I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the Gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the Gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation.
–Romans 15:18-20 (ESV)–

A revival is nothing else than a
new beginning of obedience to God.
–Charles Finney–

A WORD ABOUT STUDY BIBLES:
WILL THEY BUILD YOUR FAITH OR HARM IT?

I personally recommend spiritually-minded study Bibles like The Fire Bible because they are focused on the devotional life, holy living, and a personal relationship with Christ through encounters with the Holy Spirit. Its not a NAR Bible; its an Assembly of God and Church of God type of Bible, or classical Pentecostal. Its also a big improvement on the Dake Annotated Reference Bible, or even worse The Expositor’s Study Bible by Jimmy Swaggart, which are just not the best study Bibles for Pentecostals for lots of reasons. The Fire Bible, while affirming Biblical inerrancy to say the Bible is the Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, authoritative for preaching righteousness, and sufficient for understanding salvation from Hell–it will not run off like the Southern Baptist study Bibles often do–such as The Apologetics Study Bible, The MacArthur Study Bible, or The CSB Study Bible–into a kind of academically technical hyper-inerrancy; the kind of perfectionistic Baptist inerrancy teaching that might lead a Bible student into an all-or-nothing, inerrancy-or-atheism mindset. The risk to a Christian’s faith in reading these kinds of study Bibles is very high. Because they attempt to answer every single skeptic’s critique with complex logic, they train the reader that their Christian faith literally depends on these hyper-technical, academic explanations being 100% accurate and 100% true. If a philosophical explanation ever feels strained, overly rigid, or far-fetched to a reader, then the whole house of cards for their faith can fall apart into agnosticism.

Hyper-apologetics Bibles are mind factories for Christian deism and agnosticism. By forcing the reader into the “academic weeds” to defend every single tiny detail about Bible difficulties, they create a fragile, anxious faith, that often waffles because its based entirely on logical or scientific certainty levels. The moment the reader encounters a secular historian on the History Channel, or a National Geographic article, or an internet critique that easily busts one of the study Bible’s strained, hyper-logical explanations, the reader panics. They feel that if the apologists had to stretch the truth to make it fit, then Christianity must be a hoax. They backslide out of sheer intellectual exhaustion. They leave zero room for mystery, nuance, or human errors like the patriarchs committing polygamy in the Old Testament. If a believer begins to have a normal human doubt about one small peripheral issue, the notes will tell them that to doubt that point is to compromise the Gospel and to be a Hell-deserving unbeliever. Faced with an all-or-nothing choice, many thinkers choose “nothing” and will just backslide into a state of agnosticism. While a Baptist study Bible focused on apologetics–like The Evidence Study Bible by Ray Comfort–might be very helpful in many ways to strengthen a believer’s faith against the assaults of unbelievers–I would recommend that it be used along with The Fire Bible and other devotional study Bibles that are aimed at spiritual formation and growth: especially Wesleyan-holiness ones like The Wesley Study Bible and The Reflecting God Study Bible. Apologetics is totally dangerous to people’s quality of faith, if it is cooked in a atmosphere of cessationism or anti-charismatic beliefs, which lead the reader away from personal experiences of the Holy Spirit.