Recommended Resources

This page is short on purpose, and it's going to stay short.

Most ministry sites have a long list of recommended teachers and books. We're not going to do that, for two reasons.

First, we won't list anything we haven't actually worked through ourselves. Not skimmed, not heard good things about. Actually read or used. A recommendation list is only worth something if the recommending is real, and that takes time.

Second, we don't want you depending on teachers. That's the whole point of this ministry. If this page turned into a list of men to follow, we'd be building the exact thing we're trying to help people get out from under.

So what you'll find here is mostly tools. Things that help you get into the Bible yourself.

Study tools

These are free, and they're the ones we actually use.

Blue Letter Bible (blueletterbible.org)
Free. Multiple translations side by side, and it'll show you the original Greek or Hebrew word behind any English word with a click. If somebody tells you a verse "really means" something in the original languages, this is where you check it.

Bible Hub (biblehub.com)
Free. Good for comparing a lot of translations at once and for seeing cross references. Useful when a verse is worded oddly and you want to see how other translations handled it.

A concordance.
Physical or online. If you want to know what the Bible says about a word, a concordance shows you every place that word appears. This is one of the most underused tools there is, and it's how you check a teaching yourself instead of taking somebody's word for it.

A paper Bible.
Not a joke. Reading on a screen makes it easy to jump around and read verses out of context. A paper Bible makes it harder to do that, and harder is better here.

How to check a teacher yourself

This is more useful than any list we could give you.

Does the gospel stay the gospel? Listen to how they explain how a person gets saved. If it's Christ's death, burial, and resurrection received by faith, good. If there's anything added to that, no matter how reasonable it sounds, that's the thing to watch.

Do they show you the passage or just quote it? There's a big difference between a man who reads a verse and then tells you what it means, and a man who walks you through the passage so you can see it for yourself. The second kind is building you up. The first kind is building an audience.

What happens when you disagree? Ask a question. See what you get. A teacher who can handle being questioned is worth listening to. One who gets defensive, or tells you that questioning is a spiritual problem, isn't.

Where does the money go? Not every ministry that takes money is corrupt. Most aren't. But if the giving is constant, if there's always an urgent need, if blessing is tied to what you give, walk away.

Does what they say match the whole Bible? Not one verse. The whole thing. Anybody can find one verse that seems to prove anything. Read the chapter around it. Read what the rest of Scripture says about it.

Acts 17:11 describes people who heard Paul preach and then went and checked the Scriptures every day to see whether what he said was true. Paul didn't take offense at that. Scripture calls them noble-minded for doing it.

Do that with us too.

What's not here

We're not going to list a resource just because it's popular or because it comes from a ministry that's well known.

We're also going to be honest when we do list something. If we recommend a book and there's a section we think is wrong, we'll tell you which section and why. Most genuinely useful work comes from people we don't agree with about everything, and pretending otherwise would either shrink this list to nothing or make it dishonest.

Suggestions

If there's something that helped you and you think it belongs here, send it. Ken@livingswordministries.org

No promises. If we list it, it'll be because we went through it ourselves first.