Phillip A. Ross

144 pgs. Informal Christianity reviews the personal and informal realities involved in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that provide the foundation of Christianity. It deals with personal discipleship, what it means to be born again, to live in regeneration through the Holy Spirit in a way that produces a genuine spiritual life in Christ. If spiritual discipline does not begin in one's own heart, it doesn't begin at all.

46 pgs. This book is about thinking about God, the gospel, and Jesus Christ. We all need to make more time to do that. It is for the Mid-Ohio River Valley, but it is also for every valley where people live. It comes to a valley perspective from a valley perspective. This book is not about a mountaintop experience nor is it from a mountaintop perspective. Rather, it is from the "street," down in the valley where people actually live.

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332 pgs. There is much confusion in and out of the church about Christianity—Jesus' life, Jesus' teachings, Jesus' death and Jesus' resurrection. Is confusion about the gospel of Jesus Christ new to the contemporary world? When did the confusion begin? What is the confusion about? How have people dealt with it? These are the questions that have guided this commentary on Mark.

328 pgs.This book understands Peter's first letter with the eyes of modern, post-resurrection faithfulness, as if Peter was writing to us. And inasmuch as he was writing to all the saints, he was. In these pages we will see how Peter's vision of the progressive revelation of Christ in history fueled the scientific and technological revolutions that have already created a new world.

198 pgs. The end that Peter was talking about in Second Peter was the purpose of God for Jesus Christ. God was using Jesus Christ to bring the gospel of salvation to the Gentiles, to humanity, to the world. Consequently, Peter was not suggesting that God’s purpose was the destruction of the world. Rather, God was working to save the world. God’s message was and is a message of hope not hate, of love not loathe, of construction not destruction, of peace not war, and of suffering not fulfillment.

141 pgs. This book seeks to shine the light of Scripture into the darkened recesses of the contemporary church by shining the light of James into the hearts of its contemporary readers. This is an intensely personal work in the sense that it attempts to get at issues that few people (or preachers) are willing to talk about, but are essential for the gospel to take root in our lives.

340 pgs. Today we find that the ineffectiveness of the church in our world is tied to our own regurgitation of old answers. The answers themselves don’t change, but our languages and circumstances change all the time—and faster every year! It is not that we need new Christian answers, but that we need renewed hearts and minds to engage God’s answers through regeneration.

108 pgs. The Ten Commandments are intended to be foundational for a proper understanding of biblical Christianity. They are neither comprehensive, nor complete; neither systematic, nor extemporaneous. They are, however, intended to address issues of orthodoxy and error that plague modern society and the contemporary churches. They are neither scholarly nor popular in style or content. They simply expose the Bible for what it is, and apply it to the world in which we live. Though these insights and applications will distress many people, they are an honest effort to represent Scripture in and of itself, apart from ideology and the subtle influences known as political correctnes

364 pgs. Think of this book as a contemporary edition of John Williamson Nevin’s book, The Mystical Presence—A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (J.B. Lippencort & Co., 1846). It is not simply a reissue of an old book. Rather, it’s a sort of dynamic equivalence approach to editing in order to make it more available to contemporary people. I have simply tried to take Nevin’s work and make it my own, in the sense of comprehending its significance and application. In doing so, I have taken broad license to edit, interpret, clarify and expand what I think Nevin was saying.

Two volumes, 732 pages.The Work at Zion is a journal of a spiritual conversion that turned a ministry upside down. This collection of sermons details a preacher's rediscovery of classic, historical, Protestant Christianity in the midst of of apathy and apostasy. The logical conclusion of modern Christianity is brought to a head and set in stark contrast to God's Word.

412 pgs. Varsy Arsy is volume two of Ross's examination of Paul's letters to the Corinthians. The Corinthian church had been captured by a false teaching that brought it wealth, success and influence. Oddly, the false, Gnostic spirituality being taught was based on popular, Greek wisdom and had produced worldly success. But Paul saw through the charade and called the Corinthians back to ordinary faithfulness that stood in opposition to the false wisdom of Greek culture issuing from the academy. What the successful Corinthians called wisdom, Paul called foolishness.

351 pgs. Jesus was the most misunderstood man in history — and He still is. But does He stand alone? Has anyone ever completely understood what the Lord was up to? This study of Acts shows that Paul understood Jesus, and carried forward Jesus' perspective, not simply Paul's perspective. It was an old perspective because it was a biblical perspective, not a new perspective.

419 pgs. This study on Proverbs uncovers the biblical message of the Book Proverbs in the light of Jesus Christ. Every verse is seen in the light of Christ, from the perspective of Christianity. We cannot pretend to be other than Christians who live on the redemption side of the Cross, while Proverbs was written by King Solomon on the anticipation side of the Cross. Nonetheless, the Christian faith is founded on the eternal consistency of God. God does not change, nor does God's wisdom. (10% Discount coupon for Create Space only - ZU8JSU2J )

Christ came to free people from bondage to the law of Moses, but not through the absolute abandonment of all law. Paul’s training as a Pharisee made him the most biblically competent of the Apostles, which is reflected by his dominance as an author of the New Testament letters. My intention here is not to impose a foreign metanarrative upon the text, but to reveal the actual metanarrative of the Old Testament in the light of Christ as Paul presented it to the Galatians. That metanarrative was not what he had been taught as a Pharisee, nor what they had been taught by the Temple establishment. It was shockingly different, but it made undeniable sense of the Old Testament. The Temple establishment version was full of ancient mystery and symbolism that was difficult to understand, and cast the role of Israel as the hero of the story. Paul’s version, on the other hand, was clear, simple, and practical—though it required the abandonment of much well-established Temple superstition. Paul’s version cast the role of Jesus Christ as the hero.

While understanding the story of the Old Testament in the light of Christ is not difficult, abandoning our own false presuppositions about it requires some personal tenacity. Jesus continues to challenge our ideas about who we are and our role in history, God’s story. The story that Paul grew up with was the story about the importance and purity of the Temple. But the story that he learned from Jesus was about the corruption and failure of the Temple. Similarly, Christians today are Sunday-schooled in the importance of the institutional church, but the actual ongoing story in the light of Christ is about the corruption and failure of the church as an institution. In the following pages you will see that this story has played out over and again throughout history because of the pertinacity of sin. (10% Discount coupon for Create Space only - ZU8JSU2J )

416 pgs. -- The purpose of this book is neither dogmatic nor academic, but is systemic in that it endeavors to provide a reading of Ephesians and a biblical perspective that issue out of the wholeness of the Bible. It labors to hold various themes, lessons, and aspects together in order to display the Bible’s sustainable depth and breadth in the light of Christ in the twenty-first century. (10% Discount coupon for Create Space only - ZU8JSU2J .)

398 pgs. The thesis of this book is that Paul thought, wrote and taught that some of the leaders of the Corinthian church had things arsy varsy or ass backwards. And the reason that First Corinthians has been valued over the centuries is that many Christians have found Paul's insights and teachings to be valuable. This getting things backwards is a common problem that has plagued Christianity since the time of the Corinthian church, and before that back into the history of the Old Testament to the Fall of Adam. Being a sinner means getting things wrong. Paul was trying to help the Corinthians get things right, and their getting things right meant that they first come to understand that they had things wrong.

John's concern for holding the humanity and divinity of Jesus in tension is reflected in his treatment of Jesus' miracles. John provides a different understanding of the miraculous.

288 pgs. In this study of Colossians takes the doctrine of the Trinity seriously and applied it broadly. Its assumed it to be true of God, and therefore true of people because we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). We are not trinitarian in the same way that God is, but in a similar way, in the way that the image of a thing is not identical to the thing, but is recognizably similar. God's trinitarian character is the "image" in which He created us because God's Trinitarian character is the way that He has revealed Himself to us. It is the "image" of Him that we are to "see" in Scripture. And occasionally, the idea of God as singularity seems to find expression in Scripture.

Ross has a wry sense of humor. If humor is funny because it contrasts odd things in unexpected ways, then the best humor isn’t all that funny. The best humor is ridiculously weird.

114 pgs. It is about establishing a relationship with Jesus Christ and a synopsis of the historic, Protestant Christian position. It is not a expositional Bible study, but is more of a topical study intended to speak to the needs of contemporary people by uncovering various biblical truths and at the same time revealing various contemporary misunderstandings about the Bible and salvation.

An overview of the biblical story from Creation to Redemption from a twenty-first century perspective. The perspective you will find in these pages is thoroughly contemporary in that it issues out of the compendium and mindset or worldview ofcontemporary data. Just as, for instance, medical science has discovered that the truth of the human body is far more complex than our ancestors believed, so the truth of the Bible is also far more complex than our ancestors believed. This is not to say that everything previous generations have believed about the Bible is wrong—it’s not. We cannot escape our own worldview, nor can anyone adequately understand the worldview of a different era. We always see things from our own perspective, our own time, our own place in the world and in society.