What is This?

This Refreshings Challenge is something my husband and I do regularly to refresh ourselves with information we think is important to remember and that we want to stay prepared to share with others.

It's a surprisingly simple and effective method to renew our minds and saturate our hearts with God's Word (and other related helpful things), using condensations from a repertoire of bible studies we've done, skills we've learned, and helpful things we've condensed from other people (we'll note attributions where possible so you can read the larger materials if you like).

These posts are mere snips of things, on purpose! Keeping things extremely simplified is the point here. Even so, there are still thousands of bits of information from Scripture and related things for us to refresh ourselves with!

We enjoy streamlining stuff (a skill right up our alley), and we like using creative formats to aid our comprehension and retention of them. We apologize because this necessitates a major slaughter on grammar and punctuation, but we're looking for a minimal phrase or the gist of something to prompt our memory here.

We do believe regular and profuse Bible reading, in-depth Bible studies, and reading reputable Christian growth and theology books is extremely wise (and we enjoy doing these), but on this blog the goal is super simplified content.

As for the Bible verses we've chosen to use, we find there are multiple best ones for some of the topics, but these are the ones we've chosen for now. We do flex and adjust them when we find ones we believe are better, so our stuff is subject to change and modification.

Just thought we'd open it up this time and invite you to join us and refresh yourself with these things, too!

Copy these posts (putting them into your favorite Bible translation, if desired), stick them in a binder and then read them on a regular basis. You don't need to memorize them unless you want to, they'll take root on their own if you repeat them often enough. It's also beneficial to meditate on them throughout your day (murmuring them under your breath repetitively as you think about them)!


One last thing: we use the NAS Bible most often, but sometimes the verses are from other Bible versions and occasionally the verses are stated as Bible facts pulling together several different translations, sometimes adding theological definitions of words from reputable Bible dictionaries (some we regularly use are: Zodhiates Complete Word Study Dictionaries (OT, NT), Vine's Expository Dictionary, Earle's Word Meanings in the NT, Harris-Archer-Waltke Theological Wordbook of the OT, and others). (Note: we do not recommend, nor do we use, regular dictionaries for the definitions of bible words.)

Note: Permission has been granted for unlimited use of the NASB.
New American Standard Bible Copyright ã 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif.   All rights reserved. For Permission to Quote Information visit http://www.lockman.org