December brings us a new quarter at Focus and new course offerings for the School of Ministry's live and recorded study programs. We will start two new courses at the beginning of December. If you are interested in becoming a part of either program, please contact the office at [email protected] or call us at 402-306-0559.

We have a chapel service and one teaching session afterward. We've been recording the sessions, so those who are unable to attend can still study. However, we are hoping to have a live session via YouTube or Google Meet in December. Whether you are looking to pursue a college degree or personal spiritual growth, we hope you will join us. You'll be happy you did.



Blessings in His Name,
Dr. Patrick Vossen, FBC

THE WISDOM OF THE SPIRIT




  GOD’S POWERFUL MYSTERY
  1 Corinthians 2:1–5

  1 When I came to you, I didn’t come and proclaim God’s mystery to you by means of a superior style of speaking or wisdom. 2 No: I decided to know nothing in my dealings with you except Jesus the Messiah, especially his crucifixion. 3 I came to you in weakness, in great fear and trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in transparent proof brought home powerfully by the spirit, 5 so that your faith might not be in human wisdom but in God’s power.


Life is full of mystery. The deepest, richest and most complex theories that science can ever come up with only serve to highlight the fact that there is still a depth of mystery which goes way beyond it all. You can study biology and human genetics, and know everything there is to know about fertilization, reproduction, pregnancy, birth and childhood; but when you see your own new-born child, and two eyes meet yours with a look that seems to say, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So—it’s you!’ you glimpse a mystery which no physical explanation can ever begin to explore.

It’s the same with music. The physicist can in principle explain what happens when a particular instrument is played. But why Mozart makes us want to laugh and cry and dance, why some music is deeply consoling and some deeply disturbing, remains a mystery.

The deepest mysteries of human life—love, death, joy, beauty and the rest—have for millennia been believed to point to the deepest mystery of them all, the mystery of God. Sometimes in the ancient world people developed whole systems for trying to penetrate this mystery, often in relation to a particular divinity such as Isis or Mithras. People believed that by going through particular initiation rites and disciplines they would get to the heart of the mystery, and would discover things that would change their lives completely.

Most Jews believed that the one true God had already invited them to share his own life and purpose, so they didn’t go down this route. But they, too, knew a strong sense of mystery as they tried to understand the truth about how and why God had made the world, and in particular what his purpose was for them and for the future. Among the writings of ancient Israel, both in the Bible and in other books, there are many which try to penetrate to this truth, to discover what was going on in God’s world, and where different people might fit into his purposes.

This is where Paul comes in. He picked up this Jewish tradition and declared that God’s past, present and future had at last been unveiled in and through Jesus the Messiah. Jesus was the clue to all the secrets of God. Paul spells this out elsewhere, for instance in Colossians 1:26–2:3. And Paul wants the muddled Corinthian Christians to see that, though the message about the crucified Jesus is indeed a foolish, scandalous thing in the eyes of the rest of the world, at the heart of the Christian message there is the clue to the deepest mystery of life. In speaking like this, here in verse 7, and elsewhere, Paul may be teasing them a little about the way their culture and philosophy liked to probe into ‘mysteries’ of the pagan sort. He is pulling them over onto solidly Jewish ground.
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One of the reasons, in fact, why the mystery of the gospel is a mystery is because nobody in Corinth or most other places would ever think of looking for the secret to life, the universe, God, beauty, love and death in a place of execution outside a rebellious city in the Middle East. Crucifixion was regarded in the ancient world as so horrible, so revolting, so degrading that you didn’t mention it in polite society. Imagine somebody at a fashionable dinner-party going on in a loud voice about how he’d seen rats eating the body of a dead dog in the street; that’s the kind of impression you’d make by standing up in public and talking about someone being crucified. No self-respecting sophist or rhetorician would dream of doing it. But Paul believed, and the new-found faith and life of the Corinthian Christians bore this out, that this was the clue to the mystery of life.


Tom Wright, New Testament Wisdom for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2013), 1–3.

Found this quote in an article concerning the writings of John Calvin. I thought I would share it with the FBC family.

We have finished three full workbook and audio series in our Short Courses curriculum at FBC. The newest addition will be on " Ten People In The Bible Like Me. " We will examine ten biblical characters in truly amazing fashion, and get into some very revealing insights into our very lives in so doing. I hope you will be a part of this journey in the Word.

I will post on the College website, as well otherwise when the first lessons become available.

All Short Courses are free to listen to and take advantage of the study materials. If you desire college credit, the course is discounted to 50.00 for two credit hours at Focus. 

God bless you all, and have a fantastic upcoming Thanksgiving.


In His Grace,
Dr. Patrick Vossen, President
Focus Bible College

One of the early leaders in the Charismatic Movement was Father Bennett. We highlight a little bit of his experience concerning his quest concerning the Holy Ghost baptism in this recent post at Focus Bible College.

Dr. Patrick Vossen



Early in 1959, Bennett finally began to seek the “baptism” with the aid of a fellow Episcopal priest and a young couple in the church who had already received the experience. In an early morning home prayer meeting, hands were laid on Father Bennett as his friends prayed over him. His “nine o’clock in the morning” experience could be considered typical of the thousands that have occurred among the clergy in recent years:

I suppose I must have prayed out loud for about twenty minutes—at least it seemed to be a long time—and was about to give up when a very strange thing happened. My tongue tripped, just as it might when you are trying to say a tongue twister, and I began to speak in a new language!

Right away I recognized several things: first, it wasn’t some kind of psychological trick or compulsion. There was nothing compulsive about it.… It was a new language, not some kind of “baby talk.” It had grammar and syntax; it had inflection and expression—and it was rather beautiful.

In a short time, several members of St. Mark’s parish received the same experience. In their joy and exhilaration they began to use such typical Pentecostal expressions as “praise the Lord” and “hallelujah” in the church office and parish house. As word spread among the church members about the pastor’s strange new experience, some members of the vestry began to accuse him of fanaticism.

In order to quell false rumors and to answer questions circulating in the congregation, Bennett soon felt it necessary to tell his church about his experience of speaking with other tongues. Thus, on April 3, 1960, he shared his testimony in the three morning services of his church.

The reaction in the early morning service was “open and tender,” according to Bennett, but in the second service the “lid blew off.” In outrage, Bennett’s curate “snatched off his vestments, threw them on the altar, and stalked out of church crying: ‘I can no longer work with this man.’ ”

After the service concluded, outside on the patio, those who had set themselves to get rid of the movement of the Holy Spirit began to harangue the arriving and departing parishioners. One man stood on a chair shouting, “Throw out the damn tongue speakers.” After some members complained that “we’re Episcopalians, not a bunch of wild-eyed hillbillies,” the treasurer of the vestry called on Bennett to resign. Rather than cause disharmony in the congregation, the mild-mannered rector promptly resigned his parish, partly because he lacked enough understanding of the Pentecostal experience to defend himself. Thereupon the bishop sent a temporary priest to St. Mark’s armed with a firm letter to the parish officers forbidding any further tongues-speaking under church auspices.

Synan, Vinson. 1997. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.