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Deborah BruntDeborah Brunt speaks out about
key truths for living life,
not as a religious Christian,
but as a friend of God.
 
In January 2006, Deborah founded Key Truths, Open Gates LLC and began writing an e-column originally called What's a Woman to Do? Because the intended audience and the issues addressed include both men and women, the column title changed to Key truths, Open gates in 2008, then to Key Truths in 2010. Regardless the title, key truths articles are designed to expose what's religious, embrace what's GOD.

For 20 years, Deborah also wrote a column called Perspective. These weekly articles captured snapshots of life.

Overview of e-columns archived below:
  • Blessing series
  • Praying for God series
  • Return to Your Rest series
  • Seven Mountain Rendezvous series
  • True Confessions series
  • We Confess! series
  • What About Women? series - current series: new article added monthly
  • Other Key Truths e-columns
  • Perspective Classic e-columns

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  • Praying for God series
  • In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray first and foremost for someone who doesn't usually appear on our prayer lists at all.
  • Praying for God
  • When you begin to pray for God from your spirit, you begin to pray for people in a new way.
  • The forgotten prayer
  • What if we forgot the most powerful, most strategic prayer Jesus taught? What if we failed to pray this prayer because we did not see it? What if we rediscovered this prayer,
    hidden in plain sight?
  • Return to Your Rest series
  • If weariness and heavy loads seem to characterize much of your life, Jesus holds out a personal invitation with your name inscribed on it: "Come to me . . . and I will give you rest."
  • Return to your rest
  • If what you're getting isn't rest, where you're going isn't to Jesus.
  • Snapshots of Rest: Two sisters
  • Mary and Martha's encounters with Jesus show that something wonderful takes root and grows as we repeatedly come to Christ and receive rest from him. It's called joy.
  • Snapshots of Rest: Mary called Magdalene
  • Neck-to-neck with Jesus, we learn holy intimacy - audacious yet utterly pure. Not rebellious nor defiant nor immoral, we keep company with him in a way that flies in the face of tradition, religion and culture - and highly honors God.
  • The REST of Her Story: Mary, Jesus' mom
  • Rest finds us as we stand with our Redeemer where we think we cannot.
  • Seven Mountain Rendezvous series
  • Seven times, Moses climbed Mt. Sinai to meet with God. Rendezvous by rendezvous, you'll see: No experience of God's glory looks or feels as you thought it would. He reveals himself differently every time.
  • The seven mountain rendezvous
  • Get away with God - whenever he says, wherever he says, as often as he says, for as long as he says. That key opens the gateway for God to manifest his presence in you, to glorify himself through you, everyday, everywhere.
  • Rendezvous 1: Becoming who you are
  • Inheritance hinges on identity. Identity hinges on covenant. Covenant hinges on relationship.
  • Rendezvous 2: Prepare to meet your God
  • The God who comes in the cloud invites his people to meet with him. He sets the standards. He draws the boundaries. He chooses how much time to give us to get ready.
  • Rendezvous 3: Love affair
  • When God shows up, you never know what to expect. The lover of our souls may do things we would never have equated with love.
  • Rendezvous 4: Laying down the law
  • If we suddenly, clearly saw what has caused what - in our lives, in our world - we'd be stunned, overwhelmed, and perhaps ... delivered.
  • Rendezvous 5: The covenant meal
  • God loves to paint pictures. He works in real time, so what you see is what you get. See with your physical eyes, and you get a true story that happened at a real time in a real place in history. See with the eyes of your heart - and you get much, more more.
  • Rendezvous 6: The covenant crisis
  • When God told Moses, "Come up to me on the mountain and stay," Moses had no clue how critical his obedience was to the preservation of his entire nation.
  • Rendezvous 7: Seven
  • Intimacy involves mystery. Others may explain God's instructions to you. But no one can convey to you God's glory, his ways, his Presence, his rest. You will know those only in personal encounter with him.
  • True Confessions series
  • Snippets from my personal journey with God
  • Leah no more
  • The realization hit me so hard it left me stunned. Here was a truth I had refused to see - a truth that seemed to leave me hopelessly, helplessly stuck. "I'm Leah!" I wailed aloud.
  • A time to speak
  • We've been taught to respond to evil by enduring it silently. Especially when evil happens within our church culture, we think Christlikeness means remaining mute. But God's truths always occur in tension. There is "a time to be silent" - and "a time to speak."
  • The seven-year fast
  • Generally when you enter a fast, you know what you're abstaining from, for how long and why. But when God leads you into a time of extreme self-denial and you have no clue as to length or purpose, choose to humble your soul - and watch the oppressed go free.
  • Lookin' good
  • The uncomfortable, the difficult, the devastating isn't God's plot to do you in. It's his way of removing the veil so you can see and reflect his glory - splendor you cannot imagine or describe.
  • Lord of Breakthrough
  • "She cannot say that!" the woman standing behind me cried. Ah, but the Spirit of God had already flooded the room. He opened the way for the words he wanted said to go forth. And in that place that night, God showed himself Lord of breakthrough.
  • Unnatural silence
  • "Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him," says Psalm 37:7 NIV. I haven't located any translation that comes close to conveying the meaning of the Hebrew - the intensity of the "stillness," the travail of the "waiting," required.
  • Passing over
  • Sixteen years ago, I passed over. Five years ago, I passed over. Once again, I'm passing over. Where God is parting the waters, I'm walking through.
  • Walking on the water
  • Very few people can say they were ordained one day and baptized the next. Ah, but when the Father calls you to walk on the water to meet him - GO!
  • We Confess! series
  • Repeatedly, we've tried to address the corporate sins of the nation without first addressing the corporate sins of the church. Now, God is showing us what we haven't wanted to see, so we can become who we are.
  • Celebration and confession: 150 years
  • On the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, why don't we throw all caution to the wind - and confess?
  • Breaking the silence
  • " 'Do not speak out,' so they speak out. But if they do not speak out concerning these things, reproaches will not be turned back."
  • Personhood 1
  • The US church has never sounded a clear call regarding personhood, whether of both genders, or of all races. No wonder we've been stuck on the fulcrum of the abortion issue for 38 years.
  • What About Women? series
  • Has a failure to understand the new covenant's impact denied a whole gender, for centuries, the full redemption God intended?
  • Waylaid by God
  • When the Lord waylays you, humble your soul, quiet your fears - and receive whatever HE reveals.
  • Preach it, sister!
  • Can women preach? Let's ask rather: How can we not?
  • Where have all the women gone?
  • If translators render two very different Greek terms with the same English word, we who read the Bible in English have difficulty knowing when women are included and when they are not.
  • Case of the battered boundaries
  • Why were certain people battering my boundaries relentlessly? What did it have to do with my being a woman – and an adult?
  • Submit to such as these
  • Did you know? Paul's greetings in Romans 16 enthusiastically endorse the ministries of seven women.
  • What's a (prophetic) woman to do?
  • My motivational gift is prophecy. But I lived in a church system that warns women not to speak.
  • Parable of a woman and a preacher
  • What a contrast between the preacher and the woman! He looked successful. She looked broken. He appeared popular. She had few friends. He spoke from an influential pulpit. She had no voice. How different, yet how alike they were!
  • We think we know
  • When do we read with our eyes shut? When we think we know what it says.
  • Don't be afraid to look
  • When we silence the women eager to speak and live by the Spirit of truth and the Word of truth, we actually fan the flame of heresy that Paul sought to put out.
  • Other Key Truths e-columns
  • exposing what's religious; embracing what's GOD (articles created under the column name, What's a Woman to Do? or, Key Truths)
  • Religion vs God
  • Religion operates under paradigms that appear to be God's - but are not. Religion draws parameters that appear to be God's - but are not. Religion rejects paradox, believing the truth of God must fit into our neat little systems. Religion kills. Jesus lives! What is from HIM gives life.
  • Do I get a witness?
  • God gives three powerful witnesses to every person born into his kingdom: his Spirit, his Word and his people.
  • Culture wars
  • We church-goers see ourselves in a culture war - good against evil, Christians against pagans, us against them. But instead of counting "unbelievers" the enemy, what if we humble ourselves and acknowledge there's something they can teach us - something, in fact, that we desperately need to know?
  • Deliver us
  • If anything is ruthlessly driving us and cruelly fettering us, we're enslaved. If anything is brutally beating us down, we're oppressed. We need the freedom Christ offers. But are we crying out, "Deliver us!" or have we color-coordinated our prison cells and settled into slavery?
  • Thanks to error
  • The novel, "The DaVinci Code," contains much error. Yet it also exposes sin in the church. We've responded by insisting, "We're right! Here are the facts to prove it." What if, instead, we confessed? "We've sinned, just as this book says."
  • Dirty War
  • False accusation sent Joseph to prison, Daniel to the lion's den and Jesus to the cross. How do false accusations in the church today resemble Argentina's "Dirty War"?
  • Order of Worship
  • How do you know whether Tradition or God is calling the shots in your church gatherings?
  • I AM
  • Everything - everything - hinges on how you respond when Jesus stands before you and pronounces his unpronounceable Name.
  • Good grief
  • If you want to be comforted, if you want to be healed, you need to give yourself permission and time to grieve.
  • God's appointed time
  • God's appointed times - the days he summons his people to meet with him - include the Feast of Tabernacles. Do not think, "Sunday morning church." Think, "Celebration!"
  • Smiling just thinking about it
  • In volatile times, we don't often use the words "smile" and "future" in the same sentence. Yet Proverbs 31 says of the virtuous woman, "She smiles at the future." How does she do that? How can we?
  • Arise, Barak
  • As in the days of Deborah, God is summoning modern-day Baraks. He instructs them, "Call those with whom you have influence. Lead them to wage spiritual warfare in a way that honors my name and furthers my kingdom, transforming whole regions, setting captives free."
  • Perspective Classic e-columns
  • snapshots of life: find yourself in the picture; find God there (click on the titles below to read Perspective columns)
  • Techno-question
  • Many of us are drawn toward - yet afraid of - the world of techno-gadgets. We're drawn toward - yet afraid of - the spiritual world. In each of these worlds, what do we desperately need but rarely value?
  • Comfort Without Words
  • In the wake of a monster tornado, I recall the one thing Job's friends did right.
  • Till Shiloh Comes
  • Shiloh: The song. The battle. The place. The person. How puzzling, how contradictory, that the name Shiloh may mean "peaceable" or "rest" - yet may also mean "a conqueror."
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