The New Year is upon us! You know what this means? It means a new year to spend reading and being transformed by God's Word. It means a new year to participate in our Read the Bible In a Year plan together. This week we wrap up the year by finishing the book of Revelation before starting over in the New Testament and reading from Matthew.
I hope that if you participated in 2013 that you are back for more. I also hope, that if last year just did not quite work out for you, you are back to try again. For those of you unfamiliar with the plan, basically it is just a reading plan, that when followed, will take you through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice, in one calendar year. We read almost everyday and we read four chapters a day.
Please do not let this exercise be filled with pressure for you. I simply encourage you to do what you can, as you can. Any time you can spend reading through the Bible with us, is time God can and will use to reach out to you. Come and join us, have fun with it, and I know you will not only learn something new, but you will also grow deeper in your walk with Christ.
This week we start with the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew is the first of the Gospels recorded in the New Testament and is also one of the three "synoptic Gospels" (meaning similar or together because they include some of the same stories in the same sequences and the same words - John is the exception). This Gospel is attributed to one of Jesus' disciples, Matthew the tax collector. And from the information and perspective he includes we can tell that he was writing to a primarily Jewish audience: he stresses Jewish law, he doesn't explain Jewish customs, and in the beginning of the Gospel he includes a genealogy which takes Jesus' ancestry all the way back to Father Abraham. There are seven main sections in this Gospel, with a prologue about Jesus' early life, five sections covering his ministry and the last section about his death and resurrection.
Here is the schedule:
29, Sunday: Revelation 19-22
30, Monday: No Reading
31, Tuesday: No Reading
01, Wednesday: Matthew 1-4
02, Thursday: Matthew 5-8
03, Friday: Matthew 9-12
04, Saturday: Matthew 13-16
May God add his richest blessings, to the reading, the hearing and most importantly the living out of his holy word. Amen.
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