Joshua 11:1-12:24, Luke 17:11-37, Psalms 84:1-12, Proverbs 13:5-6
Today is the 15th day of April welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian and welcome to the bull’s-eye I guess, the center of another month as we keep passing day by day through time and allowing God’s word to wash into our lives each day. It’s great to be here with you in the middle of another month, the fourth month of the year. So, we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week and we’re working our way through the book of Joshua. And we finally got across the Jordan River. It’s a place that we’ve been heading for most of the year, we finally got to cross into this mythic Promised Land, and we’ve seen it’s been nothing, but battle and it’s been nothing but disruption since they came into the land. They’ve had to fight. And kings have been making alliances to create greater and greater armies to fight against the Israelites and Israel keeps winning. So, like in yesterday’s reading the kings that would be in the central like Jerusalem area on the lowlands and all the way to the coast, gathered to fight against Israel and lost. Today even more powerful kings in the north are gonna create alliances to try to get these Israelites out. Joshua chapters 11 and 12 today.
Commentary:
Okay. So, as we’ve been traveling through the Gospels, where in the third of the four Gospels now, the gospel of Luke we’ve been chasing this kingdom of heaven that Jesus is announcing, the kingdom of God. And according to Jesus those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, can see it, can hear it, can sense it. But where is it? That’s the irony because we often even think about it, as maybe a new Jerusalem coming out of the sky, maybe a time when Jesus will rule and reign forever on the earth, a time where maybe we’re absent from the body but present with God. Like It’s something that’s yet to come, it will look like something, but of course it doesn’t look anything like anything that we look around and see now. It’s yet to come. The people that Jesus was ministering to including the religious leaders wanted to know the same thing. When? When is it coming? And Jesus most explicitly answers this question in the Gospel of Luke. So, I quote Jesus here. “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed nor will they say, ‘look, here it is,’ or ‘there’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Okay. If you’ve 10 people and you’re all standing together where would, “in the midst of you” be? It would be in the middle. It would be around wherever you are. But what if there’s only you? What…where is in the midst of you? Well, in the midst would be in the midst…it would be in you, right? So, you’re not going to be able to observe a big building going up that will at some point at the very top have the kingdom of God imprinted on the top of it. No other building. No other movement. No other thing that can be boxed and labeled. Jesus said, nobody’s gonna be able to go, “look, here it is”, or “it’s over there. You’re looking in the wrong place waiting for something to come that not coming because it’s already here. It’s in the midst of you.” So, eyes to see and ears to hear this kingdom means that we understand that the kingdom is within us. If we want to find the kingdom then we don’t look to buildings or products or movements or boxed items that we can sell or books or music, we look at other people. It’s within us, it’s among us, it’s in the midst of us. So, if that is the case then for us to move toward the fullness of God’s kingdom means that we have to move in that direction. We have a role, a collaborative role to play because the kingdom is within us, which means that wherever we go, so goes the kingdom. If we let that sink in it’s pretty overwhelming. It’s pretty huge because that means we have a role to play in bringing out and bringing about the fullness of the kingdom. And this gets real personal when we understand that the choices, the thoughts, words, and deeds of our lives today are going to either affirm or deny that the kingdom of God isn’t buildings, is not nationalism, is not a big strong military. That’s the kingdoms of the world. God’s kingdom is within us and is very powerful within us according to Jesus. Even faith the grain of a mustard seed is enormously powerful according to Jesus. So, if you we want to look for God’s kingdom, we don’t look for it in closed borders and hysteria, we don’t look to our politicians for it, we look within, we look around at each other. We are it. Think about that today. How could that change the way the rest of this week gets lived?
Prayer:
Jesus, it’s somewhat shaking. It's…on the one hand we’re looking for this great display of amazing power and yet we acknowledge that You are always in the understated. The great power comes through the understated. At least that’s how it mostly happens in the Scriptures. That’s certainly how You conducted Your earthly life Jesus, as it’s portrayed in the Gospels. But to get our minds around the fact that we’re already in it, it’s already happening is…is…is like trying to understand eternity. That’s also something that we defer, like it’s something that begins when we die when eternity encompasses all of time and it is beyond time. We’re in it right now in the same way that we are in and are the kingdom. Give us eyes to see. Awaken us. This changes everything. If this gets to sink into our soul, this changes everything. It makes every moment a vital moment. It means that although we may be waiting for the fullness of this kingdom, we are participating in that. This is happening. Show us how with our very lives, we can go into the world and announce this Good News because this is the Good News of the gospel. Come Holy Spirit into this. Help us to meditate upon this. Help this to sink deep into our identity, into our soul we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it is home base, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here. So, certainly stay tuned and connected to each other and to what’s going on around here.
I mentioned yesterday some of the story of the Daily Audio Bible app and its development, the fact that we’ve retired the previous edition of the app. We’ve kind of had two simultaneous apps running at the same time for the last year and a half just as we build our own infrastructure and our app and just all of the…just all of the learning curve involved. We’ve kind of reached a point now where we are achieving some of the big…the big goals. We call them big rocks, but big goals that we’ve been working toward for a long, long time. And, so, I thought, you know, it’s time…it’s time to just kind of walk through the app for second to give those who are experiencing for the first time just a little bit of a flyover and those who have been using it maybe for a long time just a little bit of insight. It’s pretty simple but just a couple of small things will go a long way and I thought I would just do that altogether. So, I don’t have the benefit of a video screen, but this should only take a couple minutes. So, if you have your phone, your device, your tablet, your or whatever and you have the Daily Audio Bible app and you launch the Daily Audio Bible app the first thing that you will see, likely, especially if it’s your first time will be the login screen. You log in, because then your personal journey and all that’s associated with your personal journey is available to you from like the checkmarks of the days that you’ve read to the achievements that you will achieve as you go through the Bible to your favorited episodes to your journal entries to whatever. You login to get to your personal stuff. You don’t login, you can use the app as a guest but can’t…it doesn't…I mean it doesn’t know who you are, so there’s no way to keep track of anything for your benefit. And I have found over 15 years of this, any encouragement, any encouragement to keep going is a good thing, any sense of accomplishment as we move to the Scriptures, the ups and downs that life brings us in a year is a good thing. So, anyway. You login. You have an account already with the Daily Audio Bible, you login and you can do it from any device and all of your devices will work. For example, you could check that you’ve listened to a day on your phone and go back later on your desktop computer or tablet device and all the data…like your checkbox is there. It happens instantaneously. You can…you can have like two devices up at the same time and check one of them and watch the other one check off. Like it happens instantaneously. And that cloud-based technology is pretty complex, and it’s taken us a long time to get there but we’re there. Okay, so once you’ve logged in and you see the channels screen and you can pick, you know, you’re listening to Daily Audio Bible or you’re listening to Daily Audio Bible Chronological or it’s the Proverbs or the Psalms or one of the other languages. That’s your channel selection screen and once you’ve selected your channel then you will see all of the episodes associated with that channel. That’s all pretty straightforward and intuitive. But let’s talk about that Episodes page of that Channel page that shows you all the different dates and all the different episodes that you can listen to. On that page, or that view just above where you see all the different dates, you’ll see something that says “All Episodes” and then you’ll see to the right of that three little dots. If you click those little dots. There are some settings, settings that you can personalize. For example, you can filter out things, you can filter to only the favorited episodes that you have for the year. If you’re looking back for something that you wanted to hear again and you favorited that, you can narrow it down or you can narrow it down to days that you wrote in the journal and try to like find those things a lot easier. At the bottom of that settings page you’ll see off-line episodes and that’s where you tick the box if you want to download the episodes in advance rather than just straight up streaming them. If you tick that box, then you instruct the app to download the episode in advance to your device. Okay. So, if we get out of that settings page and go back to the Episodes page and we’re just looking at the different dates we can listen to. Up at the top and kind of the upper left-hand corner you’ll see three lines, it’s like a little drawer icon, very top left. If you click that that does open a drawer and the first thing that I want to point out to you on that drawer page is at the very very bottom. You’ll see that your logged in and you’ll see your name or whatever unless you’re not logged. If you’re logged in, you’ll see that your logged in and to the right of your name, you will see the little Gear icon. That’s a Settings page. Click that and you will see all of your user settings. And most of those are very very self-explanatory. But one setting says Listening. And it’s called Off-line Episodes. If you click that button. This is where you can decide how many days you want to keep downloaded, one day, two days three days, or a week. And you can also instruct the app whether to keep those downloads or if you want them to be deleted from your device after you’ve listened to them. So, that’s basically kind of how you control the different things on the app. Now, in that Drawer…in the drawer that we’re talking about you’ll see other things like the channels page, which is the page we came from, you’ll see Achievements. This is brand-new. It’s attached to your account. It keeps your personal progress as you move through the Bible. That is attached to the fact that you’ve checked off the days that you’ve listened to which you be able to see your progress as we move through the different sections of the Bible. The other things that are in that drawer menu, they’ve been there so you may or may not be familiar with them, but now you…I mean the pretty self-explanatory, just play around a little bit. Okay, let’s go back to the episodes page, the one that shows the date and all the different episodes throughout the year that…that we listen to, the…kind of the main screen that we use. Before we go into an episode let’s just look at that screen for minute. It’s showing us all those different dates that we could listen to. Now if we pick one of those dates and swipe to the left, we’ll see that we can favorite that episode or we can mark that episode as completed right from the episodes page. So, that’s a good thing to know. Now let’s click a date and go into the Episode screen. That’s where we see the play icon and how long the episodes gonna be and we can skip forward and skip back and all that. So, probably somewhat familiar with that screen. At the bottom of that screen is a “Mark as Listened” checkbox. So, you can check the box from there as well. So, I showed you two different ways to check that you’ve completed an episode - swipe right or be here on the play screen and click it at the bottom. Now also at the bottom to the left you’ll see a Star icon. That’s favoriting an episode. If there was an episode that the Bible spoke to you in a specific way at a time that you needed, that happens to every single one of us pretty much. Happens me all the time. But if it’s something that you’re like, “I need to not forget that”, you can Star that episode. That way you can filter back and find the ones that you’re looking for. Okay to the right of that is like a little screen with an arrow. That’s a common thing. That’s how you can, you know, throw the audio to a Bluetooth device or something like that. And then to the right of that is another little icon with points connecting to each other. That’s a Share button. You can share any episode to anyone that you want, however you want, however your phones set up to do it. So, that’s how you get around and navigate there. Now at the top of that screen, and again this is the Play screen like where we’re listening to a specific day. The very top you’ll see, “Listen”, you’ll see a tab that says “Read.” If you click that tab, then you can read along with today’s reading and the translation that we’re using. And to the right of that is a button called Journal. If there’s something that you need to jot down real quick, something that the Bible is speaking to you, something that you need to remember, this is a place that you can jot your notes and they can follow along with you on that specific day. Like if you favorite an episode and you’ve written a little journal entry about why that’s important to you and three months from now, you’re like, “what was that thing again?” Now you can see how you can find out the episodes that were favored it, the things that you wrote down and find what you’re looking for so that you can be reminded along the way. Okay, at the very, very top of the screen you’ll see kind of the header, that’s where you push the Drawer icon to get the drawer to open but on the other side of that you see the little Hotline button and I talk about that little Hotline button all the time. That’s the button that you push in order to share right from within the app and that is a hotline. You got the app and you got a phone no matter where you are in the world you have a way to reach out. And then to the right of that is the Give button. If you want to throw another log on the global campfire and help us to continue to develop this technology and build community in ways that we have no blueprint for. Okay that is a very very brief flyover, but we’ve been working really really hard to not make it a complex app. We’ve…we have tried, and we continue to try to make it as simple and as intuitive as possible so just kind of listening back through what I’ve shared here, along with the app then you pretty much know how to do whatever you want to do inside the Daily Audio Bible app. And if you don’t have the Daily Audio Bible app, this is…this is a good time…this is a great time. This is a time of rejoicing. We’ve worked really, really hard to get here and we released this version last week. There’ll be an update to this version before the week is out here just a small kind of maintenance one. What happens is you…you do a big release and you’ve tested it for weeks and you’ve like done everything possible to break it until you have it like working right, and then you release it into the wild and you find all kinds of ways that things can be done or used on different phones and devices and different kind of connections and then you know, kind of learn some different areas that need to be tightened up. And, so, there were thankfully just a couple of things and those are being tightened up this week but we’re really really excited, honestly, honestly, really excited about where this is all headed because this is finally turning a corner in some of the dream that’s been dreamed for years just seeing the light of day, like the introduction of this achievements and where we earn badges as we move through sections of the Bible and where at a glance we can kind of see where we are as we move through these sections of the Bible. This is a dream come true. It’s something that I’ve felt in years, like five years ago, like if we could do this, if we could…anything that will encourage us forward is a good thing. So, super excited to have this see the light of day. Super excited for you to be familiar with the Daily Audio Bible app and to be able to use it successfully as we take the journey of a lifetime through the Scriptures.
Okay, if you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, I cannot thank you enough. We literally would not…there would be no Global Campfire if we were not all here together and we were not all fueling it in some way. And, so, thank you. If what we’re doing as we navigate the Bible and navigate a year of life together in community, if that brings life to you and encouragement then thank you for being life-giving back. So, there’s a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio app that we just went through you can push the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address, if you prefer, is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.
And, as always, if you have prayer request or encouragement, you can hit the Hotline button in the app, the little red button at the top or you can dial 877-942-4253.
And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.