About Biblical Matters

 Studies – Notes

• One of my major goals as a teacher is to give class members who are unable to attend access to the notes used in each class. An additional goal is to give other who maybe interested in the material that same access. These notes will be made available on the website each week after a class is completed. They are my teaching notes and are by no means meant to cover the possible discussion content which may have occurred during the class. These notes are, I hope, not too cryptic. I try to make my them in sentence format as a matter of self-protection (when I go back 6 months I don’t want to have to figure out what I was saying) so they should be useful without too much head scratching. All Scripture references are in the notes as well so you can easily lookup the scripture and proceed to the notes.

• Questions used during the lessons are left in place for your use or thoughts. In most cases they are meant to stimulate conversation and get folks to engage in thought about the material being discussed. I think they will be useful for the individual looking at these notes as well. Some are directed at our specific congregation – obviously, in those cases you must think about it from your own congregation's perspective and answer for yourself as appropriate.

• See "About Notes Files" menu under Studies entry for information on file name particulars and downloading.

Studies – Commentaries

• An additional item I hope to make available in the future is what I am going to call Study Commentaries. The way these will be produced is taking the Study Notes for each class, clarify and further comment as necessary, and add to the notes other information of a more detailed nature. This is an ambitious goal. As and when this is accomplished, these files will be added to the website in a separate location as well. Again, this is an ambitious goal that may or may not come to fruition immediately. Stay tuned for updates on this.

Separate Study Projects, Papers, and Links

• From time to time, I find myself writing about some particular subject not necessarily related to the ongoing Bible studies. In these cases, I will try to publish these musings as papers for more in-depth studies and simple one or two page writeups. Some things that might show up here are (just to highlight a few):
• Topical papers – lengthier writeups or exegetical themes.
• Quick Read Topics – short one or two page max writings on topics not suitable for longer works but interesting none the less.
• Greek translation challenges – I am NOT a Greek scholar – only an avid struggling student. That being said, sometimes I find difficult to translate and explain passages which require deep digging to come to the proper translation. When I get to the bottom of these, if appropriate, I may share the solutions and the sources used to get to the answer.
• Perspectives – this is a blog page where on occasion I share some short comments on a subject of interest.

Other items – to be determined as the site grows.

• As I study and research information, I will from time to time add links to other sites with interesting takes on various topics. Not sure exactly how I am going to categorize these at this point – stay tuned for update on this.

Origins – How this Website Began (a little personal data)

• I became a Christian as a young man growing up in a local independent Christian Church in Southwestern Virginia. After my first year of college, due to monetary problems, I entered the military and spent eight years serving in the U.S. Air Force. During this time I met my beautiful wife Becky in Bangor, Maine. She is also a Christian and is now and always has been a great support.

• After leaving the military in 1972, I began a career in electronics designing and managing the design of hardware and software products for the military, communications, and then, from 1980 until I retired, I worked primarily on designing equipment for the oil industry – all, here in the Great state of Texas.

• My wife and I became members of the Altamesa Church of Christ in Fort Worth Texas in 1976. Since that time, I have been actively teaching Sunday School classes and/or small groups. I retired from industry at age 76 in August of 2021. Shortly before retiring, I took up model ship building as a hobby and guitar playing (not very successfully in the latter).

• Even though building model ships is fun and I continue to work at it, I really wanted to use the majority of my time more wisely. Since I have always striven to improve my ability to know and teach God’s word I decided to devote the majority of my time to studies. I began studying Biblical Greek, Textual Criticism, Biblical History, and other topics that are of great interest to me and, of course, all the while preparing weekly lessons.

 Biblical Matters

 Objectives of Biblical Matters Website General

• If I was to state the objective in a single statement, it would be to - Bring glory to God and Christ our Lord.

• More specifically however, it was suggested to me by a very good friend that a good way to share a lot of what I am doing would be to create a website. So, that was the beginning of all this. My hope is that you will find what content is here, and that which is added as time goes on, helpful in your ministry and a blessing to you personally. If this website accomplishes that for even a few folks, it will be a blessing to me just knowing that it has.

• The beginning offerings here will be very "underwhelming". If you take a look and find nothing of interest presently, I hope you will return from time to time and check for updates and additions. Also, if you like, please subscribe to the site and we will send emails each time a new item is added. Press the Subscribe button below to join now. I will attempt to limit email updates to a once per week event so as not to inundate subscribers.