1. Perspectives & Layout
Each of us thinks by a unique pattern of thought, basing our understanding of every specific thing on fundamental laws that we deem to be telling us the truth. The underlying assumptions that we hold determine how we define everything, yet few people consider how they define things or what are the ideas they hold that rule over all their thinking. Most underlying assumptions, including ruling definitions of truth, of how we know truth, of what God is, come out of the arguments of the serpent woven all through Christian thinking.As believers in Jesus seeking to know the One living in our hearts as He is, we know our thinking must change to fit His.
Having accepted that we do not define things as the Father defines them, we then realize that we are not blank. Every human being is definite about knowing how things work, what things are, and what everything is all about. Just ask someone, and you will get an earful. But only the Father sees things as they really are.
If we humans define everything by our own rules, however, not even knowing the Father, then our underlying assumptions and rules of definitions must be false. The ruling definitions of most of Christianity, including those you and I have held, cannot be true.
Lesson 1.1 The Purpose of this Course lays out the reasons a course defining essential terms is needed and how the learner will benefit from taking this course.
Lesson 1.2 Focus and Layout provides the focus of this course, that the Lord Jesus Christ is first Word, word coming out of the Father every moment, Word that creates and sustains all things. The lesson then lays out the topics covered in this course, the things we seek to define.
Lesson 1.3 Connections to Pro-Thesis ties the purpose, focus, and layout of this course together with God's pro-thesis as laid out in the ruling verse of the Bible, Romans 8:28-30.