Category: General

Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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(Today’s Book Installment)

Taking a Breath Between Books

There’s no book installment for today. Instead, let’s use today to take stock of what we’ve been reading – and what we’re going to read next.

The One True Church turned out to be roughly the same length as The One True God. That is, each book is about 50 chapters, 150 pages, and 35,000 words.

This is the size I was shooting for. Most non-fiction books are 50,000 to 80,000 words, with the subset of self-help, how-to, and business books coming in at 30,000 to 60,000 words. So both of these books are within that range.

I’m sure glad that I adjusted my plan a few months ago to produce a trilogy of three books instead of the one gigantic book that what I was writing was turning out to be.

Recall the three book titles:

• The One True God
• The One True Church
• Living in the Kingdom of God

I expect it will take me all of November and December to write the third book, just as it took me all of September and October to write the second one. The first book took a little longer because I was away from the keyboard for about three weeks due to a medical issue.

You may recall that the original book that quickly became too big was to have been titled The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact. It was to have followed The Biblical Case for the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact in the same way that The Implications of Everyone Going to Heaven followed The Biblical Case for Everyone Going to Heaven. This pattern is, of course, that the “biblical case” book justifies the issue, and the “implications” book describes the consequences of the issue. For example, if everyone is going to heaven, there have to be implications.

My goal was to write about the implications of a fulfilled Second Coming just as I had many years ago written about the implications of everyone going to heaven.

While I could have written the three books to be independent of each other, I thought there was more merit in calling them a trilogy so that they would be read in order. That way, there could be less repetition in each book because each would build on the foundation laid by the book before it in the same way that the “implications” books could build on the foundation laid by the “biblical case” books.

All this is to explain why I’m using a highfalutin’ word like “trilogy” for stuff I’m writing. Understanding that there is only one true God and that there was only one true church really does clear the way for better understanding how to live in the kingdom of God. And it’s also the case that each of the three ideas is individually important enough to justify the time and thought that a book requires. I still believe a book is the best way to absorb any big idea that is new to us.

As for grading my writing, I think I’m still improving – but far too slowly for it to be something to brag about. I’ll keep trying. Stay focused on the biblical truths I’m writing about, and try to look past my inadequacies as a writer.

Tomorrow will be the first chapter of Living in the Kingdom of God. I hope you will keep reading…and thereby keep growing in Christ.

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Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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(Book Installments)

Grading My Writing

Yesterday’s post was about improving the titles of the books I am currently writing. I feel pretty good about my progress in that regard. Today’s is about improving the writing in the books themselves. I don’t feel nearly so good about my progress in that area. I set a goal for my writing that I don’t think I am reaching.

You may recall I wrote three daily posts back in June, all of which at least touched on how I had become disappointed with my current writing style.

• Checkpoint (June 19th)
• Transition (June 20th)
• Adolescents (June 21st)

You don’t need to reread these posts, but I did. I’m using them to grade myself on how well I’ve done since the promises I made in them. Before I give myself the grade, let me remind you of some of the things I said at that time.

I said that I not only needed to make make my books shorter, I also needed to make my chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words shorter, too.

I realized I was writing too academically. Instead of writing for seminary professors, I needed to be writing for regular folks: adults and adolescents. That meant I needed to be writing more plainly. Since June, I have attempted to do that.

My attempts for the last couple of months have fallen well short of my goal. As a result, the grade I have to give myself so far is a D.

It’s not for lack of trying – it’s that it’s very hard to do. After all, the Bible is an ancient book…written in languages other than English. It contains concepts that are not always easy to explain. That’s not an excuse. It’s just a reason that I need to try harder.

Moreover, there’s a limit to how much words and concepts like “predestination” can be simplified. If the mysteries of God challenged minds like Paul’s and Peter’s, they’re certainly going to challenge ours.

I say all this because I don’t want you to give up on my promises to simplify my writing. It’s just going to take me more time. I am not going to give up. If I can improve sufficiently, and if I have sufficient time, I’d even like to take a shot at rewriting the book I just finished to see if I could shorten and simplify it.

In any case, I’ll see you here tomorrow for the first installment of The One True Church – my follow-up to The One True God, and the second book in the trilogy of “The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact.”

The goal of all these books is to convey the Bible’s view of “the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”

2 Corinthians 11:2 For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.
2 Corinthians 11:3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

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Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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(Book Installments)

In Between Books

Yesterday, we read the last installment of the book Christ Is God. Tomorrow, I’ll grade my writing. And the day after, we’ll read the first installment of the book The One True Church. These two books are related, and I want to use today to explain how.

In April, I began writing a book with the title The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact. By June, I came to realize that this book was going to be too big. That is, in the process of writing the book, I saw that I was needing more chapters than I originally envisioned to convey the points that needed to be made. Therefore, I decided at that time to break the big book down into three smaller books.

I also want to maintain continuity and clarity in the books’ titles. Specifically, when I write a new book, I want the title to communicate not just the content of the book, but also how it fits with the other books I have written. For if it’s not apparent how the books fit together, then I will have fallen short of presenting a single coherent gospel of Jesus Christ in my writings.

None of my books is a tangent. They all contribute to a single unified message. That message is that 1) eternal life is found only in Jesus Christ, and that 2) Jesus Christ is found first and foremost in the Bible.

This message is for everyone – that is, the entire human race. Social labels like “Christian,” “Jew,” “Muslim,” “atheist,” “agnostic,” and others are irrelevant to the purposes of our Creator. We are all His children…no matter how we divide ourselves. And Jesus Christ is Lord of all no matter how many of us say otherwise.

For these reasons, I have decided to change the title of the book we just finished – Christ Is God – to The One True God. This allows me not only to show the continuity between this book and the next (The One True Church), it also allows me to preserve the framing that the Lord gave me when I began writing on this subject in April.

What do I mean? Let me show you.

Recall that I completed two related books many years ago:

• The Biblical Case for Everyone Going to Heaven
• The Implications of Everyone Going to Heaven

The second book logically followed the first. Around that same time, I also wrote a book now titled The Biblical Case for the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact…but never followed it with a book titled The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact…until this year.

This is the book I started in April and then decided to break into several books in June. I now see clearly how all this comes together. I’ll group the three books and title them as a trilogy.

• “The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact Trilogy”
  • The One True God
  • The One True Church
  • The Kingdom of God Has Come

In other words, each book will stand on its own, but will also be related to the other books in the trilogy. And the series title – “The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact Trilogy” – not only conveys how the three books fit with each other, but also how they relate to all the other books I have written.

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s how they now appear in my list of books.

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Daily book installments of Christ Is God resume tomorrow. From this point, it’ll only take a couple of weeks to finish that book. Then I’ll begin the next serialized book: The One True Church. Lord willing.

Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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(No Book Installment Today)

Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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(No Book Installment Today)

Sorry for being so late with today’s post. I had a medical incident last week and will have to devote my primary attention to recovery for a while. Thus I won’t be able to resume sending daily book installments for the foreseeable future.

You will continue receiving the daily email reminders (with the Bible reading plans and related links until then).

No matter what, keep reading your Bible every day, learn about Jesus Christ, and love Him with all your heart. There is no other answer for the world today!

Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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Adolescents

In the last two days, I’ve described to you 1) a problem, and 2) a solution. The problem was my bloated writing. The solution is for me to reduce bloat. But in the process of recognizing the problem and choosing the solution something else came to light. An opportunity.

The opportunity is to meet what I now see as a glaring need. That glaring need is for teenagers to learn the implications of the Second Coming. It’s not that I didn’t know about this need. It’s that I wasn’t focused on it. Being reminded that most adult readers don’t care about words like “turgid” and “stultifying” was a wake-up call. Once I realized that I had been unintentionally writing for graduate school readers instead of middle school readers, I realized that I couldn’t possibly have been reaching adolescents with my writing. I wasn’t intentionally ignoring them – I just wasn’t thinking enough about them.

In retrospect, for example, I can see it was a mistake for me not to direct The Honor of Marriage to teenagers as much as I did to adults. Adolescents are thinking about marriage and marriage-related issues, so their thinking should be shaped by biblical principles. If we wait until they’re adults, their minds have already been shaped. Of course, it’s parents – not me – who have the responsibility of raising up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. But my books should help you in that regard.

My failure to consciously include teenagers in my target audience applies not just to books on the Second Coming and marriage. It applies across the board to all my books. Therefore, I have double the reason to write less academically:

1. I’ve been missing my target audience (average adults).
2. I’ve been missing a group that should have consciously been in my target audience but wasn’t (average adolescents).

Therefore, I’m not just going to write better going forward. I’m going to rewrite all my existing books. Well, not every single one of them. I’ll make each decision on a case by case basis. But I definitely plan to rewrite all the major ideas into smaller, better-written books that can be…

• …chosen more specifically.
• …started and finished more quickly.
• …digested more easily.

The currently-existing books will be archived as the new ones are produced. I don’t want to destroy the existing books because I may fall short in my attempts to imitate Flesch and Leonard, and therefore it’s always possible I could make things worse.

Some of you might have been able to predict all this back when I told you how excited I was about folding some different book ideas into The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact. I just had to get this far into it to realize that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. It was a logical concept, but it led to a book that was just too large.

I’ve got a learning curve to navigate, and I hope you’ll stick with me. Tomorrow, we’ll start back where we left off on Thursday. I hope the difference will make a difference.

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Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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Transition

I haven’t struggled to find a solution to the problem I described yesterday. It’s obvious. Once I ran the numbers and thought things through, it became crystal clear to me what I needed to do.

Ever since Rudolf Flesch (1911–1986) wrote his classic books on readable writing in the mid-20th century, there has been no mystery about what improves non-fiction writing. I read Flesch in the early 1980s, but over the decades have wandered away from the principles of plain English that he practiced and taught.

These days, even AI will readily present the all the advice – including but not limited to Flesch’s – that is needed to help any writer be better understood. For example, below is AI’s answer to the question, “If I wanted to write a book that I wanted as many Americans as possible to read, what reading level should I target?”

To reach the widest possible American audience, you should target a 5th- to 8th-grade reading level. More than half of U.S. adults read below a 6th-grade level, and most bestsellers fall into this range. This accommodates the average reader, non-native speakers, and people scanning text on mobile devices.

Google AI, quoting from multiple sources on the subject

Wow. I have been missing my target audience by a mile. I need to return to proven writing principles, and practice them better than I have ever practiced them before.

It’s not a matter of dumbing down the writing. It’s a matter of not inflating the writing, not wandering off topic. In short, it’s a matter of avoiding academic bloat. That’s not dumbing down.

Besides, it wouldn’t be right to try to make things simpler than the Bible makes them. There are things in the Bible hard to understand. Even Peter admitted that.

2 Peter 3:15 …our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you,
2 Pet 3:16 as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.

I will be avoiding bloat – not hard-to-understand truth! I’ll try to do what legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard said he did: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

The solution for my wordiness is not just shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs. It’s shorter books, too. Specifically, I’m going to break up the three major implications remaining to be written for this book into a separate book or books. The good news for you is that I’m going to start this the day after tomorrow. As a result, you’ll be going directly into the material you have been expecting to see next – so I’m not postponing the content I’ve promised. And I’m going to thin out, if not completely rewrite, the 80 installments I’ve already written on the first implication. This means you’ll be seeing the second and third implications sooner.

Oh, and there’s one more aspect to all this…which I’ll explain tomorrow.

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Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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Checkpoint

It’s time for a checkpoint in the writing and reading of this book. This process will take today, tomorrow, and next day. After that, I’ll get right back to the daily book installments.

As of yesterday, you have completed reading the introductory section of The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact. It consisted of four chapters, delivered in 68 daily installments of about 500 words each. While I am pleased that I have kept up the pace for the last two months, I give myself a poor grade on the writing of the book so far. There are a couple of reasons I say this.

First, my total word count so far is way too high. The first four chapters just are the introductory portion of the book and the word count is already right at 40,000 words. I have also written and scheduled the next 80 days of installments, which are about the first implication, and they amount to another 40,000 words – and I’m not even finished with it! When the other implications are written, they could take the total word count to something approaching 150,000 words! This is terrible. Compare that total to some of my other books. (These are round numbers.)

• The Biblical Case for Everyone Going to Heaven – 60,000 words
• The Implications of Everyone Going to Heaven – 34,000 words
• The Biblical Case for the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact – 32,000 words
• The Honor of Marriage – 50,000 words

The average non-fiction book on sale today is 50,000 to 70,000 words. So if this book comes in at 130,000-150,000 words, its size is going to discourage potential readers. The size is not so much of a problem when you’re reading in serial fashion as we are, roughly 500 words day in, day out. But for those who come later, they’ll be faced with reading the entire tome. At that size, a lot of folks will find it just too intimidating to even start. And even if some do, how many would finish?

Second, the problem is not just the total word count – it’s that I’ve been too wordy in every other possible way as well. The paragraphs I write are too big. The sentences I write are too extended. The words I use are too long. I have to admit that my writing can be turgid, and, as a result, stultifying. (See what I mean?)

I’m writing as if I’m debating my seminary professors. The excuse I’ve given myself is that I’m trying to help fortify readers so that they’re not knocked flat when the inevitable critics come along to tell them that the ideas in my books are heretical. I can’t afford to forget this because readers do need to be forewarned and forearmed. But I have to stop letting it have so much sway over my writing style. Over time, it just became too academic.

In short, life is short. And I’m taking too much of my readers’ time to deliver the content I have to give. Tomorrow, I’ll explain what I’m going to do about the problem.

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