Bible Gateway Blog

Join the free Get Your Life Back Online Bible Study with John Eldredge beginning May 10, 2021

Are you the average American who checks your cell phone 80 times a day? Are you frantically barraged by information so that you feel numb and burnt out? Are you overwhelmed to the point that your soul needs healing? How can the Bible help you focus on what really matters?

Bible Gateway interviewed John Eldredge (@ransomedheart) about his book, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad (Thomas Nelson, 2020).

[Browse the many books by John Eldredge in the Bible Gateway Store]

What do you see that we have lost our lives to?

John Eldredge: The mad pace of life; the complexity of the world and of people’s lives—especially the folks we’re trying to minister to; the tsunami of media we receive every day. The dog-pile effect of it all.

I was chatting with a friend last week who pastors a large church here in town. We were simply trying to schedule a phone call together, and after looking at our calendars, we realized it couldn’t happen for three weeks or more. A simple phone call. This is the madness we’ve come to accept as “normal.” Especially people in ministry. We’re running so fast, buried under so much, harried, haggard. Just compare your average week with Jesus’ description that a life yoked to him is “easy and light” (Matthew 11:30). Or as The Message has it, we will live “freely and lightly.” Would you describe your life as easy, free, light?

Continue reading →

The Bible uses the word Christian to describe followers of Jesus a grand total of three times. But there’s another identifier that fills the pages of the New Testament—a word that’s been mistakenly reserved for the halo-wearing elite, losing something profound in the process: saints. Wrapped in this ancient word is a divine invitation to discover who God created you to be and awaken you to the life you were meant to know.

Bible Gateway interviewed Addison D. Bevere (@addisonbevere) about his book, Saints: Becoming More Than “Christians” (Revell, 2020).

How does common culture understand the word “saint” and how does that differ from how the Bible uses it?

Addison D. Bevere: The word “saint” has been misunderstood for hundreds of years. In many ways, it’s been used to feed the elitism that’s so ugly in religion. Because of this, we, for the most part, just use the word to refer to dead people (or we use it in a sarcastic sense). But if we take a fresh look at Scripture, it’s undeniable that we’re all called to be Saints. Every. Single. One. Of. Us.

Paul was the one who primarily used the Greek word hagios (saints), and he’d use it to convey a missional sense of identity to his audience. If you look at the New Testament, you’ll notice that Paul would begin most of his letters by addressing his audience as Saints—for example, “To the saints who are in Ephesus” (Ephesians 1:1); “To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi” (Philippians 1:1). Before he asked them to do anything, Paul, inspired by God’s Spirit, wanted to remind his audience of who they were and invite them into a new way of seeing the gospel unfold in Philippi, Corinth, Ephesus, America, Canada, England, etc.

Continue reading →