"Rebuilding the Foundations" was well-received at the missions conference in Pittsburgh. Knowing that these were missionaries, and thus devoted servants of God, I am confident they will search the Scriptures to see if I told them the truth. This thrills me.

"What is 'Rebuilding the Foundations'?" you might ask.

It is a teaching I put together on the foundations of Christianity, and the results of my research are shocking ... um, at least for evangelicals.

Heaven's Family is my favorite missionary organization. I know the founder of the ministry. I have been to Myanmar (formerly Burma) with them, and I have watched the growth of the ministry over the last decade into 21 different ministries in a lot of countries. Keeping in mind that all they do is for the Gospel, they teach poor people to farm "God's way," they help save children from being sold into prostitution, they support missionaries and orphans, they help provide wells for clean water, they send missionaries to unreached people groups, etc., etc.

They invited me to speak at their annual conference in Pittsburgh. There were about 40 staff and nearly a hundred donors there. They let me speak on whatever I wanted. Because these were people actively involved in spreading the Gospel, I FILLED the 45 minutes I had with truths I trust them to verify for themselves.

The response was amazing and positive. I knew it would be because the teaching is simple truth from the Scriptures and early Christianity that happens to contradict perhaps the most fundamental idea in modern evangelical Christianity.

The Gospel is not "Jesus died for your sins."

It is true that Jesus died for our sins. It is gravely important that Jesus died for our sins, and his crucifixion and resurrection are the most important events in the history of the universe.

But his death for sins is not the Gospel.

The short proof of this is that the apostles never told a lost person that Jesus died for their sins. Their letters are to churches, and thus to Christians, and those letters talk about Jesus' death for sins, the atonement, on almost every page. In the book of Acts, however, where their preaching to the lost is recorded, no lost person is ever told that Jesus died for their sins. They are never told heaven is a free gift. They are never told they are sinners. They are simply told that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, who can forgive their sins and who will one day rule over all the world and judge the living and the dead.

I cover a lot more in the teaching I gave, the audio recording of which will be linked from the front page of Christian-history.org in about half an hour. The PowerPoint and outline are already linked there.

The apostles instead built on the rock that Jesus said he would build his church on, the confession that he is the Christ, the Son of God (Matt. 16:13-19). The keys of the Kingdom in that passage refer to the fact that Peter got the chance to open the doors to the Kingdom of God in Acts chapter two when he preached the first Gospel sermon to the Jews on the day of Pentecost. You will see there that he preached the resurrection as proof that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (see esp. v. 36).

Throughout Acts you will see that the apostles preached that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God--the rock on which Jesus said he would build his church--to the lost. They witnessed to his resurrection from the dead as proof. They were, after all, called especially to be witnesses of the resurrection (Acts 1:22, 4:33, and several other verses).

It seems extraordinarily important to me that we get the Gospel right. It seemed extraordinarily important to Paul as well, I would guess, because of his words in Galatians 1:8-9.

You don't have to be a bible scholar or a graduate of Bible school to verify what I just wrote. All you have to do is read the book of Acts, which should be easily done in a couple hours.

Again, the links to the 45-minute teaching are on the front page of Christian-history.org. If you have questions afterward, I have six hours of teaching on the subject at my author page at http://www.paulfpavao.com/free-bible-study-lessons.html. I also wrote a short book on the Gospel as the apostles preached it in the book of Acts, appropriately titled _The Apostles' Gospel_. It is available on Amazon with my other books. You can go even deeper with Matthew Bryan's book _The Forgotten Gospel_.

OTHER NEWS

I will be revamping at least the Navigation menu on Christian-history.org to make it more organized and easy to follow. I will also be making a section of the site specifically for the "Rebuilding the Foundations" teaching and ministry.

My latest book, _Rome's Audacious Claim_, is more than half done. I am struggling to find time to work on it because I am also a business owner, a father, a husband, and an active pastor of a Christian community--an all-living-on-the-same-land community. Please pray that I can find time to complete the book because it puts facts in people's hands that Catholic apologists don't want you to know about.

On that subject, I get asked why I argue against Catholic doctrines that I see to be false while leaving Protestants alone. The answer is that this is not true. See the subject of this email as perhaps the greatest example of not leaving Protestants alone.

You can follow me on Facebook as well. Look up Paul Pavao (my page) or Christian History for Everyman (this web site's page).