring in something from the spiritual realm in order to influence this realm.

If you don’t do that and teach people how to somehow integrate their spiritual life into their secular life, they are going to end up in what we call a ‘spiritual bubble’. They will be living in a little airy-fairy spiritual world which is not real, and they will not be able to relate to real people in the natural world.

What use are you to the Lord if you can’t take what you have and bring it back into the world? You won’t be able to win people for the Lord, and bring them out of that System and into the Kingdom of God.

If you cannot succeed in the natural secular world, you are no use to the Lord whatsoever. What do we usually teach people though? We say to them,

“Give up all your past friends and relationships. Friendship with the world is enmity with God. You can’t have any friends anymore. Your friends are all unbelievers, and now that you are a Christian you are only allowed to be friends with Christians.”

The trouble is other Christians are not your friends. They are your family. There is a big difference between friends and family. So many people have given up all their friendships and relationships in the world. But by doing so they have lost all influence that they could have had in the world.

Living an Abundant Life

The key here is to create an abundant life; one where you are fully successful in this life and this world, using spiritual principles that are taken from that new spiritual dimension that you have.

There are three areas in this world that we should be successful in and that God intends for us. They are:

1. Health

2. Wealth

3. Relationships

The abundant life consists of these three main areas in the real world. You must understand one thing, and that is that health is not purely a medical thing. It comes from within. Solomon tells us that from within us come the forces that control our lives.

Health comes from within and we must teach believers that health is their inheritance in the Lord. We can tap into the spiritual resources and bring them into the physical realm. We can bring them into our physical bodies to produce the health that we need.

Wealth is not wrong. However it must be subject to the spirit within. If you keep it subject to the spirit within you can have any amount of wealth as a believer.

Finally we come to relationships. How are they created? They are created by allowing the love that flows from deep within our spirits and towards other people to develop loving relationships.

All of these should be manifest in the life of a believer. But how do we create them? We do it by using spiritual power and by using principles taken from the Scriptures.

We don’t do it using the ways of the world. The world teaches principles on psychology and the ideas of man, but they are not God’s ideas.

The church has lost this ability, and as most Christians grow up they end up living in a spiritual bubble and they can’t relate to the real world. That is the difference about this course. We are going to teach you how to survive not only in the spiritual realm, but also in the natural realm.

That is what this whole course is going to embrace. We will go into these subjects in detail.

Wrapping it Up

To summarize everything together very quickly, God created man with a plan in mind. That plan was blocked when man sinned and broke fellowship with God. But God created a new plan, and He introduced it after Jesus died on the cross of Calvary.

Everybody is able to enter into this new plan simply by receiving what Jesus did for them. This is an ongoing process that begins with being born again and leads upwards to maturity.

That is a full summary of the entire spiritual life, starting from the beginning and leading upwards. Each of these in turn will move to a higher level.

We will look at all of these subjects in this course and go into them in far more detail than what I have shared here. We will expand them so that you can understand what others teach.

It will help you to learn to grow spiritually and become more mature. You will increase your knowledge and rise up to be more and more like Jesus. You will learn to rise up in this world and to rule and reign in Him.

You can learn to overcome using that spiritual dimension that He has given to you. You can develop health, wealth and good relationships, turn this world upside down for the Lord and win this world for Him.

That is really what this is about isn’t it? It embraces every part of our life.

That is what this Bible Course will be teaching. I have given you an introduction in this e-book to show you where it is at. I hope that I have whetted your appetite to realize the wonderful things that the Lord has for us.

We are going to teach you as we go on how to take all these things to a new level. We will show you how to rise up and become not only the kind of Christian that you desire to be, but to become man the way God intended.

We will show you how to get back into fellowship with the Lord and to enjoy even more than Adam and Eve had originally in the Garden of Eden. That is after all what we call the abundant life, and it is what we are headed for.

This book was an introduction to the subject on hearing the voice of God. If you were blessed by this book, please consider giving a review of it.

For an introduction to the subject of the Bible and Doctrine, check out this other book available now:

How to Hear From God

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If you are interested in the full Bible Study Course you can find it on the GBM Academy Website below.

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Other Books From Global Business Ministries International

You Can Find All These Books on the Amazon Kindle store or on GBMI Bookshop

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Conversational Prayer Made Easy

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Finding Your Ministry Calling Made Easy

Prophetic Ministry Made Easy

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The New Way of Blessing Part 2 - Using Your Blessing

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Keys to Creativity: Unleashing Your Creative Abilities

Keys to Self-Motivation: Releasing Your Core Desires

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Daily Good News Volume 2 – Second Quarter

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Table of Contents

Chapter 01 – From Unbeliever to Newborn Baby &nb...

Chapter 02 – The Next Level &n...

Chapter 03 - Introduction to Ministry &nbs...

Follow GBM International &nbsp...

Other Books From Global Business Ministries International &n...