The danger of some of the new culturally friendly, politically correct, palatable paraphrase versions of the Bible is that for many, it will create dumbed down, bound in chains, and weakened believers.
Transformation and metamorphosis into the image of Christ will cost you all that you have. It’s hard work, but its worth is above all money and riches.
We live in times where we want everything to be easy, pleasant and with little sacrifice. God many times works in opposite ways to these.
The image of Christ has no pain. He dwells in liberty and power.
The image of Christ is created in you in proportion to how closely you live your life by the untainted exactness of God’s Word. The huge inaccuracies of these new paraphrases will not transform you into a place of freedom.
For the unchurched, I can see some value.
I perceive in part these new paraphrases as used by the enemy to keep believers in bondage through the mediocrity of cultural relevancy, the unobtrusiveness of political correctness, rather than the freedom which is produced through sacrificial studying to find the unalloyed precision of the Word of God.
Believers beware and see where the cunning hand of enemy might be used in these new paraphrases.
We must study the revivals of the past and its leaders, William Seymour, Evan Roberts, Charles Finney and Smith Wigglesworth. However if we go back to simply cherish in the glories of these people, without learning, and then looking immediately forward to how God can use us now, we commit a grave mistake.
If you are in to just read and read, you have sorely missed the boat.
I believe that revivals and awakenings are more needed now than when these people lived.
We live in far more perilous times than them.
We must become the revivalists and awakeners of today. Their ceilings should be our floors. We have infinitely far more Biblical resources than what they did.
Jose and Mary Alvarez 