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The Word Walked Out

newest release

the well is open

by Hannah Rolyn

The whole Word of God lies open in your hands, and the Spirit Himself has been given to teach it to you. So why do so many believers still live on someone else’s secondhand faith?

35 min read · 12 chapters

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The cover of A Friend in Deed
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booklets

booklet

The whole Word of God lies open in your hands, and the Spirit Himself has been given to teach it to you. So why do so many believers still live on someone else’s secondhand faith?

booklet

God looked on a sinless Eden and found one thing not good: that the man was alone, and the whole world is now proving Him right. So why do we call our starvation freedom, and settle for the counterfeit of connection over the friend who shows up in deed?

booklet

Men and women are far more alike than the world or the church has told you. What if the soft-woman, hard-man picture was never from God at all?

booklet

Every church on the street confesses the same virgin birth, the same empty tomb, the same blood, and they will not walk across the road to one another. So who tore the body of Christ into a hundred pieces, and was it ever Christ who wanted it?

booklet

God is sovereign in salvation, and the gospel still says whosoever will, come. So what if election and human responsibility were never enemies to begin with?

booklet

Let no man despise thy youth, Paul told Timothy, and in the same breath, not a novice, lest he fall. So how does a young soul carry a true word without being lifted up into ruin?

booklet

The whole world was told to stay home, churches went dark, and a thing was done with a speed no generation had seen before. Not about the virus at all, but what if those strange days were a quiet rehearsal, and the people of God slept through the show?

not just a bumper sticker

A faith you have never examined is a faith you cannot defend, and most of us are carrying more of it than we would like to admit. This series is about learning to think: how to test a saying against the text, tell a settled truth from an open question, and reason your way through the hard ones.

bumper #1

Much of what we believe we simply absorbed, the way you absorb an accent, and never once examined. So how do you take a belief down off the bumper and find out whether it will actually hold?

bumper #2

Most believers reach for the Bible the moment a conversation turns hard, and wonder why it never lands. So what if God wrote a second book, and you have been leaving it unopened?

bumper #3

Most Christians did not reason their way to a position on drinking; they drifted into one. So what do the words the Bible actually uses say, and where does the weight of its witness really fall?

bumper #4

The world discovered emotional intelligence and self-regulation and active listening, gave them names, and sold them back to us at a premium. But what if Scripture held the whole of it in full color long before the world ever caught the shadow?

bumper #5

The church keeps a list of forbidden words and calls the saying of them a sin. But where is that list, and who ever gave us the right to bind it on another believer’s conscience?

strangers in babylon

Every believer knows we are to be in the world but not of it. Almost no one is taught what that actually requires on an ordinary Tuesday. This series takes the phrase down off the church sign and walks it out, one arena of life at a time.

strangers #1

We are to be in the world but not of it, a phrase we say so easily we have stopped asking what it means. How does a citizen of heaven actually live in a land that is not his home?

strangers #2

Christmas trees and Easter eggs trail a long history of pagan roots, and tender consciences have been made afraid of all of it. But does where a thing came from decide what it means now, or does the heart decide that?

strangers #3

Every story preaches, because there is no neutral storyteller. So how does a believer take in the world’s movies and music and shows without being quietly discipled by them?

strangers #4

The world says the machine will wake up one day and finish us off. But what if it is only dust with no breath in it, and the ending was written long before anyone thought to be afraid?

strangers #5

The world gazes up at the stars, longing and afraid, certain the great answers are somewhere out in the dark. But what if the truth never was out there, and the fear itself is the fingerprint of the one who peddles it?

strangers #6

The whole modern world has been taught to lie down on the therapist’s couch, and its language of trauma and triggers and toxic has walked straight into the church. So how much of the therapeutic age actually survives when you hold it up against the Word of God?

strangers #7

You were told the public school was a neutral place where children simply go to learn. But what was it actually built to do, and what are we handing our children over to get?

strangers #8

The American church was taught to call its nation a new Israel, a shining city on a hill. But what does the real history say, and where is the only city that was ever truly promised?

daughters of eve

Eve’s daughters have been handed a great many comforting lies, by the world and, more painfully, by the church. This series pulls them into the light one at a time and measures every one of them against the Word.

daughters #1

You have been handed a hundred soft comforts and told you are too delicate for anything harder. But what if you were made a woman of valour, strong enough to be told the truth and grow lovelier for it?

daughters #2

You have been told the ache means you need more romance, more attention, a grander gesture. But what if the ache is not hunger for more at all, but a sign you have been drinking from the wrong well?

daughters #3

The church handed you a measuring tape and a chart and called it modesty, then told you a man’s eyes were your job to manage. But what if the two great modesty passages were never about your hemline at all, and the freedom you were promised is still waiting?

daughters #4

There are exactly two things in all the New Testament a woman is told she may not do, and a whole open mansion of calling besides. So why do we spend ourselves warring over the two shut doors while the wide field lies untended behind us?

daughters #5

You have been handed two pictures of yourself: the still, seated woman who only ever waits, and the world’s loud girl-boss who bows to no one. But what if Scripture shows a third woman entirely, bold and moving and yet wholly submitted to God?

sons of adam

Men were made for something good, and Scripture has never once been shy about saying so. This series is written to build a man up, and to take him seriously enough to hand him the whole truth.

sons #1

The world says the very thing you are is a problem, and the church too often just wants you tame. So what does God actually say a man is, and why has He never once been embarrassed about making you one?

sons #2

A king wrote this chapter down out of what his mother taught him about being a man, and the church has spent a century preaching it at women. So what happens when you finally read your own mail?

sons #3

Most men are quietly starving for real brotherhood, a few feet from a well they have been taught not to drink from. So what did we lose, and how does a man go and get it back?

sons #4

You were lied to from two directions: feel nothing, or be ruled by everything you feel. So what if a man was made to feel like a furnace and govern it like a general, both at once?

The cover of A Friend in Deed
coming nextA Friend in Deed

more booklets coming soon

let’s walk out the Word together

a message from the author

Every one of these booklets began as something small: a note scribbled down, a question that would not leave me, a thread I kept pulling on across many years with an open Bible. I have spent a long time sitting with these ideas, turning them over and writing them out, and what grew from all those years is gathered here now, offered to you freely as a labor of love. My one hope is that it sends you back to the Scriptures to work out the Word for yourself.

Hannah Rolyn