#GodsStory ft. Christian & Gloria: Understanding God’s Word from His Perspective

Hello. Our names are Chris and Gloria. We are a married couple from Germany. Last year, we started a 1-year trip to get to know Asia as travelers. We made a stop in Kuala Lumpur. While looking for a faithful church, we got to know CERC through a friend.

Gloria and I both grew up in a Christian Pentecostal household. Many of our beliefs and the way we lived our Christian lives were mostly based on feelings. We measured God’s presence in our lives or in particular situations we were going through by our feelings and emotions. And although we did accept the Bible as God’s Word and the primary source of knowledge and truth, we still seemed to be influenced by our feelings, and we even wanted to interpret certain passages of the Bible according to what we felt that day.

As we grew older, we started to see contradictions in what we felt and what we read in the Bible. This prompted us to actually question whether our faith had firm foundations. We started asking questions like: Do we actually understand what God is trying to tell us through His Word? Through the entire Bible, including those difficult parts that actually make us uncomfortable? That is why Chris studied evangelical theology in a German university. But a lot of questions were raised, especially how a healthy church environment should look like and how to discern good from bad teaching.

After visiting CERC for a couple of months, we actually got to learn what a big difference it makes to not just superficially read the Bible, but to carefully read and work hard on the text and try to understand God’s message to us through His Word. We learned that we not only need a cultural and context-based understanding of the text and the author, but also a framework-based understanding of how the Bible holds together its many books as one story with one message. We learned how to look at particular events in relation to the whole picture of God’s message to us. We even confronted the tough questions in the Bible like: How does God carry out His message throughout the Bible? How do the events and passages point back to Him and to His salvation plan with Jesus Christ? How does the salvation plan look like and how does it develop throughout the Bible? And how does it relate to us? Where are we in the total picture of God’s plan? What are our roles, our purpose, and our task?

A powerful tool for this approach is Biblical Theology (BT). BT is the study of the unity of the message of the Bible. This framework helps us to put into perspective the problematic passages we have been struggling with for years.

Knowing that every part of the Bible, starting from Genesis to Revelation, is related to and is pointing towards Jesus helped us to no longer see the Bible as a collection of independent stories from God to us that fail to shed light on the central purpose of Scripture.

BT corrected our way of reading the Bible. It helped us grow in the knowledge of the Word. It helped us see the heavy consequence of sin. As we know, it is impossible to know God and to know how to please Him without understanding His Word. Thus, knowing how to read and understand Scripture properly is a must for every Christian. This should be followed by submitting ourselves to God and killing sin in our everyday lives to please God. We encourage you to raise the bar when it comes to investing your time and effort to faithfully understand God’s Word. With God’s grace and help from CERC, we have been able to do that.

It changed our lives and we thank God for leading us to CERC.