Learning about the BFF website

Using BFF Free Materials

Our materials, including our images, are free to use in God-honoring ways just so it is not for profit. You can sell printed BFF materials, but just for cost of production and printing. If you translate them, you are free to include your costs. Many great truths have been locked up in dusty books for far too long. Even if one had invested in a large library, they are difficult to integrate into ones own notes. If you would like BFF's materials printed out, visit the BFF Resource Center.

As an extension of God's grace, we specialize in making the teaching and application of God's Word readily available to all. We hope that you not only use but improve what you find here. Take the best parts and form your own collection. We are not concerned with your acknowledging BFF in your material.

However, we encourage you to mention this site to others and link your web page to us to enable others to more quickly find this resource. We now have a set of 3 Cds (or DVD) which include not only the web site material but also many other valuable articles in printable format (pdf) including powerpoints and mp3 audio files. Some of these files are not available online. Many files are about 14 printed pages long. Some like our Romans Bible Study series is more than 100 pages long! You can put all of this right on your own computer for fast reading, printing or past it along to a friend! (We were glad to tell the inquiring seminary professor he could freely use these in his classes.)

Bible versions

We generally use the New American Standard Bible (NASB). The NASB excels in providing a reliable literal English translation of the Bible for study. This translation provides less interpretation of the text and therefore makes a good study Bible. Other versions have their good and bad points. We should be grateful for the many available Bible versions in the English language. Many groups of people across this globe only have one version or no Bible at all! Check out the NASB (Lockman Foundation) web site. Click here to learn more about picking a Bible version.

Caring is not professional counseling

Our hope for you is that through reading our material God's mighty Word and Spirit greatly impact your life. We pray that the concepts in His Word will come alive in your lives and churches even as it does in ours. His Holy Spirit is like water which softens the hard grain kernel and enable a sprout to come forth. However, we are not and do not care to be professional state-recognized counselors. We instead are those who are dedicated to living out and proclaiming God's truth. Our end hope is that we all more deeply experience God's wonderful grace and blessing and so produce righteous and godly lives (cf. Deuteronomy 28). Our response to experiencing the love and power of the LORD in our lives is to testify of Him to others (Psalm 51:13-15).

The Visual Touch

We have observed that this new generation has been trained by the screen rather than by the book. They are more presentation-oriented rather than script-oriented. Because of this, we need to think and present God's Word differently if we are going to inspire Christians in the modern world to be communicators of God's Word. This movement is just at the initial stages and in a number of years, we will see a flood of materials out there.

• As Christian teachers we need to better learn how to preserve and communicate our best thoughts and insights not only for ourselves but also for others. We need to personalize our own material to be effective presenters of God's amazing truth. Each of us can take what is offered here and improve on it or develop ones own material. This web site is only a beginning. God's truths must transform our lives and then be proclaimed from our mouths.
  

• For the Christian, we hope that BFF's materials will inspire each Christian to begin to write and collect the best materials faithful to God's Word for his own personal growth and for reference for others. In not too many years, Christians no doubt will have their own personalized application 'commentary' that they can regularly refer to and add to.
  

Striving for Excellence

With healthy competition and good help from others, we can excel in our materials. We are only a beginning. Many generations will follow and improve on what we now offer. That is fine. (We hope to keep up with this progress!) We want to encourage God-gifted teachers to take the best of two or three presentations and refine it into a new one used for God's glory! We have a greater goal of unleashing God's truths. People are hurting. They need God's Word now. Any good teacher or preacher will make the material his own before teaching it.

We have in our short history produced many original works. In order to keep up to the standard, we need your volunteer technical, language or editing skills. If God puts it on your heart to help, please let Paul know.

Narrowly Focused

Some people might think our goal of providing help to the general Christian is too broad, but it isn't. We have narrowed our focus to those biblical presentations helpful to the Christian. Our materials are meant to be training tools, both basic and advanced, to aid in discipleship training. I hope someday soon that others will develop three other web sites.

• a theological library. A site that specializes in thorough and clear presentations of scriptural discussions on difficult biblical passages or theological concepts. This site could get involved in what we have somewhat refrained from: different interpretations and grammatical/linguistic helps.
  
  

• a book summary. There are great books out there and their illustrations and summaries could be capsulized in a number of presentations. This would help promote reflection on Biblical truths and encourage focused discussion.
  
  

• a language Bible library. A site that provides linguistic insights all the way through the Bible. In this way God's Word will be more effectively and rightly used even without training in biblical languages.

A Learning Approach

As Christ's disciples, we always need to be in the learning mode. The Holy Spirit provides the insight and reception of knowledge from God's Word. We need to humble our hearts to realize that other Christians can have different views. This does not make them or us correct. But with good competition and clear presentation from the scriptures, we hope that some of our prejudices, misunderstandings and ignorance will fade away as we let the Lord speak through His inerrant Word. Both truth and grace must fill our hearts, minds and lifestyle if it is to bring glory to God. We are as concerned with applying God's truth as much as in possessing a knowledge of it.

Theology and Doctrinal Purity

BFF is thoroughly Biblical. We pay a lot of attention to theological purity. The scriptures shape our foundational beliefs and perspectives. We hold to the famous Christian Nicene Creed, a common traditional statement of belief developed from the scriptures. Unfortunately, many with good doctrinal creeds do not live by them.

BFF is very concerned with bringing the full power of God's Word into a person's life rather than just stating one's preference for a certain creed or doctrine over another. We share in our mission statement that we hope God will be gracious in helping us develop a systematic theology that will more clearly proclaim the truths and principles of God's Word in this complex world that transform us into Christ's image.

In the spirit of faithful Biblical theology we use an open mind in understanding the scriptures but stay within rigorous bounds to the intended meaning by the author in the original text of the sixty six books of the Bible. We are convinced that the autographs (original biblical scriptural documents) are authoritative for life and doctrine. If you feel uneasy with these words, try to understand us more by the words God had spoken long ago to Joshua in Joshua 1:8-9 (NASB).

"This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success. ..."

Our success in life will come from meditating on and observing God's Law. We are here to share our meditations that God has used to help us be more like Christ Jesus.

We appreciate any suggestions, advice, prayer, encouragement and support you can give us at Biblical Foundations for Freedom!

Your web servant - Paul