A Unique Believers Manual. For those who want to learn the TRUTH of God's Word

TURN BACK When we hear the word “repent,” most of us probably think we already know what it means. We have heard it preached, we have heard people say it, and we have probably said it ourselves. Usually, we think of being sorry for something we did wrong. There is nothing wrong with being sorry, of course, but the Bible gives us a much bigger picture than simply feeling bad and saying, “I'm sorry.” Repentance has to do with what happens after you realize you are wrong. It has to do with what you do with that realization. Let's say you are following your GPS to get somewhere and suddenly realize you have been going the wrong way for the last twenty minutes. You look at the screen and say, “Ohhhh. I was supposed to turn back there.” You can be as sorry as you want about missing the turn, but if you keep driving in the same direction, you are still going the wrong way. You can apologize to your passengers, apologize to the GPS, and probably apologize to yourself, but none of t...

There is something about Yeshua that sets Him apart from every other human being who has ever walked this earth. He knew who He was. He knew where He came from and He knew who had sent Him. He knew what He had been sent to do, and He knew where He was going. Because His identity was secure, He did not have to spend His life proving Himself to other people. When we say that Yeshua had no ego, we need to understand what we mean. We are not saying that He lacked confidence, personality, authority, dignity, or any understanding of His own identity. He knew exactly who He was. He spoke with authority, confronted hypocrisy, corrected people, and refused to be manipulated. He could stand before powerful religious leaders and tell them the truth without backing down. There was nothing weak or uncertain about Him. What Yeshua did not have was the human need to make Himself important in the eyes of other people. He did not need applause, constant recognition, titles, or admiration to e...

  There is a statement Jesus made that has caused a great deal of confusion over the years. He said, “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by forc.” Matthew 11:12.  When we read those words in the King James Version, it can sound as though Jesus is talking about people physically attacking the Kingdom of God and taking it away by force. But that is not the only possible meaning of the Greek text, and when we examine the words, the surrounding verses, and the parallel passage in Luke, we begin to see what Jesus was actually describing. Jesus was speaking about a great change that had taken place with the arrival of John the Baptist.  Just before this statement, Jesus had spoken very highly of John.  He said, “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist” Matthew 11:11.   Then Jesus immediately began speaking about the Kingdom of Heaven and wh...

  Have you ever really stopped to think about what a pearl actually is?  We usually see a pearl after all the work is finished.  It is sitting in a piece of jewelry, polished and shining, and we think, "Oh, that's pretty."  We know pearls are valuable, but most of us probably don't stop to think about how that little round object got there in the first place.  A natural pearl has a remarkable story behind it. It is formed inside a living mollusk through a biological process that takes place mostly out of sight.  When you understand what is actually happening, that little pearl becomes a whole lot more interesting. A natural pearl begins when something becomes enclosed within the tissues of a mollusk.  It might be a grain of sand, a parasite, some organic material, a piece of tissue, or some other foreign material.  We have all heard the story that a pearl begins with a grain of sand getting into an oyster, but that is not really how every natur...

There comes a time when we have to stop looking at what is happening around us and simply shake our heads in disbelief.  We have to ask a harder question: What are we going to do about it?   We are living in a time when artificial intelligence is moving into almost every part of human life.  It is being used to write, draw, paint, answer phones, create music, produce advertisements, handle customer service, analyze information, and perform work that humans depend upon for their livelihoods.  Technology itself is not the enemy.   People have always created tools to make work easier and to accomplish things that would otherwise require enormous amounts of time and effort.  The problem begins when the tool becomes more important than the person, and when the desire for greater profit causes humans to be treated as though they are nothing more than an expense that can be eliminated. That takes us into something much deeper than artificial intelligence. ...