Genesis 1:1-2:25, Matthew 1:1-2:12, Psalms 1:1-6, Proverbs 1:1-6
Today is January 1st welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian happy New Year everybody it’s great to be here with you. Welcome aboard. We are about to set sail on a journey that will last a year. We will travel all the way around the sun, and as the earth travels all the way around the sun, we will make our way through the entire Bible and the Bible will invariably touch every aspect of our lives. So welcome, welcome aboard and for those of you returning for another year and another voyage, welcome back. I am so glad to take this journey again with you, it is beyond words. And for those of you who have found your way here somehow, whether somebody invited you or whether you just stumbled upon this, whatever the path you’re here and in the coming days and weeks you will find out that that is that is meaningful. You are embarking on a journey that will in fact affect your life in a positive and profound way. That’s what the Bible does. So welcome, welcome, and happy new year and off we go. And every time that we begin a new journey, and this is the 15th journey through the Bible, so this is the first day of the 15th year the Daily Audio Bible. We have we been working our way through the Bible seven days a week for 14 complete years, seven days a week without stopping. So, this year will be no different, but this year will be very different because every year is very different. And I as we kind of settle into the rhythm that will take us through the year these first few days, we just kinda need to get acclimated to how this all works. So, I’ll be sharing some different things each day for the next, I guess about, week until we get all those things covered and then we’ll be sailing smooth out into the deep beyond the shore. But today this is our launch day and we will launch at the beginning and the way that the Daily Audio Bible works is that we will read a portion of the Old Testament, a portion of the New Testament, a portion of Psalms and a bit of Proverbs every day as we take steps forward every day through the Scriptures. So, today is a rare day because we’re gonna be starting four different books - Genesis, Matthew, Psalms and Proverbs. And every time we encounter a new book we usually just take a step back, get a little context, understand what the story is, understand who the players are, who the voices are, what’s going on, why it’s being written - so that…so that we can put ourselves in the position of the early hearers of these writings and understand how they applied to their lives so that we can more adequately interpret how they apply to ours. So, we won’t talk about all four of the books that we’re beginning today, we’ll take one at a time over the next couple of days and just get our bearings. And, so, let’s begin at the beginning, which is the book of Genesis.
Introduction to the book of Genesis:
And the book of Genesis is famous because it contains the story of creation. And, so, often if you’ve never taken a journey through the Bible or read the book of Genesis before you think that’s kind of what’s in there. The…the very very early stories of early Earth, the early creation stories. But what’s interesting but Genesis is that this book covers more time than any of the other books in the Bible, about 2500 years pass between the beginning and ending of the book of Genesis, which ironically is more time than the rest of the Old Testament combined. So, there’s a lot more to Genesis than the story of creation. Like, the first 11 chapters of Genesis will cover a couple thousand years and a couple thousand miles before…before slowing down the warp pace and then beginning to focus on several specific generations of people who we need to know and we actually need to know well because they and their ancestors shape the rest of the Bible and continue to influence our world all the way till today. And Genesis is also a part of a group of writings, a larger group of books that…that encompass the first five books of the Bible which are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And it’ll take us a minute to come carve our way through all those books, but this grouping is called the Torah or the Pentateuch. And we’ll discuss that more as we continue our journey forward through the next days and weeks in front of us. But we’re at the beginning so let's…let’s go. We’re reading from the New Living Translation for the remainder of this week. And today, Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2.
Commentary:
Okay. So, as you can see, we have begun our journey in the book of Genesis, and we talked about what the book of Genesis was going to tell us. But man, even in today’s reading alone there’s so much for us because we have a baseline now, we have an origin story. We are told that we are intentionally here, God created us in His image and allowed us to be here as His children upon this planet. And we have a rare view, actually a very, very rare view that can pretty much only be found here in the first pages of the Bible and that is a look into how things were supposed to be, like how this was supposed to go. Genesis has given us a little peek into a time when things were perfect, a time when things were as they were meant to be, a time that things and every life was whole. And obviously, you know, we don’t need to look too far to understand that there is brokenness everywhere, including inside of ourselves at the moment and that we can’t look at the world and go, “oh, its as it should be, its whole.” So, this little view in the book of Genesis, at least gives us a glimpse into when things were as they were supposed to be. And this is what our hearts are souls deepest longing is after - wholeness, completeness. There’s a word, a Hebrew word that kinda seeks to…to say this and it’s a popular word, shalom. I mean, if you’re living in Israel and say shalom, that’s a way of saying hello or a lot of times it’s interpreted, peace, like peacefulness. But it’s like the deepest origins. The deepest meaning here is, wholeness, completeness and the Bible has given us a picture of what that looks like. And it should call out to the deep places inside of us because we are longing for this. Like, we spend the majority of our lives trying to make arrangements for ourselves to feel, at least, to feel whole. So, like, we’ll rearrange all the furniture in our lives, we’ll get rid of people, we’ll bring people in, like we’ll change jobs, this that and the other, all in an attempt to make things more comfortable and better and more whole, at least in our view. And yet, we have to acknowledge there’s a God view of what wholeness looks like and it’s a bit different then what we think it looks like. And the Bible will do a really good job over the course of this year, poking and prodding and challenging and questioning and giving us continual opportunities to consider the path that we’re on because the Bible continually will bring us to a fork in the road. We will encounter so many forks in the road, I don’t even know how many there are. Just continually, we will come to a fork in the road where we are given an illuminated path to destruction and an illuminated path to life and then we get to choose which path we’re going to walk on. And, so, right here on day one, we gotta get in our minds that what we do matters. And we will explore that a bit more tomorrow.
And then as we began the New Testament today, and we’ll talk about Matthew tomorrow as we get into tomorrow’s reading, but we can see now that we read the genealogies of Jesus. And its funny. Genealogies are like notoriously like glaze your…your eyes glaze over, your mind checks out, “what are all these names in the Bible about?” And we will certainly be talking about that as we go further, but these names are all people we’re gonna meet along the way. Many of them were kings of Israel and we will meet them when we get to the books of Kings, but Matthew is trying to establish Jesus genealogy for…for reasons, and we will see this as we go forward because the book of Matthew, the mission of this gospel is to show how Jesus fulfills prophecies that had long been foretold but I don’t want to jump ahead of ourselves. We’ll talk about that some more tomorrow.
We also began the book of Psalms today. And how’s this for day one, in terms of advice for life. “Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or stand around with sinners or join in with mockers, but instead they delight in the law of the Lord meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit in each season leaves will never wither, and they will prosper in all they do.” You see the forks in the road that I’m talking about. There’s one right there. You can follow the path to destruction by following the advice of the wicked and hanging around with sinners and joining in with mockers or you can follow a path that will allow you to prosper in all that you do. And that path would be delighting in the law of the Lord and meditating on it day and night. And become like a tree that’s planted by a riverbank, right? The water source is right there. And, so, your bearing fruit and your leaves don’t wither, and you prosper. It’s right there, and it’s worth just spending some time today silently or in prayer just asking, “God help me see these paths, help me know the way to walk, help me to delight in you, help me to be like a tree planted along the riverbank, that's…that’s what I’m looking for, wholeness, fullness. So, there’s some things to think about there.
And Proverbs will, on a regular basis, give us like one sentence that says volumes if we will slow down and think about it. And we will talk about that some more as we move forward.
Prayer:
Father, we thank You for Your word. We thank You for allowing us to cross the threshold into a brand-new year and beyond that into a brand-new decade. This really is a fresh new starting point and everything that flows from here is going to be borne out by the choices that we make. And here at the beginning of this decade we are inviting Your Holy Spirit to come and lead us into all truth. This is what the Scriptures say You will do. We are told of a narrow path that leads to life, and few find that path. And we, Lord…Lord, we want to be one of them and we will never find it on our own. We were never meant to find it on our own. And, so, come Holy Spirit, be a light to our feet, a lamp to our path leading us a day by day forward in the name of Jesus we ask. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website and that is home base and that is where you find out what’s going on around here.
And that is something that you’ll hear me say just about every day because…because we are a community and we are wrapped all around the world and there are tens of thousands of us here. We actually kinda get to know each other and a feel connected in spirit as we go forward, but we’re still…were still wrapped all over the world in every conceivable time zone. And, so, dailyaudiobible.com is this portal, it’s like home base for a virtual community like this. This is where you find out what’s going on around here. So, check that out. I'll…I’ll talk about different aspects of it as we can move into the into the decade together, but that’s a good jumping off point for today. That’s a good thing to get familiar with and find out what’s going on there, but mostly I just want to talk about beginnings, new beginnings.
Yeah, this is the beginning of year, 15 but this is a new beginning for me. And you may have been here for the last decade or the last year. This is a new beginning for you. And you may have stumbled here today by accident or maybe just the last week, couple weeks, been thinking a little bit more deeply about your interior life. You know, your spirituality, what’s actually going on inside of you because what’s going on outside of you can be chaotic and…and…and confusing. And, so, when you’re confused inside and you’re confused outside then pretty much confused and that can lead into all kinds of really, really challenging and dark places. I don’t know how you got here. You may have got here because you jumped off the ship yesterday and re-boarded for a new year or you may have just accidentally come here today. I just…it doesn’t matter how we got here, we’re here right now and this is the first day of a new decade and the next 10 years can be profoundly different than the last ten if we’ll want them to, if we’re willing to allow God’s word to unpack us instead of us trying to unpack it. You may be listening today thinking, “oh my gosh, I cannot believe I’m going to listen to something religious. Like I…I can’t. I don’t like those kinds of people and I’m not so sure about their Jesus. I don’t know. I think…I think what I’d like to say to you…I think what I’d like to say to everybody is, don’t believe everything you’ve been told. We’re going to go through the Bible. We’re going to read every word of it together and we’re going to talk about it and at the end of this we’re gonna know what the Bible says and we will have wrestled through whatever we need to wrestle through, but my own faith journey is one in which I realized one day, “I don't…I have been professing my faith for a long time. I’m not sure I know God, because everything that I’ve ever been told about God is something somebody else told me.” And that is what brought me to the Bible all these years ago. I thought, “I’m…I'm…I’m searching…I’m searching for God and yet I'm…I’ve never read this book called the Bible that apparently my entire future hinges upon. I…I just know the famous verses that everybody quotes. I don’t know why they were said. I have no idea what’s going on in that book. All I know is every time I’ve ever tried to get into the book it’s like, “what is going on?” And I just didn’t understand but I decided I’m gonna read this book with an open heart and open mind and I’m in read this book as if God will speak to me. And if I read this whole book, and He doesn’t speak to me, and there is no God, and there is nothing out there, then I read one of the most famous books in the world. Everybody should read it. But that’s not happened. What I found is that God created us in His image and never intended to be separated from us, and in no way desires any kind of separation from us and we will see the lengths He’s willing to go to. And, obviously, you can go, “well, you’re just pointing to the cross, blah, blah, blah. That’s obvious.” Oh, you’re gonna see a lot more ways that God is incredibly intentional about staying connected. The reason we have a Bible, is because God was unwilling to be left out of our story. The Bible isn’t the biography of God. If you take people out of the Bible there is no Bible. This is the story of God with us. So, it really doesn’t matter how you got here. You are here and everything after this is what matters. 365 days from today we will be beginning a new year. What your life looks like when you begin that new year, 365 days from now is going to be made up of the choices and decisions that you make. The Bible can really, really help with that. So, I…I welcome you. I am thrilled to take this journey together. I am thrilled that you are here no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what time it is, no matter what’s going on, no matter how it is that you got here. This is a new day. This is a new year. This is a new decade. Let’s live into this with all of our hearts.
Song:
Cold - Leslie Odom Jr.
You lost
yourself on empty promises
Broken on the way
All you’ve ever known are dishonest men
Who don't ever change
So
you're keeping all your secrets
By you wrapped up tight
You’re who I believe in
So why say goodnight?
Don’t listen
to all you’ve been told
You can come in from the cold
And you know the safest place to be
Is right here next to me
Won’t you come in from the cold?
Wanna help
you ease the feeling
Weighing on your mind
You’re looking for a reason
Running out of time
You’re
keeping all your secrets
By you wrapped up tight
You’re who I believe in
So why say goodnight?
Don’t listen
to all you’ve been told
You can come in from the cold
And you know the safest place to be
Is right here next to me
Won’t you come in from the cold?
I know your
heart’s telling you, “Run now”
Run so far away (Run so far away)
The self is trying to reach out (Trying to reach out)
Shine a light into the grey (Light into the grey)
I know how hard it is to take a chance when it calls your name
So I pray (I pray, Oh I pray, I pray)
I pray
Don’t listen
to all you’ve been told
You can come in from the cold
And you know the safest place to be
Is right here next to me
Won’t you
come in from the cold?
Won’t you come in from the cold?
Won’t you come in from the cold?