International Discipleship Literature is the product of what some people call a “felt need.” The churches in many so-called Third World Countries have Bibles, but they do not have any supporting literature to help them understand their Bibles. Our desire is to fill that void between the people’s Bibles and their understanding.
For instance, the Bible doesn’t tell us that within the framework of the two major covenants, the Old and New Testaments, that there are five very distinctively different sections – Law, History, Poetry, Prophecy and the New Testament. Within the New Testament, the text doesn’t explicitly tell us, for example, that:
- Romans 6 and Galatians 2 are twin sisters;
- that when Jesus cried out to God the Father from the cross, He was quoting Psalm22;
- that when John the Baptist introduced Jesus he was quoting Isaiah 40;
- that when Abraham offered Isaac on the altar (Genesis 22) he was acting out what Jesus, the “Lamb of God” was to do for us 2,000 years later;
- that God was talking about what Jesus was to accomplish in His death and resurrection when He told Satan the “Seed of the woman will bruise your head” (Genesis 3:15).
People need corroborating literature to help them understand what a miracle they have in their hands every time they pick up a Bible.
“Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him…that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 1:15-17; 3:16-19