Category: DAB Transcripts

Genesis 28:1-29:35, Matthew 9:18-38, Psalms 11:1-7, Proverbs 3:11-12

Today is the 13^th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it’s great to be here with you as we get ready and come in and out of the cold and the chaos that life can bring and just come around the Global Campfire where everyone has a seat and we just let this fire burn and warm us and it’s this other place, this safe space we have, to allow God’s Word to speak into our day and into our week and for that matter into our lives, transforming us from within. So, we’ll pick up where we left off yesterday which will take us back into the book of Genesis. And there’s a bunch of drama going on in this third kinda generation. So, Abraham’s grandchildren, Jacob and Esau, brothers, they’ve had…well…there’s been some deception, some significant deception on the part of Jacob and his mom, Rebekah. So, Jacob took the blessing and the birth right from his brother Esau. His brother Esau is not happy. In fact, so upset about it that he’s willing to kill his brother Jacob. So, Jacobs got to go. And that’s where we pick up the story. Genesis chapters 28 and 29 and we’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week.

Commentary:

Okay. Oh…there’s a lot for us to…to look at today. Let’s go into the book of Genesis. There’s just a lot of things that are happening right now and they’re really important to the story that is unfolding. We can begin to read the Bible and read about different people’s lives like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and know that they’re important figures in the Bible, but not necessarily know how they’re all connected. And, yet, once we met Abram the story has been a cohesive story of Abram who became Abraham, his family, right? So, we are at the grandchildren level at this point, Jacob and Esau and we read the story of what happens. So, Jacob is on the run and he’s going back to Abraham’s family where he’s been sent. This is the same way that Abraham’s servant went and to the same people that Abraham’s servant went to get a wife for Isaac, right, Rebekah. So, this is where Jacob’s going and when he gets there, he meets Laban who is Rebekah’s brother. We already met him. He was much younger, when Abraham’s servant came but he would have been roughly the same general age as his sister Rebekah. So, now he’s grown up and in charge of things and Rebekah’s son Jacob comes to him and lives with him. But let’s not get ahead of the story. Jacob’s on the run and the sun sets so he finds place to sleep and it’s in this city that was known as Luz that became known as Bethel, which is biblical Bethel, a place that we’ll see many times on our journey through the Old Testament. And he is a dream and God appears to him. So, the third generation. God appeared to Abraham with a promise. God appeared to Isaac in Beersheba with a promise. And now He is communicating with Isaacs’s son and Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, reaffirming the promise. So, Esau gets up and says, surely God is here, and I was just unaware of it. Can I just tell you that that phrase out of the book of Genesis, that phrase right there much describes our whole lives? So often we live our lives as if we need to go through a certain set of rituals, kind of get ourselves into a certain state of organization or whatever within or without in order to approach God who is separate and apart from and distant and separated from us and then we can come into His presence and then…and then commune with Him and ask for the things that we need and offer our worship. When the truth is, as we are going to find out explicitly in the Bible that God is within us and never absent. We aren’t separated from Him. We have just become unaware of His presence. And, so, when we do become aware of His presence, which we can do at any point in time, we too, Like Jacob would say, “surely the Lord is here, and I was just unaware of it.” So, fold that up, put that in your purse or in your wallet and carry it around with you for the rest of this year. It can be a rescue when things get pretty crazy. And this place that Jacob spent the night, he’s got another night to spend in that place, but that is a story for another day. So, Jacob wakes up, you know, he’s realizing the presence of the Lord. And then he does something interesting and it’s something that we’ve already mentioned. So, he…he gets this rock and he…he stands it up and…and then he pours oil on top of it and he sets that stone as a standing stone. It's…it’s a marker the Bible says. And he does this, and we see this tradition throughout the Scriptures, he does this so that what happened there will not be forgotten. And one of the ways that we’ve brought that specific tradition into our rhythm of life in the Daily Audio Bible community is to encourage journaling. Write down the things that the Lord reveals to you in your heart as you move your way through His word. You don’t want to forget that. You want to be able to go back to that place and remember what happened there. So, then Jacob eventually does get to Laban as we mentioned a few minutes ago and he does become a part of Laban’s household and he begins to work as a shepherd because he’s fallen in love with Laban’s daughter Rachel. So, he does his work. He asks for his wife. He gets married. He has a wedding night he wakes up and finds out his bride is not the one he loves. It’s her sister. And, so, now he’s married to Leah but in love with Rachel. And a week goes by and then he marries Rachel. So, now he is the husband of two sisters and that, you just can’t imagine that’s gonna be a harmonious home, but I want to point out something here. Jacob had been a bit of a deceitful person all along. And in a very real way, the trickery that he used to deal with his father and his brother is the same kind of trickery that’s being used on him. And, so, we could say Jacob is one of the patriarchs, he is, you know, one of the pillars of the story that were telling and God used him, but the Bible goes to great lengths to show us the way that Jacob was a conniver. And we’ll see that it…it doesn’t ever really smooth out for Jacob until he learns that lesson and ceases that activity. And we will see that his…his trickery and deception, and his, you know, kind of trying to play the game, these things haunt him well into his adulthood, well into the establishment of his own household. So, we end our reading today with Jacob having married the two sisters and the sister that Jacob loves, Rachel, she’s not able to have children and meanwhile, the sister that Jacob doesn’t love, Leah, she has already given birth to four sons. Her firstborn was Ruben and then came Simeon and then Levi and then Judah. And those names, depending on how much you’ve ever been around the Bible, those names may sound familiar, and they should. These little children who are babies at the moment in our reading will one day grow up to have households of their own and we’ve met four of them, but there are more that we will meet. And these people will one day grow up and become tribes, 12 tribes making up one whole people called Israel. That’s the story we’re telling, the origin story of the Hebrew people who, for the most part populate the rest of the Bible

And then we get into the book of Matthew and we’re very, very quickly seeing the ministry of Jesus and the stories in the gospel of Jesus are just fantastic to read, but if we actually want to get to know Jesus and not just know the stories about Him then we need to look under the surface of these stories because we find such interesting things there, things that challenge…challenge what we think we know. So, we begin our reading today and one of the leaders of the village that Jesus was in, he comes and he’s like my…my daughter just died. So, you can only imagine that, He didn’t just come up to Jesus and wait his turn and kind of, you know, “my daughter just died but come and lay your hand on her and she will live.” Like, nobody does that if their daughter just died. So, you can imagine the situation but it’s an urgent situation. So, Jesus and the disciples they get up and they follow this guy and on their way…so Jesus is on His way to this urgent situation when He gets interrupted because there’s this woman who’s been kind of following Him around and she's…she’s been bleeding for 12 years, right? So…so…the thing is, as we will learn when we go through the Mosaic law, we will understand that this woman who is a Hebrew woman, she is ritually impure, okay, because of the bleeding for 12…so that means for 12 years she’s been ritually impure and kept outside of God’s presence. She thinks to herself, “if I can just get to Him. If I can just touch…touch his robe, I’ll be healed.” And, so, we know this super famous story and that happens, but what we…what we usually walk away from is that we look at this story as Jesus, the miracle worker, the proof we’re looking for to believe upon him. Ironically, it doesn’t appear that Jesus ever was angling to be perceived of as a miracle worker. Obviously, if miracles are being performed in your presence word is going to spread so He couldn’t keep a lid on that but that does not seem to be in any way what he was after. And if you don’t believe me, then just keep watching Jesus as we go through the Gospels over the next several months and watch what He does when the stuff happens. Let’s just take the story that we’re telling right now. This woman, she has touched Jesus and Jesus realized He was touched, and according to Matthew, Jesus turned and saw her and I’m quoting Jesus, “have courage daughter, your faith has saved you” and the woman was made well from that moment. So, unless Jesus has been misquoted here and that’s not what He meant to say at all then we would have to deduce from what He said that this woman’s healing was not simply something that happened to her, but rather something that she also collaborated in. “Have courage daughter, your faith has saved you.” And the woman was made well from that moment. That’s what the Bible says. Okay. So, then that scene gets over and Jesus does finally make it to this leader’s house whose daughter has just died, and there are a bunch of people there because he was a leader, and this was the common practice of the timHe ge. When there’s a loss of life then, you know, mourner’s friends and people…people will come to mourn. A lot of times outside, even…even they would be hired at times to come and professionally mourn just to let everyone know around that there’s been this loss. So, Jesus comes into that kind of situation where there’s a lot of crying and weeping and noise. And He says, “leave.” Like, that’s what the Bible says. Verse 24 “leave”, He said. Okay. Because the girl isn’t dead but she’s asleep. And all of a sudden, their mourning turned into laughing, which is something that is a rich metaphor in the Scriptures, but this is not the kind of joy that we’re talking about, they start laughing at Him sarcastically. They are unaware of the situation. They have accepted the reality, this person, this girl is dead. And, so, now they begin all of the rituals of death when a completely different reality is available, and Jesus gets everybody out and after they’re out he goes and gets the girl and she wakes up. So, in this scene we see Jesus describing, depicting, engaging with a reality or the opportunity of a reality that everybody else can’t see and has dismissed. And when they’re presented with this reality, the idea that the girl isn’t dead, they dismiss that. Like, hope doesn’t rise. They laugh at Him instead. Okay friends. We’re looking at ourselves here in the Scriptures because this is what’s intended to happen, that we look into these stories we feel all of the different elements of these stories and we find our heart in these stories. We locate where we are, and we find our orientation and the reality is that all too often the presence of Jesus is with us, just like Jacob, completely unaware of it and then we do become aware of it, but the situation seems impossible. We can’t wrap our minds around any other kind of reality besides what we seem to be crushed by and instead of reaching out, right, for the hem of His garment, instead of just reaching out we hear him say it doesn’t have to be this way son, it doesn’t have to be this way daughter and we laugh at him. And do you see the parallels here? So, you remember the story of the promise in the beginning with Abraham and Sarah, she laughed too. And we begin to realize, this is a pattern, this is a theme, these things keep happening over and over. They keep happening over and over in the Bible because they keep happening over and over in my life and they keep happening over and over in my life because they’re happening everywhere in the world. And then we become aware of the fact that maybe we are living blinded to the fact that there’s another way, that there’s a way to be in this world, continually in the presence of God because His presence is never taken from us. We are simply unaware of it. And we are watching a person when we watch Jesus. We are watching a person totally dialed in. Jesus is modeling for us who we are and how we’re supposed to be. So, this girl is raised up. Everyone obviously doesn’t laugh anymore. The news spreads all over the place and the next scene we see is two blind men asking for mercy. And Jesus gets them aside and he simply asks them a question…like He doesn’t heal them, He asks them a question, “do you believe that I can do this?” And they say, “yes. I do believe.” And then…and then…here's…and I’m quoting Jesus again, “let it be done for you according to your faith.” And their eyes were opened. Right? You see, again, this isn’t something that Jesus did to them, it’s something that was collaborative. Faith arose within them. Their awareness of the presence of God rose up and they experienced God. And then…and then the miracle worker, Jesus has some words. I’m quoting Jesus here, “be sure that no one finds out.” That’s what Jesus said after He opened the eyes of the blind. But according the Scriptures they didn’t listen to Jesus, they went and spread the news about Him everywhere. And then we are taken immediately to a scene in which Jesus is dealing with a person possessed by a demon and was mute because of it. And Jesus throws the demon out, the man begins to speak, the crowds are amazed. Alright. So, now we are about to encounter the two different reactions that happen and swirl around just about everything Jesus does. So, this person who couldn’t speak is now speaking and the crowds are amazed and they say, according to the Bible, “nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.” So, they are effectively saying, “we are seeing a new thing.” God is doing a new thing and they believe that it’s God doing this thing because the Scriptures tell us that they are in awe and worshiping God about it. Jesus is definitely gaining momentum. But the Pharisees, right? So, the religious leaders, the people who are charged with guarding the souls of God’s people, their response isn’t, “nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.” Their response is, “He drives out demons by the ruler of the demons.” Those are two very different reactions to the presence of God in these stories and they reveal the different ways that we respond when we find ourselves encountering God. On the one hand, we could say, “I don’t know how to explain this. I do not know how to put this into language or words, but something has shifted, an awareness in me has changed. Something…something that wasn’t here is now here”, right? Like, maybe “my anxiety has fled, and I feel a presence of comfort with in me.” I mean…if we just begin to describe examples, we could go all day, but we realize that as much as we try to articulate this doesn’t need to be articulated, it’s something deep, it’s something true, it’s something that has shifted in us, and no one can take it away from us because it has been real to us, right? So, then we could say, “nothing like this has ever happened before.” Or we can have the same kind of experience and then immediately lose our body and soul and just go into our mind trying to figure out what the theology of our experience might have been, go deeply into our religion and go like, “do the rules say that this can happen?” And then we can easily find ourselves in the seat of the Pharisees. “This is an of God, this is of the devil.” Stuff happens all the time and we need to know what we’re seeing in the New Testament when it comes to Jesus. It’s religion and the keepers of God’s rules that are attempting to diminish and denigrate God and eventually to kill Him. Yikes! Like, that’s scary stuff and disruptive stuff and, like I’ve said, we need to get used to disruption because the Bible’s gonna shake us. So, after this encounter with the Pharisees where they’re like, “He drives out demons by the ruler of demons” Jesus continues to just move on doing what He…He does. Quoting from Matthew, “Jesus continued going around to all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness”, right? That’s what we would expect to find Jesus doing and that’s what we actually continue to pray that Jesus will do in this world. But what’s interesting is that Jesus comments on it. When He saw the crowds, He felt compassion for them because they were distressed and dejected. They were like sheep without a shepherd.” So, He felt…He felt bad about that. In another words He sees the plight of humans trying to navigate life, and yet Jesus is operating and navigating in and among these people and awakening something in them. He’s telling them about a kingdom that is within them. They are awakening to this and He sees…He sees this happening, but he realizes it’s not gonna happen with just one person with just Him alone. So, He said to His disciples, “the harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” So, Jesus was seeing a human harvest, and He was in the harvest reaping the harvest. And we can look at Jesus as a wisdom teacher and miracle worker and prophet, and yes, divine son of the living most-high God, who was operating as a human being in some sort of special other nonhuman way, when Jesus continually is just operating as a human should be operating. And when we get to the writings of the apostle Paul this will become explicit. And in our reading today Jesus is saying, “I need…I…pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest…I need help. So, brothers and sisters. The harvest is still ripe. It…it will never not be. Humanity is asleep. We are still living backward, and help is still needed and that’s you and we’re gonna find what we usually lack is awareness. And that’s what we see in the Old and New Testaments today, and that’s what we need to begin to live into.

Prayer:

Father, we invite Your Holy Spirit because on our own we are blind, and we can’t see and we are like sheep without a shepherd, and we are floundering in life. We know that. We’ve experienced that. It's…it’s not a theory, we’ve lived it. And, so we come to You, You’ve rescued us, You’ve changed everything but so often we fall back into the patterns that we know and we look at the world in the way that it seems like everybody else is looking at the world and so we find ourselves at times even at odds with You because we’ll consult all the rules and all the regulations and all the things we think that we know and we miss when You do something new. And yet the Scriptures tell us it is the same Spirit that raised You from the dead, the same Spirit that You were operating in on this planet, the same, not a similar, the same one that lives within us. And, so, this idea of being Christ like isn’t a metaphor. This idea of being one body, the hands and feet, the physical representation of Christ on earth inside of us, this isn’t a metaphor. This is something we’re supposed to collaborate in. And, so, as we continue this journey that has just begun this year, we invite Your Holy Spirit to fully transform us from within, day by day, step-by-step so that the person that we see in the mirror at the end of this voyage is a different person, so that we are awake and aware in our lives. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, its the website, its where you find out what’s going on around here. I have highlighted some different resources that are in the Daily Audio Bible shop because they are…well…they….they’ve been created for the journey that we’re on. And one…one resource that I haven’t mentioned yet this year, but this is a good day to mention it, is…is a DVD…double DVD and digital download series called “Promise Land.” And we spent, I think six seasons in Israel filming so many of the biblical archaeological locations in all their beauty in an attempt to bring the biblical places closer to home. So, like we we’re talking about Luz today, Bethel, right, Bethel and this place where…where Jacob spent the night and a place where he’s going to come back to. So, we’ve…we’ve filmed that. So, like to get an idea of what he saw, what that looks like, you can see this. And so many of the different places around Jesus ministry, these villages and these places we’re Jesus ministered, they’re all filmed. And, so, it makes a fantastic resource to just be able to look in and actually see. And before I ever went Israel I never even wanted to go. It was like not the thing I thought it would be. I just kinda…I don’t know what I thought. I thought it would maybe ruin the Bible for me but it didn’t, it actually made it a real, like these things happened in real places. And I realized while all I’ve been looking at is, you know, pictures like static photographs on the Internet of these places, what it would it be like to try to provide a 360° view, like a real honest look at a place from the air and we using drones and from the ground and all of this. So, that’s Promise Land and it will serve as a fantastic resource throughout the year to refer to. It’s like, there’s over 70 different locations that we’ve filmed and are just, they’re short, like only 2 to 3 minutes in a place. So, real easy to access. Like, “okay. We were reading about Bethel today. Let me see that.” And in just a couple minutes you can see it and find out the significance biblically of what happened there. So, that is a resource that is available in the Daily Audio Bible Shop. Check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 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 will be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Genesis 26:17-27:46, Matthew 9:1-17, Psalms 10:16-18, Proverbs 3:9-10

Today is the 12^th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it’s wonderful to be here with you today. How are you as we enter a new week? Can you believe it? Before this week is over, we will have passed through the center of January. Like, that’s how quickly…ahh its like hard to believe, just a couple…couple weeks ago we’re in like the last decade, it’s Christmas time, its…how quickly, how quickly we just…life just moves us forward and here we are about to cross through the middle of the first month. But it’s good to know where we are. It’s good to know, like, this is the 12^th day of the year, but a lot of time that pulls us forward, right? Like, that keeps us from being here and gets us out into the future. And, so, let’s be here. We’re beginning a brand-new sparkly shiny week and we’ll cross into this week together we’ll Let God’s words speak to us and then the reality is this week hasn’t been lived yet. So, we may be carrying all kinds of baggage into this week, but the choices that we make, the way that we conduct ourselves and live our lives in this week, that’s going to be the story of this week and it’s really good at the beginning of week to remind ourselves of that. This is a new day. This is a new week and we can make the next right decisions right now. And one right decision is to allow God’s Word to speak to us, which is what we’ve come here to do. And, so, let’s get to it. We’re…we’re in a new week. This week we’ll read from the Christian Standard Bible, and we’re picking up the story of Isaac and Rebekah, and Isaac has basically done the same thing his father Abraham had done in the same city. Like they went to this city called Gerar and Abraham had told the people there that his wife Sarah was his sister. So, Isaac has gone to this same place and said that Rebekah, his wife, is his sister, which has caused some unrest. And, so, we’re seeing a little bit of tension beginning to build as we move into the new generations. Today we’ll read Genesis chapter 26 verse 17 through 27 verse 46.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for bringing us into a new shiny week and we invite Your Holy Spirit into every aspect of our lives, ever thought, every word, every deed that is out in front of us. As we live into this new week, we cannot do this without You. Why we have ever tried to do anything without You is remarkably foolish, but we are learning. And, so, we invite You in advance into every aspect of all of our interactions this week and we take note, even in today’s reading from the book of Matthew, but in general now that we’re reading of You, Jesus, getting to know Your personality and getting to observe Your behaviors and the way that You moved in this world and the way that You were willing to be disruptive, especially to the people who thought…who thought they had control over the worship of God. And, so, we see You in today’s reading alone healing a person who couldn’t walk by saying Your sins are forgiven, which only served to disrupt the scribes who are thinking You’re a blasphemer, and using the whole scene to reveal its…its not about obeying the rituals of religion, its about how we are in this world. And You did that by quoting from Hosea, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” And, so continually, even…even we who love You, even we who are following You, are trying to be a disciple in this world, to be Your hands and feet in this world, we find ourselves continually invited to look at the motives of our hearts. And we do everything that we can to curate a life that looks religious and looks pious and looks like maybe we know You or do we not care about any of that because we actually know You and know Your will and know Your ways? Come Holy Spirit into that question we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, home base, its where you find out find out what’s going on around here as I say most every day. So, stay tuned and stay connected in any way that you can, and in any way that you want to.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There’s a link on the homepage. If you’re using the app, the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner, or the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, you can press 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 will be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi this is Gary speaking I’m from South Carolina and I’ve just completed 12 years of listening to the Daily Audio Bible. Today is January 5^th and I’m starting my 13^th year now. This is actually my first time calling in. I’ve been listening for so long hearing so many different people call and leave requests, I’ve finally gotten around to call in myself. I’m not really calling you with a prayer request. I just wanted to call and encourage anybody joining this year for the first time or maybe if you’ve been on a few years I just want to encourage anybody to stick with it. In fact, I would say stick with it indefinitely for years. I have found that…and it’s easy to do. If you’re commuting to work it’s easy to fit into your life, just to commit to listening to the hearing, to have the hearing of the Word happening in your life daily, it will do amazing things to you. It starts to sink in in a very unique way. After listening for a few years, you start associating parts of the Bible with months of the year. The stories of the Old Testament start to happen in ways where you know at certain times of the year what to expect. You start to memorize the flow of the Bible. And over time you start seeing how the gospel is clearly displayed throughout the Old and New Testament. And listening to all the people call in you can hear how it’s changing lives. You can also see that really everyone, all lives are broken and need saving. And just hearing that and being a part of that for this many years has really…it’s really it’s really deepened my faith. And Brian and Jill I thank you for having this ministry and I pray you continue it as long as well as long as I’m alive. I intend to listen to it indefinitely as long as it’s available…

Hello DAB family this is Alicia My God is Abundance and I just got finished listening to the January 3^rd broadcast on today, January 3^rd. And I heard Finding Peace sounding broken and asking for prayer and clinging to faith and right after that I heard God Smiles with that beautiful message. And I know, God Smiles, that you had that message for all of us and I thank you for that message. But Finding Peace, I…I couldn’t help but think the minute that I heard that message that that message was a message that you needed to hear, that you needed to hear and cling to. I mean we’re starting a…we’re starting the Bible over again. We are in Genesis and man oh man it’s…we are so quick to hear the serpent hiss and to listen to his voice and to ignore the loving whisper of our God, you know? So, I just pray for you, Finding Peace, that you can hear the loving whisper of our God and I think today that loving whisper might have come to you in the voice of God Smiles and I think that whisper came to us all God Smiles, so thank you so much for that. Finding Peace, I do pray for your peace, your wholeness, your shalom. Thank you DAB family and thank you Brian for being so faithful and continuing to read is God’s word every day.

One of the reasons I love this podcast is because Brian talks about choosing the narrow path to life and this has been a pretty big theme in my life. This is Cindy, by the way, the Silver Lining Miner from Seattle. I have been struggling with a couple things in my life, one was my job that, thank God I have a job and I start on January 20^th and I thank all those who prayed for me. The other one is choosing relationships and people and bringing people into our lives that will lead us toward the narrow path that leads to life. So, I would love to praise Brian for his reminder about choosing the narrow path. And, are you going to choose the…the way to sin and to desires, giving into your desires and things that you know might not lead to that narrow path or are you going to choose the narrow path? And, so, for everybody out there who has maybe been in a relationship that’s…they know is not healthy or they’re walking a line right now where they are close to choosing a relationship that’s not healthy or doing something that is not healthy for their current relationship, I just want to say that I stand with you and I pray for you. I made a choice today to avoid an unhealthy path and I knew I could do it because of my family that I have here and other family members in my history that have been strong and actions that I’ve taken that show that I can walk that narrow path and be strong. So, I stand with you all and I pray for all of you to make those right choices with me. Amen.

Hi DAB family, I’m…this is Anonymous, I’m calling in because it’s January 4^th and I just want to praise God for hearing prayers outside of time. I tell you what, I have never been so encouraged in my entire walk with Christ. You know, I grew up in a in a Christian household and, you know, I got saved at 14 and I’ve never felt so encouraged and I know it’s because God has heard everyone’s prayers outside of time. Everyone who heard the message I left that got played on the 27^th and I didn’t hear it, I didn’t know I got played, I thought it might’ve have been have been played on the community prayer or maybe not…not really in anyone’s hearing. And today, January 4^th, I heard a woman pray. The first prayer was for…for Anonymous. And I thought, “oh yeah. You know what? Anonymous prayers are always really…they’re really…they touch my heart because those are prayers of people who don’t have anything left to try to hide what they are dealing with, they don’t have any…any layers left.” And, so, I prayed for Anonymous. And then the gentleman who prayed next prayed for anonymous and I thought. “oh.” I thought, “that sounds familiar. I don’t know why that sounds familiar but that’s something that I…you know…that fel;t familiar to my heart.” And then the third woman who prayed identified the day and I was like, “Lord God. I’m gonna go back and listen but I think…I think these people are praying for me.” And I know that God hears prayers outside of time and I want to thank everyone who has prayed for me since the 27^th. I’ve felt that. God has done work in my life. So, thank you so much. I love every single one of you.

Hey this is PG from NC. Brian thank you for reading. While you are reading, I had a thought. All my life I have heard the fact that Jesus called us to be fishers of men. The reality was He was calling fishermen to be fishers of men. It was a metaphor. He was allowing them, helping them to see themselves with a kingdom purpose and vision. There’s our word for the year. And I think if He were walking the earth today, I think He would be calling people and using a metaphor for which they could truly understand and wrap the purpose and a vision of themselves around. If He were calling a waiter or waitress or server, He might be calling them to serve the bread of life to individuals. If He were calling a fireman, He might be calling them to help people…help people escape the fiery situations of life there in or protect them from perilous situations. If He were calling a pilot or a flight attendant, He might be asking them to divinely help transport people along the journey of life to their ultimate kingdom destination. I think that each of us has a way that we see, we identify ourselves by our occupation or by our skill set and I think that God would want to use of metaphor that to allow us to see the kingdom purpose behind how He created us and how we function. So, Lord I pray today for every DABber who’s listening. God, I pray You’d give us vision of ourselves with a metaphor or a thought or an understanding of how You designed us to function. And I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

This is Michaela from South Carolina. I’ve called a few times over the 14 years that I’ve been listening. Each time it has been for my sister Susan who suffers from bipolar. She’s currently in ICU having a medicine overdose. She almost made it through the holidays but just finally couldn’t cope. I’m asking for prayer for her recovery and her restoration. I am believing God for her to be an icon of His healing power. Thank you all for your prayers and support. My husband and I listen daily, and we pray for all of you.

Hello Daily Audio Bible this is Heather and my son Judah, hi. So, I’ve been listening to the Daily Audio Bible and this is my first time calling in. I’ve been listening for the past seven years and for this eighth year my son Judah, he’s now 10 years old, he’s committed to live…listen to the Daily Audio Bible with me daily. I’m excited to see him go through the whole Bible in a year with me. I’m glad I finally called in. I listen to prayers and pray for the prayers as they come in and it’s just been a part of my growth the past seven years. And, so, I’m finally glad to be able to call in. God bless you.

Genesis 24:52-26:16, Matthew 8:18-34, Psalms 10:1-15, Proverbs 3:7-8

Today is the 11^th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian its great to be here with you as we continue our journey by taking the next step forward in the Scriptures. And the next step forward takes us back into the book of Genesis where we are…well…we’re kind of moving into a new generation. We’ve been traveling with Abraham and Sarah and Sarah has passed away and now Isaac, the son of promise is emerging into our story. So, we’ve been reading from the New International Version this week, which is what we’ll do today. Genesis chapter 24 verse 52 through 26 verse 16.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word and we thank You for…well…for bringing us into this new year and allowing us to begin to settle into the rhythm that will carry us each and every day through this year. I thank You for what You are speaking into our lives here at the beginning of a decade, in the beginning of a year because it’s challenging us and it’s shaking us in its re-orienting us and it's…it’s bringing us clarity. And, so, we invite Your Holy Spirit to continue to speak deeply into our souls and that we might be aware and awake and listening when You begin to shift things inside of us. Even today’s proverb, don’t be wise in Your own eyes. Just that right there, just that alone, we could probably sit with that the rest of our lives as a piece of constant wisdom that needs to be ever before us. Yes, we’re not wise on our own, but the proverb goes on to tell us to fear You and shun evil and this will bring us health. And it’s a physical thing, health to our bodies and nourishment to our bones. Physical healing and health can happen when we…when we become aware that there is a wisdom that is far deeper than what we think we know. So, come Holy Spirit into that because we are looking for this, we are hungry for this, we are asking for this, we are seeking, we are knocking, we are present. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website and that is home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. So, be sure to…be sure to check it out.

Check out the Community section. That’s where the Prayer Wall lives. That’s where the links to the transcripts are, that’s where the links to all the different social media channels are. So, check that out.

Check out the resources that are available in the Daily Audio Bible Shop. They have been invented and crafted for the journey that we are on together this year. So, check…check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible in the mission that we are…that we are sharing to bring the spoken word of God to anyone who will listen anywhere on this planet at any time of day or night, and build community around that rhythm so that it’s not a solitary journey so that we know we’re not alone, that we’re in this together. If that…if that’s life…life-giving to you than thank you for being life-giving back. There is a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial or you can just press the Hotline button, little red button at the top of the app and off you go.

And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I will be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi Daily Audio Bible this is Brooke Wright from Omaha Nebraska and I would just like to pray for my daddy who is now…right now he’s in Argentina and I pray that on Monday, by the way it’s Sunday, January 6^th and I would like to pray that today he has a good flight since he has more than one flight and he has to fly today and tomorrow. I would just like to pray that he would have a good trip and he would not have a bad day. This is Brooke Wright and I would just really like if you guys would pray for me and my brothers and my mom and that my mom would have…her cough would go away. Since I only have two minutes I’m going to end here. This is Brooke Wright and I’ll probably be calling very soon. Bye.

I want to pray for everyone listening and you are good people for listening and I hope it makes a change in your life. And try and remember I wish I could be like you guys. Shout out to my friend named Porshe. She listens to DAB and she’s disabled. She lost her leg, but she says that she __ God can help her through. She also had cancer and when she started listening to the DAB her life changed and she just wanted to thank God. Even at church she gets on her __ and prays. She does it for the Lord.

Hey DAB family this is Lori in Ohio I am a third-year DABber starting my 18^th year reading the Bible through in the year. In 2020 am stepping away from a 20 year long, long relationship that should have never…I should have never been in. It did not strengthen my walk in God, and it was awfully verbally abusive, sometimes physically and he really made me do things I didn’t want to do and gosh after work pressuring me every day to…to do things I didn’t want to do. That aside two decades of memories __ family blended and the loss of the best friend as well I’m coming off mutual friendships. It’s very painful, beyond painful. Exhilarating though, to get rid of this sin and to have nothing blocking me and God. Just praying once again like it used to be and walking in the light of Christ, a whole person now as God’s girl once again. I ask that you please pray for me as for my focus and strength on this journey as a finally reborn again, rebooting a brand-new life that pleases God, continually growing a strong godly support team that are very helpful and whenever or wherever He takes me. I’m free. Woo! Please call me…my handle here will be 202020. I’m looking forward to all God has in store. I love you guys. I need you as iron sharpens iron. Please pray for me. I…I know God is preparing for me something big and this is such a way of peace that it’s a brand-new life for me. I’m praying for Finding Peace, for Good Smile in England, Rebecca in Michigan, Denise with Louis the rescue dog and Dave in Colorado. Okay guys. Talk to you soon.

Hey Daily Audio Bible this is John calling from Bethlehem Pennsylvania it is the 4^th of January. It’s great to be here to be around the Global Campfire and toss a couple logs on and keep it burning and speak with you all in community as we do this, as we step through the Bible one day at a time, one step at a time as Brian says. I wanted to call in and let a couple people know I’m thinking of them here this morning. Of course, I’m keeping you all in prayer. I want to just mention a couple people. So, Finding Peace and also Dave from Colorado. Finding Peace, I want you to know that you are a child of the most-high God. You see yourself as stock but sees you as free. He sees you as released. He sees you as not in the place that you see you, but He sees you in His kingdom and doing a mighty thing. You are mighty in the land, you come from royal blood, you are a princess of the most-high God and what He has in store for you in 2020 is going to absolutely blow your mind. You are touched, you are equipped, you are well able, and there’s nothing that can stop you except the thinking that you have and that but that you put out there. So, my prayer for you is that you remove your but that you get your own “butt”, BUTT, and your “but” BUT out-of-the-way to be able to live into everything that God has for you. I’m praying for you sister and I can’t wait to hear your report when you call back to say that you’re out of the hole and it’s because of God’s grace and kindness that He’s taken you out of that hole. Don’t listen to anything that the enemy has to tell you it’s a lie and deceit. And then Dave, my brother from Colorado, listen I love your voice. Don’t hide under a rock and don’t put a bag over your head man your beautiful and your voice is beautiful to. You have nothing to be ashamed of you’re an awesome person. It was great to hear from you and if I were in Colorado I would totally…

Dear Anonymous, hey, this is Annette from Oklahoma City. I just want to start off by saying, I love you sister. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. I can tell you real quick in my life story I was pretty much beaten and abused by my mother and ignored by my father a lot of the times because of these things. I got…I tried to get away by joining the Air Force where I was taken advantage of by a supervisor. I was…thrashed around and taken sexual advantage of by there only to get into two marriages where I was abused and I can tell you I know exactly how you feel. I wondered many, many times if I just drove up this ditch if I just, you know, did the same thing, you know, that my life would be better because it would be over. I understand. I totally, totally understand but I can tell you this, these are the things that I would’ve missed had I done that, and this is a very, very short condensed list because the Lord has blessed me since then. And now I understand that maybe those things happened to me because I was strong enough to endure them so then later on, I could help other people who have been through this type of situation and these tragedies and these hardships. And, you know, I would have missed my husband that I have now. He loves me more than anything in this whole wide world and he takes good care of me. And I would’ve missed seeing my children to grow up and enjoying grandchildren. Riding my motorcycle out in the middle of the country and being able to pray for all of you…

Hi DAB family I’m calling in to ask for prayer for my daughter. She graduated high school and then went to college for a semester and then she’s not going to be returning and she’s really gotten into some really difficult times in her life and she carries a lot of weight from her childhood from…her dad committed suicide when she was four years old and that’s been coming up a lot. And she told me that she’s was having dreams and I can’t go into detail but there are some things that could cause a mother…afraid to have a lot of worry but that’s what I don’t want to do. I’m actually pregnant and I just pray that…I ask that you guys pray with us…my husband and I…for __ this down and we’ll have a healthy pregnancy but pray for my daughter. She really needs prayer right now. She is, I guess, what you would say a prodigal. And, so, she, I don’t think wants anything to do with God right now and just a very, very hard time in her life. Thank you so much.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family my name is Tammy I’m from Georgia today is January the 5^th. I’m calling specifically for anonymous. I’ve listened for 10 years completely and I have never called in, but your message has just really hit my heart. I would love to be your friend and I want you to know that you’re never alone and if you would love to reach out to me my email address is tammygrace23@gmail.com, tammygrace23@gmail.com. Anonymous, I’m praying for you and you are never alone. Jesus loves you and He has you honey. Please email me.

Genesis 23:1-24:51, Matthew 8:1-17, Psalms 9:13-20, Proverbs 3:1-6

Today is the 10^th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian and it’s great to be here with you today. And well, this is the 10^th day of the year. So, 10 days equals a week and a half. So, that’s where we are in the year even as we approach the end of the week, the first full week of this year. So, we have indeed begun our voyage and we are sailing straight out into the deep, and probably by now we can see that the Bible hot to say that’s very, very, very poignant to the lives that we’re living right now. And, so, let’s continue that voyage. Today, we’re going to say goodbye to somebody that…that we’ve gotten to know a little bit and we’re gonna see ourselves beginning in the Old Testament to shift into a new generation. So, we’ve been reading from the New International Version this week and we’ll do that today. Genesis chapter 23 verse 1 through 24 verse 51.

Commentary:

Okay. So, a couple things just to point out today and consider as we prepare to go into our first weekend of the year.

So, let’s go to the book of Genesis. We said goodbye to Sarai, who’s name had become Sarah, who was, you know, when we got into the meat of the story, she was already kind of an elderly woman who then gave birth to a son of promise whose name is Isaac. And this is where we kind of begin to shift into the next generation. So, Abraham sends a trusted servant to go find a wife for this son of promise, Isaac. And, so, he sends the servant back to his own family because this is a child that…like there’s a huge promise over this and we will see how that story begins to play out as we continue it tomorrow. But Sarah, she dies. And, so, Abraham…Abraham is…he’s a foreigner so he’s not a landowner. He has plenty of…of material goods. He’s wealthy, but he’s not a landowner and he needs some land now to establish a burial ground. And this is kind of the first owned land by Abraham who’s received this promise in this land of promise, and it actually has some significance, some significance that we’re not going to really understand until we get a little bit further in the story, but let’s just remember where this burial cave is. It is near Hebron according to the Bible and it is the cave of Machpelah according to the Bible and it is in the Valley of Eshkol according to the Bible. We’re gonna see this place again in the Bible, but I should point out that this place still does exist until today. It’s called the tomb of the patriarchs at this point and it’s a kind of enclosed by…by a large structure that was built in the Herodian era. And, so, we’ve just basically buried Sarah. She’s the first person to be buried in this cave, but she’s certainly not going to be the last. And Abraham himself will eventually be buried in this cave. And, so, it’s the tomb of the patriarchs and it’s a bit of a contentious well-regarded place because of where it’s situated and what it represents. Obviously, the tomb of Abraham has significance for Jewish people and Christian believers as well as those who practice Islam. So, it is that one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in the world until today.

Then we move into the book of Proverbs and now Proverbs is almost pleading with us and simply reaching out her hand to say, “I have everything that you are struggling to figure out. I have everything you need, and I have everything you want. So, you can struggle, you can grasp and thrash and connive and deceive and manipulate. You can withhold information, you can curate, you can…you can make something false look true and even fool yourself. And you can think that you’ve accumulated all the things that you want and you’re surrounded by all this life and lifestyle that you think you deserve or that you think that you’re after and it won’t be what you’re looking for and it will collapse on you. And in some cases great will be that thunder or you can listen to me and I will just give you what you need to know to navigate this life. And none of the things you’re trying to hold onto or achieve our grasp will be able to enslave you because you will be wise.” So, I just want to give voice once again to what wisdom was speaking to us from the Scriptures. Let’s listen to these words again, because we’re only like a week and a half into the year and this is what we need to know to navigate the rest of the year. So, this is wisdom speaking, “do not forget my teaching. Keep my commands in your heart”, right? So, this is as deep as it goes if you’re gonna keep something in your heart. “But if you do”, She says, “if you keep them in your heart, they’ll prolong your life many years and bring you peace and prosperity. Let love and faithfulness never leave you.” Okay, love and faithfulness. “bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart, then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man”. Very different than a curated respect that we try to make in our lives that is ultimately propped up and false. This is…what wisdom is speaking to us is something that is a real and true. And She goes on to say what many of us may have memorized but all of us need to take to heart. This is something to put in our hearts as wisdom was suggesting. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”, right? Don’t lean on what you think you know. You do not know all that you think you know. “In all your ways submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.” So, I…again…I mean…well the question is, is that what you’re looking for because this is where the Bible is headed, So, we’re like a week and a half in and we’ve set sail and you’re like, you know, “this is not what I’m looking for. I was hoping for, you know, better ways to manipulate people and get things that I wanted.” Then this is not the right ship. But if you’ve been on a windy path that has taken you…taken you through territory that you never wanted to experience and you’re trying to find some sort of illuminated path that will lead you to somewhere that makes sense in life, here it is. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.”

Prayer:

Father, as we prepare to move ourselves into the end of a week and as we look back over just the first bit of time that we’ve had in the Scriptures this year, it's…ahh…yeah…we can already see where this is going and we want it because for the first time it feels like we might be able to go somewhere. And now we’re realizing that where we’re going is going to required trust and not understanding. And now we have pause because that can bring us a great amount of fear because You are simply exposing our need to be in control and our awareness that we must trust in You with all of our hearts if we want a straight path before us. So, come Holy Spirit into that as we meditate upon that and consider that during the events of today and in the days ahead. Come Jesus we pray. In Your mighty name, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. And there’s always something or another going on around here. So, stay tuned and stay connected at the website.

Kind of been talking this week somewhat unintentionally about the Daily Audio Bible Shop just because of the different themes and stuff that we’ve been approaching in the Bible. So, I got guess I’ll do that again. The Daily Audio Bible Shop is available and the resources that are in the Daily Audio Bible Shop certainly…certainly everything that is shipped from the Shop helps to keep the lights on and keep…and keep the incredible amount of data bandwidth that gets used every day of flowing. But we certainly don’t exist on the Shop. The resources that are in the Shop have been created over time for this particular specific journey, the one that we’re on moving through the Bible in a year. And just understanding that that becomes a rhythm and that anything that we can bring into our lives that help us with a rhythm, a path that we are wanting to walk on, anything that we bring into our lives that remind us, that continually keep us focused, that’s very helpful. So, that’s why these resources exist. So, certainly check them out.

I will…I will mention the God of Your Story, which is the…the newest written resource that we have. And that came out late last year. That is a dated 365-day devotional format that follows the same plan we use at the Daily Audio Bible and offers the same kind of thoughts that we’re talking about. I mean, the Daily Audio Bible, it’s different every year, it’s different every day. Sometimes talking about the same things we talked about a year ago and sometimes we’ve…we’re talking about things…there’s things this year we’ve never talked about before already. But there is a path through the Scriptures. And, so, it took a couple of years, 600 writing days to do it, but it’s kind of a written tangible holdable version of the kind of story that we’re telling as we’re moving our way through the Bible. So, if you’re ever without Internet or you just kinda want to double dip, you wanna go through the Daily Audio Bible and hear what we’re talking about but then also kind of go back and review, then the God of your story is a fantastic resource for that and it can be found in the Daily Audio Bible Shop. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link that just kind of hangs out and lives on the homepage. And I thank you with all my heart for your partnership. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial or you can press the Hotline button in the app, the…well…its at the top. You can’t miss it, the little Hotline button and start sharing your story.

And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Genesis 20:1-22:24, Matthew 7:15-29, Psalms 9:1-12, Proverbs 2:16-22

Today is the 9^th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is wonderful…wonderful to be here with you on a great day out in front of us, the next day forward moving. We’re ourselves toward a week and a half now being in this new year and decade. So, it’s like we’re on this voyage together. If we look behind us we can still see the distant faint line of the shore and we’re just kind of getting moving but we are headed out into the deep, and I am so excited about sharing a little bit of every day has this rhythm of our lives becomes established and we allow God’s Word to speak into it each day. So, today’s a new day and we have new territory to cover. We’re reading from the New International Version this week. Today Genesis chapters 20, 21, 22.

Commentary:

Okay. Let’s look at a couple things, one thing in Genesis and one thing in Matthew today just to mainly point them out. We have experienced or touched on these ideas before and one of those is this language, “the angel of the Lord” or “the Lord.” We…we experience this in today’s reading, where God calls out to Hagar. And it says, “the Lord called out to Hagar from heaven”, right? And then he spoke to her about Ishmael. But then God told Abraham to take Isaac and sacrifice him. And during that story, the angel of the Lord called out from heaven, but then spoke in first person as God…as the most-high God. So, I point that out just to show the…the angel of the Lord is not necessarily like a messenger sent from God, the angel of the Lord is a way of…of identifying God. So, what we are seeing here in these early chapters of the Bible is God, very, very actively interacting and being around and upon the earth, interacting with human beings and we’re also seeing this divine family, for lack of a better word, this spiritual realm of beings that are doing the same thing. So, it’s interesting that we’re like, “okay. So, then when did this stop and all the sudden, we have these books that are named after prophets and we have all their writings in…in the Bible and God talked to them so that they could then talk to the people. But here were just seeing God speak on his own behalf about things. When we see this shift?” We’ll begin to see this shift when Moses begins to show up on the scene, which is several centuries from now, at least where we are in the Bible. And we’ll just…we’ll just keep exploring this as we go. There’s so many little things to see, so many little things to become aware of as we…as we continue make this journey.

So, then we go into the book of Matthew and Jesus is talking about prophets, right? People speaking in God’s name as if God has told them a message to give. And He’s also talking about true and false disciples. You know, I…I am a person who grew up in church. So, I’ve been around church people and church life pretty much my whole life. So, this idea of true and false prophets and true and false disciples, this is not a new concept. I’ve heard it my whole life. But since we’re reading it in the Bible, we see that it’s for sure not a new concept, it dates back to the very beginning. Those are labels and attached to them are judgments, right? If you say, “you are a false prophet” you are labeling that person and judging that person based on whatever criteria you are using to make that judgment or if you are saying, “you are a false disciple, you are not a true disciple of Jesus”, then that’s a label and that’s judgment and it comes out of criteria that has been established somehow. And we do this kind of stuff…like I see it now more than ever, probably because when I was growing up you couldn’t flame these things out on the Internet and just shoot the arrows out there and it’s so much easier. But the thing is, we label people false this and false that without having ever spoken a word to them and largely based on whatever swirl of information may be flying around. So, in this day and age eat, you know, you can become a false prophet by asking the wrong questions, right? So, we…we sort for our dogmas because we just want it to be very crystal black-and-white clear what the expectations of the faith are. And, so, if we can arrive at something that even resembles that, which is impossible really, but if we arrive at something that makes sense to us then we’ll defend that line, right? Because that’s what we believe, and anything that would disrupt that would make us feel unsteady and unstable in our faith. And, so, we can get really, really erratic when we feel like, right, when we’re being pressured in any way in our lives. Wrestling with your faith is not a sin, it’s an expectation. How will you grow? How do you grow in any way of your life without resistance, without being disrupted, without having to walk through valleys, without having to see the mountaintops and actually experience the valleys below? We are starting to read the story of a people. They are not formed yet. There is only two people involved. Right now, Abraham and Isaac but those two people are going to become a people and those people will eventually become Israel and they are the progeny of a person named Jacob and his name means one who wrestles with God. This is baked into our tradition. So, running around labeling people false this and false that without using the measuring criteria that Jesus gave, so in terms of like a false prophet Jesus said, “by their fruit you will recognize them.” Okay. So, that’s easy, that’s external. We can look around and go, “well, I judge that person’s fruit to be false.” And there you go. So, you make your judgment. But Jesus doesn’t just stop there with the external judgment which we might make about people. He brings it very, very, very close to home because after He talks about how you will understand a false prophet by their fruits he says, “not, everybody who tells me, “Lord, Lord” is going to enter the kingdom of heaven. Only the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven. Many…many are gonna say, “didn’t we prophesy in your name? Didn’t we drive out demons in your name? Didn’t we perform miracles in your name?” So, let’s pause here for second and point out. Those must not be the criteria that make a person true. And, so, we could judge them as true. Even a person who can prophesy, even a person who can drive out demons, even a person who can perform miracles. Jesus is saying there will be people like that who do not enter the kingdom of heaven and there’s a reason. Jesus says, “I never knew you. I never knew you.” Could we just linger there for second? We can work our entire lives trying to get every dot dotted, get our theology perfect, get our doctrine bulletproof. And I…I am a person who has made those attempts. I am a person who thought if…if that…if I could just apply yourself that significantly to just finally getting it right, what is expected of me? Then maybe I could know God. And maybe I could stop constantly, constantly worrying about whether He’s mad at me or whether He loves me. And I started realizing like, how can…how can you call that a relationship? Like, how do…there’s no other relationship in my life that could work like that. How do you call that a relationship? And then it’s this verse, “I never knew you” that really helped me to realize, knowing all you can possibly know about God is not the same as being in a relationship with God any more than knowing everything that you can know about your spouse on paper represents the actual living relationship of your life. Jesus is basically saying the criteria that you use to make somebody a big shot, like somebody who can prophesy or drive out a demon or perform a miracle, that does not mean you even know me. Yeah, that’s disruptive indeed, isn’t it? Because all the blinking lights and flashing stuff that we look for as proof isn’t the fruit Jesus is looking for. And we will continue to talk about these things in the teachings of Jesus as long as we’re talking about Jesus, which means that we’re gonna be talking about this all year long.

Prayer:

Father we thank You for Your word and we thank You for another day, another…another step forward as we continue to journey, even though we’re just setting sail, You are already at work in our hearts in comforting and in shaking ways. We just open ourselves to You. We just invite Your Holy Spirit to come. You have promised that You would lead us into all truth and that's…that’s what we’re counting on, that You will. So, come Holy Spirit we pray. In the mighty name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here.

Yesterday I was talking about the Shop and journaling and…and stuff like that. Today I should probably, because of what we were just talking about, I should talk about some…some of the written resources that are in the Daily Audio Bible Shop, especially from today, a resource called Reframe. I mean, what we were just talking about very briefly, the fruit of a relationship, the difference between knowing about and actually knowing God was a lengthy, a lengthy theological pursuit for me that ended up becoming a book and it’s called Reframe. So, if some of the stuff we’re talking about here…if you’re like, “yeah, these are the kinds of things I’ve been wrestling with too”, then there’s much more lengthy discussion on that subject available in the book Reframe which you can find in audio form or in book form in the Daily Audio Bible Shop at dailyaudiobible.com.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible in the mission that we have as a community, which is to bring the spoken word of God read fresh every day and offer it to the world freely to anyone who will listen to it anywhere on this planet any time of day or night, and to build community around that rhythm so that as we take this voyage through the Scriptures we know that we’re not doing it alone and we know we will never be alone. If that is something that resonates and brings life to you then I thank you humbly, deeply, with the most gratitude I know how to have for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app you can press the give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

As, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is a number to dial or you can press the Hotline button in the app, the little red button at the top and I just start talking.

And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Genesis 18:16-19:38, Matthew 6:25-7:14, Psalms 8:1-9, Proverbs 2:6-15

Today is the 8^th day of January welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it’s great to be here with you. And we’ve gone a full seven days into the new year, right? This is day eight. So, we’re really in this new year and have…have navigated a week of this new decade and hopefully we’re…we’re getting moved into the new year. Hopefully we’re, you know, getting comfortable with our surroundings and the new rhythms of our lives as we take steps forward every day and allow God’s word to speak into those steps through his word. So, let’s get to it. We’re reading from the New International Version this week. Today Genesis chapter 18 verse 16 through 19 verse 38.

Commentary:

Okay. There’s so much for us to talk about. We encountered so many things to be considered today, pretty much in every section of our reading.

Let’s just start with Genesis because this is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And, so, God and some of His divine family, some of these angelic beings, beings that are embodied and can be seen by human beings but are about the work of doing God’s will, upon this earth, they come to visit Abraham and they are on their way down to the plane where Lot, Abraham’s nephew was living, down to these city’s called Sodom and Gomorrah because they…well…because…because the wickedness of the region had reached God and…and He said He was going to take a look. This story has so many disruptive really unsettling things in it that we can read it and then close the Bible and could set it down and go like, “I don’t know what is going on here. I don’t know how to read this book. I don’t want to understand. I’m just gonna set this over here. That’s what happens a lot because we don’t like any time we get disrupted. Like, if…if we’re in the Psalms today and we’re talking about the wonder of it all and that God would even pay any attention to us whatsoever, like, we like that quite a bit, it’s comforting, it’s reassuring, it gives us stability, but then if we’re disrupted or we’re shaken or we’re knocked off kilter or we’ve lost our balance in some way, we don’t like that. But this is a good time to tell you something. You need to get really used to being disrupted at times because there are times that that is the point that the Bible is trying to make. It’s what the Bible is trying to do, is shake you awake until you say, “wait, what’s the deeper meaning, like what’s in this story?” So, like we got to an incestuous relationship between father and daughters today. That’s disruptive across-the-board all the way across the generations until today. So, you can go like, “eww, I don’t like that. This is…I…I don’t know why this is in the Bible and I’m gonna set it aside” or we can go like, “what is going on here? Why is this shaking me up inside? What…what? Let me dig deeper here. What is below the surface?” And, so, what we see in this story is that Abraham and God are together, and God makes a decision. “I have entered into a covenant with this man. I’m not gonna keep any secrets from him. I’m gonna tell him what I’m gonna do even though this may affect his nephew.” And, so, the Lord says, “I’m gonna go check this out.” And we have this really interesting story - a human being negotiating with the most-high God over the righteous people that might be down in the valley. Certainly…and I mean Abraham is talking audaciously, “You wouldn’t do that. Certainly, You wouldn’t do that. If there were 50 people down there who are righteous, are You gonna wipe the whole plane out including the 50 righteous people? I know you are just…You would not do that?” And the Lord confirms what Abraham already knows. “No…of course…I wouldn’t do that. If there are 50 down there that are righteous, they will save them all.” And, so, Abraham’s like, “what about 45”, right? “what about 40, what about 35?” He keeps working his way down and God keeps saying, “look. the point is, if there are righteous people down there, that’s what I’m going to find out. If the place has nothing but wickedness in it then I’m here to destroy the evil and the wickedness in this world that is destroying my people. And if there are people that get wrapped up into that, that will not…that have determined to reject God and remain evil then they have made their own choice about what will happen.” And believe me, we see this story in Genesis, but we’ll see this story throughout the rest of the Bible all the way into the final pages of the book of Revelation. So, God goes down to have a look and it’s an evil situation. And, so, God gets lot out of there before the destruction happens. Lot goes to this little village called Zoar and he’s a little bit freaked out to live there, so he ends up in the mountains where the angelic beings told him to go in the first place. He’s living in a cave with his daughters. He had his wife. She looked back. God told him to flee and don’t look back, and she did, and we can pause there and go look at the metaphors for our own lives in that alone. Nevertheless, here’s two daughters who had been betrothed who were engaged to be married. These men, these beings who had come to the city, their father took them in and was trying to protect them and was gonna throw these daughters out to the mob. So, they have sort of a sense of where they fit into the whole picture. Their mom is dead. Their father is in a cave freaking out. These girls. Now, we remember the story, God called Abram to a land that he did not know that he was going to be given, but he needed to follow God and Lot came with him. So, Lot and his daughters are foreigners in a foreign land, and they have lost everything that would defend and protect them. They are hiding in a cave. The daughters know that their father is not going to live forever, and if there is no child then they have no one to speak for them. This is the culture of the time. So, if something happens to him and something is likely to happen to him at some point because it’s just two young women and…and their father. And, so, they would…if they’re wandering around at some point it’s gonna be really easy to…to kill Lot, to steal the two daughters and probably prostitution is in their future. So, like, this is not a good situation. They’ve lost everything. They have no way to protect themselves. And, so, they devise this plan in the cave - “let’s get dad drunk. We’ll…we’ll go have sex with him and see if we can have a child. And if we can have a male child, either one of us, if we’re successful then we have our family line, like we’re protected. And, so, that’s what they do. And both the…both the daughters end up of having sons who then…who’s offspring then becomes the Moabites and the Ammonites. So, you’ve got to wonder, like when Lot and his daughters are in the cave and they’re like trying to figure out what to do, why they don’t even have a conversation about going back to Abraham. Like they’ve lost everything. It’s just the three of them. Like why don’t they just go back to the household of Abraham? We don’t know. Maybe that wasn't…we don’t know. But we read a story like this and it’s very easy for us to go, “why is this in the Bible, number one and why do I feel so strange about God now that I’m reading a story like this in the Bible.” Go with that. Like, instead of being freaked out about it, enter into the disruption. What’s going on here? And what does God have to do with this story. Like, we read the whole story and what God was going to do was to go check out the evil and eradicate it unless there were righteous people to preserve it. And he went down and…and got Lot and his family out of the situation. He redeemed them. He rescued them out of the situation. And it was a pretty difficult situation to say the least, but everything that they did next, all of their fear and all of the choices that they made, they made themselves. God didn’t make them make those choices and God didn’t instruct them to follow that path. And then all of a sudden, we’re like, “okay. Yeah, I mean, it’s a disruptive story because it contains incest and all this kinda stuff in it. But Hold on a second. I have been in very, very strange situations where I’ve felt like I was in a cave about to make decisions that were not good decisions and that were not gonna lead me on a good path but I was like the only thing I could…like the only choice I could think of that I could to make and so I made it. And, yeah, it was not a good choice.” We can find ourselves in these stories. And then we have to look back and go, “where was God in this?” God came for them. He sent angels and rescued them and sent them on their way and said, “you’ve got go fast because we can’t even do what we’ve been sent to do until your safe.” So, why did they lose that threat? Why did they find themselves in a cave making these decisions? We don’t know. Why do we do that? Now we could just stop there. That…there’s plenty to think about right there, but the Bible continued to speak to us when we moved into the Gospels in the book of Matthew, in Matthew chapter 6.

And Jesus is talking about worrying and it’s a pretty famous passage. He’s pretty explicitly telling us not to worry, that God already knows what we need and all we have to do is look around to see that He cares for…for his creation. And, so, that's…that’s a great lesson, it’s a famous lesson, we take it to heart, we comfort ourselves with it when we’re…when we’re kind of enduring stressful situations, but let’s look deeper into what Jesus is saying here. Because what Jesus is ultimately inviting us to do is to be present in our lives right now instead of skipping our lives in order to try to arrange for whatever might happen in our future, thereby never being actually here now, only being a shell that exists in this moment because we’re out there in the future living somewhere else that’s not happening. So, let’s just look at this again. And this is Jesus. So, we’re just…we’re just quoting Jesus in what we’re saying. “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food? Isn’t the body about more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They don’t sow or reap. They don’t store away in barns.” In other words, they don’t have a retirement plan. They’re not stressed out about that promotion. They’re not burning the candle at both ends trying to figure out how to get the ends to meet because of the over obligations of life. Jesus is saying, “look at em’. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t ya more valuable than they are? Can you add a single hour to your future by worrying about it?” Why would you worry about clothes? Look at the flowers. Even Solomon didn’t have clothes like that. And if God’s gonna care about the grass that’s here today and gone tomorrow and clothe it with such splendor, you don’t think He can handle you? Oh, you of little faith.” There’s actually something important that Jesus is doing here. Certainly, certainly giving a different view of the world. Like, I mean, we would look at what Jesus is saying, and we would agree because He’s our Savior, but if we didn't…if they were just words by somebody we might look at em’ and go, “that would be nice, but that’s not the world I live…like that’s not how things work. That would be nice if I could do that but that's…that’s not how it works.” And Jesus is like, “no. This is how it’s supposed to work. This is how your life is supposed to be lived. You’re supposed to actually live it right here right now and allow God to take care of the moments that are yet to come and allow Him to bring them to you moment by moment after the same fashion that the birds don’t freak out about anything. And there’s a reason that He’s trying to slow the world down.” And we would say, you know that, “the world is moving much faster than it did in Christ’s time because of our technology.” But what we begin to realize is the heart of man hasn’t changed, it’s just the tools that he uses and the clothes that he wears in pursuit of the same…of filling the same void. So, one of the first things that we can underneath the surface of what Jesus is teaching is now, what’s happening right now matters because it it’s the only thing that’s actually happening right now. And if you’re gonna be in your past or in your future then you are not here, and if you’re not here you’re gonna miss something really, really pivotal, the kingdom of God, which is what Jesus is leading us toward. So, He’s like, “don’t worry saying what am I gonna eat, what am I gonna drink, what am I gonna wear? That’s what the pagans do. They run around. Everybody’s looking for those things. Your Father who created you already knows that you need them. Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well. So, don’t worry about tomorrow,” right, “the future, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” So, isn’t Jesus saying, “stay here. Be present.” And He’s starting to talk about the kingdom and He’s never gonna stop. Like we’re gonna follow His kingdom language all the way through the Gospels because He’s trying to expose the kingdom and He’s trying to expose it as not something that’s in the future, not something that will be coming but something that already is happening now. Like, if you never…never heard this before, like if you’ve never considered this before, this is not like…this is not my philosophy. This…this is what Jesus says. As we continue through the Gospels., we’ll see…see it all the time. Jesus will say, “how do I describe the kingdom? It’s like this. It’s like that.” And He will invariably come around to saying, explicitly, “the kingdom is within you, the kingdom is among you, the kingdom is now. It has not reached its fullness. It is not complete, but it has begun. It is happening. It is not something that has yet to begin in the future. It’s now. So, don’t skip it. Don’t skip your life trying to prepare for what might happen to you in the future. If you do that then you won’t have eyes to see and ears to hear.” Okay, so that’s kinda what’s going on in Matthew and that can be disruptive too. We may need to pause. We may need to consider this because I know I grew up thinking that the kingdom was coming. I grew up…I didn’t know how to quantify even what that meant, other than the Jesus would come back on a horse in the sky, and all these things could happen. But it’s so esoteric that like how do…you how…do you live toward something that…like how do you do that only to find out like that’s what the people of Jesus time were thinking too. They’re waiting for this Savior, this Messiah, this figurehead to come and rally the troops, basically to stir up the hearts of people and restore them to God and lead a charge that would restore a kingdom. And here we have Jesus going, “yeah, there is a kingdom, but you are not seeing and the way you are going about this will not get you where you want to go. You’re living backward. And just watch. Watch as we continue. Watch as we find Jesus in confrontation with the religious leaders over and over and over and how they are blinded and how they cannot see and how they will eventually plot to destroy Jesus. And that…that…that can be deeply convicting because we know the stories about Jesus and so we look at the, you know, we look at the religious leaders and the Roman soldiers, “they’re the bad guys and they hurt Jesus.” And, “why would anybody hurt this beautiful Savior?” But as we go through the stories and we begin to just look underneath the surface at what Jesus is saying and how it is impacting the people’s understanding of the world that they live in and how they reject it. To put it in the vernacular of Jesus, “the light came into the darkness and the darkness rejected it.”

Okay. So, what can we…what can we take away from today?

In Genesis, we can take away that there’s a lot more going on than we understand, and we can’t blame the choices that we make on somebody else including God.

In the book of Matthew, we hear the rumblings of a kingdom that Jesus is talking about, one that should stir some kind of awakening inside of us, because Jesus, the Savior, is saying that this is the first priority, to seek it first. And, so, we need to know and understand what we’re seeking, and we will as we continue through the stories of Jesus. But we need to understand that this is first. Everything else follows that. “All these things will be added unto you” is the way that Jesus put it. All the things that you’re striving and looking for and trying to arrange for and to protect yourself from. All this stuff that you’re doing and calling it life, that’s not life. You can actually live by seeking the kingdom of becoming aware, having eyes to see and ears to hear. And all of the things that you’re struggling to get will just be added to you. That is different than the lives most of us are living and that should give us pause. And that doesn’t mean we have to make all these changes and reorganize our entire lives today. We need to understand that somethings already happening, even though we are only eight days into the Bible. The Bible is already doing its work. It’s already challenging. It’s already moving, and massaging. It’s already beginning to shift things inside of us and we find ourselves disrupted. We just need to sit with it. This is a journey we are on. Whatever is going to happen in our lives is going to happen over the course of a year. We can relax and not worry and allow God to lead us on this journey as Jesus is suggesting in the book of Matthew chapter 6 today.

Prayer:

Jesus, we thank You. We thank…there’s so much here, this is for sure gonna consume our thoughts for the rest of the day, just what You’ve spoken to us in Your word today. So, we invite Your Holy Spirit to…to do…to do what You promised in the Scriptures, to lead us into all truth. That’s what we seek. That’s what we’re after. And, so, we open ourselves to receive from You. Come Holy Spirit we pray into all that we’ve heard today from the Scriptures. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. And there’s always something or another going on around here.

I’ve been thinking of the different things we haven’t spoken about yet, and we have touched on the fact that there is a Daily Audio Bible Shop and it’s at dailyaudiobible.com or if you’re using the app, you can press the little Drawer icon in the upper left-hand corner and that’ll take you there as well. I mention it because there are a number of resources as we’re at the beginning of the year that are made for this journey and we’ll talk about them over the coming weeks, but I would just mention today like, the Daily Audio Bible Journal is something that…this is our 2.0 version…like we keep perfecting…just it…its finding the right paper and the right feel and the right size and the right writing instruments. I found the best pencils. I love kind of doing this old-school in my own hand. I’m a bit of a journaler. And, so, I enjoy that. The thing is, if we’re gonna go through the Bible, then we’re gonna talk about all kinds of things. But we’re reading the Word of God. And, so, God is speaking to us through His Word. And if you take the time to sit and listen to that, then He’s gonna say things that we need to know. And if God’s gonna speak to us then we should probably write it down. And, so, we create these resources for this journey. And journaling…well…there’s precedent for that in the Scripture as we will soon see, God continually inviting his people to create standing stones or a memorial or something to create a monument in a place where something happened. The purpose of that is so that people won’t forget what God did there so that when they pass by that way they can see that monument and remember what God did there and that’s in a very real way what journaling does for us. We journal our way through the Scriptures and then years from now, years from now when things may be foggy or we just want look back over our lives, we turn to those journals and we realize that we have told ourselves the story of God’s faithfulness, that we did find ourselves feeling as if we weren’t going to make it but we did make it. So, those resources are available in the Daily Audio Bible Shop. Check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There’s a link on the homepage. I thank you profoundly and with all humility for your partnership. We are a community and what we’ve done we’ve done together since the beginning. And, so, I thank you for that. So, there’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment you can press 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.

Genesis 16:1-18:15, Matthew 6:1-24, Psalms 7:1-17, Proverbs 2:1-5

Today is the 7^th day of January, welcome to the daily Bible I’m Brian and it is a joy, every day it is a joy to come around this Global Campfire that…that we all share, where the fire is burning and no matter what time of day or night it is we can kinda come…come out of the cold, come out of the heat even and just come to this place, this space that overtime just kinda becomes an oasis. It’s like this one space, this once period of time a day that we kinda step out of all of the chaos that’s swirling around and just simply allow God’s word to wash over us and then we go back out into it. It’ll still be there, but we may go back out into it with some perspective and some transformation in our lives, And, so it’s a beautiful thing to be here with you today for the next step forward. And we have been reading from the New International Version this week. And we have, in the book of Genesis, been reading about this guy named Abram who has entered into a covenant with God and God has given him a promise for lots…like an innumerable amount of offspring, but he doesn’t have any kids at all. And he has followed this God into a land that is not his homeland, a land that God has said will become his ancestral homeland, but that hasn’t happened either and God has just told him yesterday that it’s gonna be like for centuries of mistreatment before that stuff starts to happen. And all of a sudden, we see, “oh… the stories in the Bible are full of ups…ups and downs just like my life is. There’s no straight line to anywhere. It goes through all of the issues of life” and where we arrive is how we respond to those things. And, so, we continue with that journey. Today we’ll read Genesis chapter 16 verse 1 through 18 verse 15.

Commentary:

Alright. There are a few things we should touch base on in our reading today. I’m trying to think of the fastest way to go about this. So, let’s go into Genesis. And we read within the last couple of days of Lot and Abram separating. Like, they’re close relatives, but their…their households have grown too big to sustain them in one place. So, they go in separate directions and subsequently Lot is captured in sort of a nine-king battle and Abram goes and reclaims Lot and retakes all of the things that have been stolen and those get divvied up and Abram takes nothing. He won’t let anybody claim that they made him rich, it was only God. And then we have up person, like right after that battle a person kind of comes in and his name is Melchizedek. Okay. So, pause for a second. Some of the things that we’re doing in our time going to the Bible this year is to try to look below the surface, not to find hidden Bible codes or secret messages and stuff like that, but because we need to be below the surface at the level of our hearts to allow the Bible to begin to speak to us deeply. And, so, every time one of these little, strange kind of references show up, and it’s happened several times in the book of Genesis so far, where we get a peek into the spiritual realm, most of time we just kinda move past, go like, “that’s weird. That’s something. That’s something spiritual but it’s weird. I don’t understand it.” And we just kinda move on trying to find the things that would apply to our lives today, which is okay. But since we’re realizing that as we follow Jesus and as we look at Jesus in the Gospels we’re looking at a whole person who is their Spirit and their soul and their body integrated and they’re working through the world and realizing that we are spiritual beings and there is a spiritual realm. I guess we should look at that when it peaks up. So, Melchizedek shows up. This strange figure who is the first named priest of the most-high God. I’m gonna go into all kinds of things about Melchizedek right now because he will show back up for us later when we…when we wind our way into the book of Hebrews, but to connect it to the story that we’re in in Genesis, Melchizedek blesses Abram. And this incident that we witnessed at the Tower of Babel a couple of days ago where the…the earth’s languages were confused and people went off into their language groups, that actually has significance because we’re moving one story to the next, to the next, to the next and it can seem like, “well, maybe that was a thousand years, or maybe…who knows how long that was” but there does seem to be a cohesive story being told underneath it all. And we are most definitely watching apparent spiritual beings communicating and being seen on the earth by humans. We see that in today’s reading alone. So, we see that a flood happened on the earth because everyone on the earth had only evil in their hearts and the Bible talks about them essentially kind of a devolving into animals, which I guess is a really decent way of describing what happens to us when we are separated from God. And, so the flood goes away, but the evil in the hearts of people is still there. And then we move right into God calling Abram who has today become Abraham and has today entered into covenant with God and the outward representation of that covenant is circumcision. This idea of circumcision is gonna carry us because it’s from a Hebrew perspective through the rest of the Bible, but now God’s saying, “okay. There is a mark, a very intimate mark, one that will be observed in the most private and intimate times of life, and for that matter, one that will constantly be a reminder of the covenant and who you belong to, and who you are submitted to.” And what God is doing with all of the language of Abram whose name is turned to Abraham is to tell him, “a new people will be raised up and they will be my people. There are lots of people that are in absolute rebellion and disobedience. These people I’m raising up through you, Abraham, my covenant partner to be my people.” And that’s gonna become more and more important as we go on and that is actually gonna cause problems that need to be worked out when we get into the letters of the New Testament’s early church era. Okay, so we know Hagar, you know, Sarai gave Hagar to Abram. And, of course, Abram agreed. And, so, a child was born. His name was Ishmael. And we read of the tension that happened between Sarai and Hagar and that’s pretty understandable, but Hagar was mistreated to the point that she ran away and she had an encounter with a spiritual being upon the earth that she could see, the angel of the Lord. And often among biblical scholars, the angel of the Lord means the Lord. This is like a physical visible representation, but God. So anyway, after they have this conversation, she says something really, really profound. It's…it’s fairly famous, but it’s pretty profound, “you are, the God who sees me. I have now seen the one who sees me.” This is actually quite beautiful, because we will remember back in Genesis chapter 3, that as soon and Adam and he realized the separateness from God that rebellion had made them aware of this and even caused this, that they realized they could be seen, and they hid. And that has really been a fundamental reality of a fallen mankind existing until today. We still struggle. We don’t want to be exposed. We don’t even want to be exposed before God. The thing is, people, like when you’re in a relationship with somebody, they only know of you what you’re willing to reveal to them. They can only know of you, what you will let them see. So, if we understand that we understand how much we are hiding and how pretty much nobody really sees us, no one really knows us. And here is Hagar in ultimate distress, a really difficult situation and what we’ll find in the Bible and what we’ll find in our lives is that this is where God dwells a lot of the time, when we…when we have unraveled ourselves to the point that we, in our own strength cannot move forward. So, she’s in distress but she is also saying that she is seen. And if we could all just understand that the more we are willing to reveal…we could say, “well, God knows everything about me. I don’t…like…He sees it all” but that’s different than opening your heart and revealing it all. We can be seen. We can be seen by one another. We can be seen by God. It’s all really hinging on how vulnerable we’re willing to be.

And man, I feel like I…I…I should…I could stop there, but there’s more and can’t really skip this because Jesus gave us the Lord’s prayer today. Maybe we even recited it as we were reading it. And, so, the Lord’s prayer is certainly very, very famous. But Jesus kinda comments on portions of the Lord’s prayer as soon as He ends the prayer, right? So, like, “forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” This isn’t just debt, like you owe somebody some money. Like this…this is a transgression against you or a transgression that like you are indebted to somebody because you’ve done them wrong and it needs to be made right. So, we get through the Lord’s prayer and then immediately Jesus says, “if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Okay that is certainly a posture of heart. But if we’re looking at what Jesus says and we’re looking below the surface then we begin to realize that the underlying truth is that when you set someone free you are being set free. And when this is the way you live then…then you live in freedom.

Then we get into the Psalms today and we read, “whoever is pregnant with evil”, right? And I mean, let’s just like stop there. “Pregnant with the evil.” How do you get pregnant with evil? So, the language is out of the Bible, pregnant. Pregnant is that you’re incubating something within you that has been put…put their very intimately. “Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment.” We can say a ton of stuff about it, but there is one of those sentences that we can ponder and invite God into as we meditate upon it.

Prayer:

Father there’s…like there’s plenty of other things that we could…we could maybe talk about just from today’s reading alone, but it feels like this is…this is where we’ll land today. And, so we thank You for all the many facets in today alone that…that gives us pause and gives us a chance to reflect, gives us the opportunity to invite Your Holy Spirit, gives us an opportunity to…to just observe ourselves and the past that our lives are on, understanding now that it doesn’t all have to be pure confusion, it doesn’t all have to be a mystery. There is a way. There is a way that leads to life. And as we interact with Your word every day it is revealing that path. And, so, come Holy Spirit and lead us into all truth we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. And there’s always something or another going on around here.

And I’ve been spending the last…well…since we began this year just maybe pointing out a few things here and there that are good to know about. And, so, today I’ll tell you about the transcriptions. So, like, if, you know, you’re listening and you’re driving or whatever, and something sticks out, something you want to remember, whatever. Every day, everything that…that we’re saying here gets transcribed by a team of very dedicated volunteers that…ahhh…well…it wouldn’t exist without their labor of love and it is seen, and it is valued by many, myself included. And, so, you can access those by going to the community section at dailyaudiobible.com and then clicking the Social Media tab which brings up all the links to all the different social media channels that we interact on. And one of those links is DAB transcripts and that will take you where you want to go. So, that’s a great resource to know about.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible in the mission that we share that is to bring the spoken word of God to anybody who will listen anywhere on this planet any time of day or night, and to build community around that rhythm so that no one has to feel alone in this journey, if that is life-giving to you then thank you for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request a comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial or you can just press the Hotline button. That is the little round red button at the top of the app and just start sharing from there.

And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Genesis 16:1-18:15, Matthew 6:1-24, Psalms 7:1-17, Proverbs 2:1-5

Today is the 7^th day of January, welcome to the daily Bible I’m Brian and it is a joy, every day it is a joy to come around this Global Campfire that…that we all share, where the fire is burning and no matter what time of day or night it is we can kinda come…come out of the cold, come out of the heat even and just come to this place, this space that overtime just kinda becomes an oasis. It’s like this one space, this once period of time a day that we kinda step out of all of the chaos that’s swirling around and just simply allow God’s word to wash over us and then we go back out into it. It’ll still be there, but we may go back out into it with some perspective and some transformation in our lives, And, so it’s a beautiful thing to be here with you today for the next step forward. And we have been reading from the New International Version this week. And we have, in the book of Genesis, been reading about this guy named Abram who has entered into a covenant with God and God has given him a promise for lots…like an innumerable amount of offspring, but he doesn’t have any kids at all. And he has followed this God into a land that is not his homeland, a land that God has said will become his ancestral homeland, but that hasn’t happened either and God has just told him yesterday that it’s gonna be like for centuries of mistreatment before that stuff starts to happen. And all of a sudden, we see, “oh… the stories in the Bible are full of ups…ups and downs just like my life is. There’s no straight line to anywhere. It goes through all of the issues of life” and where we arrive is how we respond to those things. And, so, we continue with that journey. Today we’ll read Genesis chapter 16 verse 1 through 18 verse 15.

Commentary:

Alright. There are a few things we should touch base on in our reading today. I’m trying to think of the fastest way to go about this. So, let’s go into Genesis. And we read within the last couple of days of Lot and Abram separating. Like, they’re close relatives, but their…their households have grown too big to sustain them in one place. So, they go in separate directions and subsequently Lot is captured in sort of a nine-king battle and Abram goes and reclaims Lot and retakes all of the things that have been stolen and those get divvied up and Abram takes nothing. He won’t let anybody claim that they made him rich, it was only God. And then we have up person, like right after that battle a person kind of comes in and his name is Melchizedek. Okay. So, pause for a second. Some of the things that we’re doing in our time going to the Bible this year is to try to look below the surface, not to find hidden Bible codes or secret messages and stuff like that, but because we need to be below the surface at the level of our hearts to allow the Bible to begin to speak to us deeply. And, so, every time one of these little, strange kind of references show up, and it’s happened several times in the book of Genesis so far, where we get a peek into the spiritual realm, most of time we just kinda move past, go like, “that’s weird. That’s something. That’s something spiritual but it’s weird. I don’t understand it.” And we just kinda move on trying to find the things that would apply to our lives today, which is okay. But since we’re realizing that as we follow Jesus and as we look at Jesus in the Gospels we’re looking at a whole person who is their Spirit and their soul and their body integrated and they’re working through the world and realizing that we are spiritual beings and there is a spiritual realm. I guess we should look at that when it peaks up. So, Melchizedek shows up. This strange figure who is the first named priest of the most-high God. I’m gonna go into all kinds of things about Melchizedek right now because he will show back up for us later when we…when we wind our way into the book of Hebrews, but to connect it to the story that we’re in in Genesis, Melchizedek blesses Abram. And this incident that we witnessed at the Tower of Babel a couple of days ago where the…the earth’s languages were confused and people went off into their language groups, that actually has significance because we’re moving one story to the next, to the next, to the next and it can seem like, “well, maybe that was a thousand years, or maybe…who knows how long that was” but there does seem to be a cohesive story being told underneath it all. And we are most definitely watching apparent spiritual beings communicating and being seen on the earth by humans. We see that in today’s reading alone. So, we see that a flood happened on the earth because everyone on the earth had only evil in their hearts and the Bible talks about them essentially kind of a devolving into animals, which I guess is a really decent way of describing what happens to us when we are separated from God. And, so the flood goes away, but the evil in the hearts of people is still there. And then we move right into God calling Abram who has today become Abraham and has today entered into covenant with God and the outward representation of that covenant is circumcision. This idea of circumcision is gonna carry us because it’s from a Hebrew perspective through the rest of the Bible, but now God’s saying, “okay. There is a mark, a very intimate mark, one that will be observed in the most private and intimate times of life, and for that matter, one that will constantly be a reminder of the covenant and who you belong to, and who you are submitted to.” And what God is doing with all of the language of Abram whose name is turned to Abraham is to tell him, “a new people will be raised up and they will be my people. There are lots of people that are in absolute rebellion and disobedience. These people I’m raising up through you, Abraham, my covenant partner to be my people.” And that’s gonna become more and more important as we go on and that is actually gonna cause problems that need to be worked out when we get into the letters of the New Testament’s early church era. Okay, so we know Hagar, you know, Sarai gave Hagar to Abram. And, of course, Abram agreed. And, so, a child was born. His name was Ishmael. And we read of the tension that happened between Sarai and Hagar and that’s pretty understandable, but Hagar was mistreated to the point that she ran away and she had an encounter with a spiritual being upon the earth that she could see, the angel of the Lord. And often among biblical scholars, the angel of the Lord means the Lord. This is like a physical visible representation, but God. So anyway, after they have this conversation, she says something really, really profound. It's…it’s fairly famous, but it’s pretty profound, “you are, the God who sees me. I have now seen the one who sees me.” This is actually quite beautiful, because we will remember back in Genesis chapter 3, that as soon and Adam and he realized the separateness from God that rebellion had made them aware of this and even caused this, that they realized they could be seen, and they hid. And that has really been a fundamental reality of a fallen mankind existing until today. We still struggle. We don’t want to be exposed. We don’t even want to be exposed before God. The thing is, people, like when you’re in a relationship with somebody, they only know of you what you’re willing to reveal to them. They can only know of you, what you will let them see. So, if we understand that we understand how much we are hiding and how pretty much nobody really sees us, no one really knows us. And here is Hagar in ultimate distress, a really difficult situation and what we’ll find in the Bible and what we’ll find in our lives is that this is where God dwells a lot of the time, when we…when we have unraveled ourselves to the point that we, in our own strength cannot move forward. So, she’s in distress but she is also saying that she is seen. And if we could all just understand that the more we are willing to reveal…we could say, “well, God knows everything about me. I don’t…like…He sees it all” but that’s different than opening your heart and revealing it all. We can be seen. We can be seen by one another. We can be seen by God. It’s all really hinging on how vulnerable we’re willing to be.

And man, I feel like I…I…I should…I could stop there, but there’s more and can’t really skip this because Jesus gave us the Lord’s prayer today. Maybe we even recited it as we were reading it. And, so, the Lord’s prayer is certainly very, very famous. But Jesus kinda comments on portions of the Lord’s prayer as soon as He ends the prayer, right? So, like, “forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” This isn’t just debt, like you owe somebody some money. Like this…this is a transgression against you or a transgression that like you are indebted to somebody because you’ve done them wrong and it needs to be made right. So, we get through the Lord’s prayer and then immediately Jesus says, “if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Okay that is certainly a posture of heart. But if we’re looking at what Jesus says and we’re looking below the surface then we begin to realize that the underlying truth is that when you set someone free you are being set free. And when this is the way you live then…then you live in freedom.

Then we get into the Psalms today and we read, “whoever is pregnant with evil”, right? And I mean, let’s just like stop there. “Pregnant with the evil.” How do you get pregnant with evil? So, the language is out of the Bible, pregnant. Pregnant is that you’re incubating something within you that has been put…put their very intimately. “Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment.” We can say a ton of stuff about it, but there is one of those sentences that we can ponder and invite God into as we meditate upon it.

Prayer:

Father there’s…like there’s plenty of other things that we could…we could maybe talk about just from today’s reading alone, but it feels like this is…this is where we’ll land today. And, so we thank You for all the many facets in today alone that…that gives us pause and gives us a chance to reflect, gives us the opportunity to invite Your Holy Spirit, gives us an opportunity to…to just observe ourselves and the past that our lives are on, understanding now that it doesn’t all have to be pure confusion, it doesn’t all have to be a mystery. There is a way. There is a way that leads to life. And as we interact with Your word every day it is revealing that path. And, so, come Holy Spirit and lead us into all truth we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. And there’s always something or another going on around here.

And I’ve been spending the last…well…since we began this year just maybe pointing out a few things here and there that are good to know about. And, so, today I’ll tell you about the transcriptions. So, like, if, you know, you’re listening and you’re driving or whatever, and something sticks out, something you want to remember, whatever. Every day, everything that…that we’re saying here gets transcribed by a team of very dedicated volunteers that…ahhh…well…it wouldn’t exist without their labor of love and it is seen, and it is valued by many, myself included. And, so, you can access those by going to the community section at dailyaudiobible.com and then clicking the Social Media tab which brings up all the links to all the different social media channels that we interact on. And one of those links is DAB transcripts and that will take you where you want to go. So, that’s a great resource to know about.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible in the mission that we share that is to bring the spoken word of God to anybody who will listen anywhere on this planet any time of day or night, and to build community around that rhythm so that no one has to feel alone in this journey, if that is life-giving to you then thank you for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request a comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial or you can just press the Hotline button. That is the little round red button at the top of the app and just start sharing from there.

And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Genesis 13:5-15:21, Matthew 5:27-48, Psalms 6:1-10, Proverbs 1:29-33

Today is the 6^th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it’s great to be here with you today. This is the first Monday we are experiencing in this new decade and I’m glad to be here to share it with you. This will be our first full week together as we journey into this new year and into the Scriptures. So, kind of a set sail and we’re kind of getting our bearings, moving in and by the time…by the time we complete this week we should have established a rhythm that will carry us through this year and I’m excited about that. I’m excited about the journey that we’re on. I’m excited about all we’re gonna see and the way the Bible is going to show up and give us what we need each day. So, let’s get to that, let’s get into this first full work week of the new year. We’ll read from the New International Version, which is what we began yesterday. And today, Genesis chapter 13 verse five through 15 verse 21.

Commentary:

Alright. So, in the Gospel of Matthew we’re working our way through what is known as Jesus Sermon on the Mount, which really is the…a foundational piece of the teachings of Jesus. And, so, we kind of talked about the Beatitudes a little bit yesterday because we were moving through them and we…we noticed that it’s almost like Jesus is describing up an opposite way of living in the world that we live in, right? So, we were saying like, “how can…how is it that blessed are the poor in spirit? How are the poor in spirit blessed?” Like, it’s almost like the opposite of what we would think. And we talked about the disruption of…of pure wisdom kind of flowing into our lives in the way that often happens in disruptive ways that we have to stop and think through, like meditate upon, consider, contemplate, deeply allow things to move past only our minds comprehension and allow our heart to be a part of that conversation. And we will notice this in pretty much all of the teachings of Jesus. And, so, we’re continuing the Sermon on the Mount today and it’s like, “okay. Jesus is saying some pretty interesting difficult things to read about adultery and divorce and oaths an eye for an eye and the posture that we should have about that and the way that we should…the way that we should love our enemies.” So, like there is plenty of disruption to go around, but a lot of that tension arises in our, like, five physical sense-based experience of life. So, it’s like, “okay. Wow! I thought Jesus was coming to bring me freedom, but now I’m reading what He’s saying and it’s just like more rules. Who can live up to this standard?” We must realize that Jesus is also waking up our hearts. I mean here’s an interesting truth for us to consider. I mean we know we have a body. We can look in the mirror and see that we have a body. And we know that that body moves around and has a being some way. Like, if we want to move our finger, we move our finger. And…like…like just move your finger for a second. Like, that just kinda happens, right? Like you’re not thinking, “okay, I need to engage my mind and I need to fire off certain synapses that will…will travel toward my finger and it will move.” Like, it just happens. So, somewhere within you is the will for your finger to move and then…and then your mind and body collaborate in this seamlessly and you never really think about the distinction between your mind and your body. And we know that we are made up of a body and we know that we have a mind and we also know that we have sort of the deep core truth of who we are called our heart, our identity and yet functionally, we…we sort of live as if those components are all…like they don’t necessarily work together, they’re just compartments. Like, we can be in the compartment of our mind thinking or we can be in the compartment of our body eating or working out or whatever, we can be in the compartment of our…our heart and feel. But what if all of those – body, soul, and spirit - what if they are all made to be in harmony with one another making a complete and comprehensive whole person? And what if we began to realize as a whole person, we become aware that we are irreversibly interconnected with every other person because this is what Jesus prayed for. This is what Jesus prayed for, “make them one as we are one” is what Jesus said. So, you can be like, “this is kind of interesting. I’m just not sure what it has to do with the Sermon on the Mount.” It’s really interesting that the Sermon on the Mount reads quite differently if you’re looking through that perspective, a perspective of union and unity and wholeness. Let’s understand that when we…when we observe Jesus in the Gospels and when we hear his words flowing out of the Gospels, we are certainly seeing God made flesh and dwelling among us, but we are also seeing humanity in a perfect state, right? Remember that little glimpse that we got when we began this journey in the very first pages of Genesis? That kind of wholeness and perfection contained within one human being hadn’t existed upon the earth until Jesus arrived. And, so, a lot of what we see in Jesus, even things that we might find confusing or that we’re not quite understanding, we’re seeing depicted for us what wholeness in a broken world even might look like. And I think…I think we would all agree that Jesus operated in a way that was misunderstood by many but was also out of sync with the world he was in in the same way that it’s out of sync with the world we are in. If your heart and your mind and your body are submitted to Christ and, as Paul said, “it’s no longer you live, it’s Christ’s in you” the hope of glory and the hope of us living whole and complete then we can understand that adultery shatters everybody that it touches, right? You can participate in adultery with your body and be seeking bodily pleasure or excitement or…or to ease your mind from of the difficulties of working through a very difficult relationship, like, but you can’t do it whole any more than you can love your neighbor and hate your enemy whole. So, we can be frustrated about, you know, new categories of rules and behaviors that we have to modify to try live up to the standard of Jesus or we could understand Jesus is showing as what our lives could look like if we would embrace wholeness in Him. And we will not be able to do that by just attempting to try get our mind and bodies to cooperate or try to integrate our hearts and allow us to kind of feel and process and be where we are, wherever we are, whenever we are. We will not be able to do this without the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives and the voice of wisdom’s counsel. And the further that we get into the Gospels and the more that we look at Jesus, and when I say look at Jesus, I mean, like, really. Like, we can go through the Bible stories again, like we go through the Sunday school stories again. We can smile and go, “I haven’t heard that story in a long time. I really love that story” or we can really look at this Jesus. We can really, really look at what He’s saying and what He’s doing and…and how He’s behaving and how He’s navigating life on earth. And if He is our Savior, the Son of the living God most-high, which I believe He is, and if we are to be imitators of Christ then we need to look really closely at what He’s doing and…and understand that we will not be able to understand without our hearts and our minds and our bodies in collaboration with each other, with the goal of being Christlike and whole. And we will need voice of wisdom to do that.

And, so, like even in our reading from Proverbs today, the voice…like the voice of wisdom actually sums up everything we were just talking about. The voice of wisdom today in the book of Proverbs said, “since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord, since they would not accept my advice”, “my” being wisdom, “since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. Sounds ominous, but all that’s said…that’s being said here is, “okay you want to go that way. That’s fine. You will reap what you sow. But you…but you could sow other things that would actually lead you to life.” Wisdom goes on to say, “the waywardness of the sinful will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. But whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease without fear of harm.”

Prayer:

Father, once again we’re inviting Holy Spirit, that we might hear the voice of wisdom and see wisdom in action all around us, see You moving in and among us, transforming us, making us whole. And we pray Father that we will recognize this and that we will open our hearts, that we will open ourselves to Your work within us, as difficult as it may be. Come Holy Spirit we pray. We have been told there is a narrow path that leads to life and we ask that You lead us on that path. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, and its where you find out what’s going on around here. And we’ve been spending the last few…few days getting into this New Year’s talking about different things that are going on and how to get connected, how to stay connected, how to just move through the year in this rhythm that we have, that we’re in together.

So, I’ve talked about the website and maybe you’ve kind of glanced around there and see what’s going on. I’ll mention the Daily Audio Bible Shop is at dailyaudiobible.com and in the Daily Audio Bible Shop are a number of resources that are specific to the journey that we’re on together. These have all been created to either directly affect the journey that were on or just to create a sense of community and that…that we’re in this together because that becomes important. A lot of things happen in a year. We can look back over year and go like, “wow, that flew by”, but a lot of things happen in a year and we face highs and lows that can be extreme and unexpected and it’s so good to know that we are rooted in the Scriptures and that we aren’t alone. And, so, there are a number of resources that are aimed at in the Daily Audio Bible Shop. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There’s a link on the homepage and I thank you with all of my heart for your partnership. We’re just getting ourselves launched into year 15 and this has been a community project from the get-go. Daily Audio Bible just kind of rose up out of the dust of the Internet and here we are. And it’s just…we’ve figured it out as we’ve gone, and we’ve been in this together and we wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t do this together. So, thank you for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Given button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment you can just hit the Hotline button. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, that’s 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.

Genesis 11:1-13:4, Matthew 5:1-26, Psalms 5:1-12, Proverbs 1:24-28

Today is the 5^th day of January welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is wonderful to be here with you and this is the first time we get to do this, we get to turn the knob as it were and swing open the door and step through the threshold into a brand-new week and this would be our first full week of this new decade. So, I am excited to share it with you as we move forward on our journey that we have begun moving through the Bible this year and this week we will read from the New International Version, brings up another little thing to explain. You’ll notice when we began the year and worked through last week we were reading from the New Living Translation and now we’re reading the New International Version, next week we’ll be reading another translation, and the week after that another one, and we do this, working our way through the year for a number of reasons, but the primary reason is…is this, we may not ever think about this or we may know this, but not really think it matters that much, but the Bible’s native tongue isn’t English. It’s Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. So, every single one of the words of the manuscripts that the Bible has been translated from are a different language than English. And, so, every word has to be poured over or translated or brought into the language for which its intended. Not necessarily an overwhelmingly big deal unless you are creating theological formulas and doctrines that…that affect the human soul and its eternal life, like it becomes more of a big deal. And it’s kind of at this time that some people raise their hands and I go, “I just stick to the good old tried-and-true King James. That’s the real one. That’s the inspired word of God.” But it’s actually it’s actually a translation into English, like all other translations into English. And…and I’ve sat…I’ve been able to observe biblical interpretation and translation in my…been able to watch teams of scholars around the table discussing the kinds of things like verb tense and obscure Hebrew words that have fallen out of use and what do they mean. And that’s just scratching the surface. I mean, there’s a number of ways to do this kind of interpretation. So, you could go like, “well why don’t you just look at one word in Hebrew, and then say what is that word and English? How do you say that word in English and then just put that down and then go to the next word? And there are translations that do that, that seek to do that, and we read from them. There also biblical translation teams that…well…basically every biblical translation team would acknowledge that oftentimes one word means more than one thing, depending on its context. And, so, if you try to port a word for word translation you can see this word and know that it has five or ten equivalents in another language, depending sort of on the nuance of the context and so then you get into interpretation, “what is this trying to say? What does this mean?” And, so, often biblical translation teams will then look at a complete thought. “Like what does the sentence mean? What is the point here?” Because word for word when you read it back in English doesn’t convey the depth of the meaning and maybe even obscures it. And, so, then teams of linguists and historians looking at the context of the time that a particular passage might have been written try and get into the minds of the original hearers will then looking and go, “what is the complete thought? Like, how would what’s being said here in Hebrew or Greek, how would that complete thought be said in English in a compelling way that would carry the same weight that it does in its native language?” And, so, there are translations that seek to work from this perspective and there are all kinds of hybrids in between. And, so, allowing ourselves to receive thousands and thousands and thousands, probably tens and tens of thousands of scholarship hours for us to be able to rotate and appreciate and receive all of that as we continue the rhythm of the year is the goal so that being English speakers we get the most comprehensive view of the word of God that we can…that we can short of learning all of the biblical languages and then, not only just understanding how, maybe for example, to read Greek but all the slang and all of the cultural reference…like all of the stuff that you would have to immerse yourself in. We have this scholarship, and this is why we rotate through so that we can appreciate this. And, so, this week we will be reading from the New International Version. And let’s get to it. Let’s get back into the book of Genesis. Today we will read chapters 11…well chapter 11 verse 1 through 13 verse 4.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we have already…we have already done some talking about some things, so I don’t want to spend a bunch of time because we’ll have plenty of opportunity. I just want to point out a couple of things, three things in particular that we have begun talking about. Alright. So, let’s begin with what we what we were reading in Matthew today, the Sermon on the Mount and in particular the Beatitudes. And. they’re very, very famous, this is Jesus central core teaching. And it’s interesting to read it as His core teaching because it’s like everything that He talks about we don’t quite understand exactly how that could be. It’s like He’s saying bad things are good things, right? “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Just…I mean…that…that one is…that one beatitude, that’s disruptive because that seems out of sync with the world that we live in. “Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek”, right? So, what is Jesus telling us here? Like are we supposed to be week, feeble, cast down human beings with our shoulders slumped and our heads facing the ground as we move about the earth? It’s disruptive and it forces us, if we want…I mean…we can blow by all of this, but if we are seeking what the Bible says and trying to understand what’s going on in the Bible then we have slow down and go, “Okay. That does not look like the world I live in. The advice that I’m being given is to live almost backward to the world I’m living in.” And that is the point. So, we talked about Proverbs. We talked about wisdom. And listen, I believe Jesus is the son of God. He is my Savior, right? So, like, there’s no problem there but let's…let’s like step aside from that understanding and just look at Jesus appearing on the scene in the first century. Like, he just starts calling people together as a rabbi and starts teaching. And we could say that the reason that the people flocked to Jesus was because He was a miracle worker and that would be true, that would be part of it. We could also say that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, like He spoke of the end of things, He spoke of the kingdom of God, He spoke of an ultimate reality. So, people would’ve also understood Him that way. But Jesus also used a specific teaching style. We know them as stories or parables. We look often at the words of Jesus, and it seems as if He may not be answering what He’s being asked or He may not be talking about what it seems like He should be talking about and this is also because Jesus was known as a wisdom teacher. And, so, when you see a story or something that’s disruptive and you have to stop for a second and go, “what are we talking about here?” “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven?” We have to stop and go, “Okay. How does that work? What are we talking about?” It’s disruptive because the ways of wisdom are disruptive. You have to be shaken awake, right? You’ve got to see something clearly all of the sudden and then it comes to you clearly. This is the way, walk in it, right? But if we look at our lives, we see that…that like that rarely happens when everything is perfect. Like when things are super great and we’re sort of like sailing with the wind at our back downhill, like everything is moving in the right direction. It’s wonderful to enjoy those times, but wisdom usually comes in disruption and we will find that this theme and these ideas, they are everywhere, everywhere in the Bible. We will not be able to turn a page when we start reading the apostle Paul, without coming face-to-face with these themes of enduring and looking deeper, like not just looking at what we can see but understanding that there is a vast reality beyond it and we are being transformed and that…that Jesus says this, Paul says this, Peter says this, John says this, James says this. Like, disruption is actually part of it. Like, being shaken awake from our slumber is part of the journey. So, as like we are just getting going, we are just in the first pages of the first gospel, so we’ve got a lots of time before we go through Mark and Luke and John to look for this, to begin settling in and looking for this when we listen to the words of Jesus.

Okay, then the book of Genesis we have another of these weird like stories that… “where did this story come from? And why is it situated here? And it’s just a really short story and then we just kind of move on. And what’s happening here?” And that is a very famous Sunday school story, the tower of Babel. So, we member a couple days ago we were talking about the sons of God and the daughters of Eve and just, you know, just exploring some of the different ways that that has been talked about or viewed or understood and this tower of Babel story is kind of a weird one like that. So, here’s these people and they’re…they’re moving and they’re coalescing together, they decide to build a city and they decide to build a tower. And this is going to stabilize them, and they all speak the same voice there and they’re all on the same page. And God comes and He’s like, “yeah. this is not a good idea because if they stay here and they’re allowed to do this, then, you know, they’ll be able to do anything. Nothing…nothing will be impossible.” So, He confuses the language and then people have to disperse into their language groups from there. So, we could say, “well, you know, the point of the story here is that this is where the languages on the earth came from, but many theologians would say, “no. this is tied to the sons of God and the daughters of Eve…like these…and the Giants. Like this is…there’s like this other kind of story happening before us. And, so,…so the thought here would be that the people come together at Babel and decide to exalt themselves because they are…are fully…they…they have fully inherited the knowledge of good and evil, the…the price that was paid for eating the fruit, and disobeying God and that awareness that conscious shift or whatever we want to call it, the Bible because it their eyes being opened, made them realize they were naked and separate from God. So, all of a sudden this is…and this is really interesting because we know this in child development, right? So, there is a certain period of time where a child doesn’t have an awareness of themselves as a separate thing, as a separate being from their parent. And that grows and then we cultivate and then we work really, really hard to get our children to be individuals. And when out back out to the garden in Eden, we see man and woman and God, and they have no awareness of a separation. They have one understanding of their reality and it is them and God together and then eat this fruit and they become aware of all lot of things that make them sense a separation. They are…they are…I need to be careful how to say this, that they are the same as their parent, that they are separate. And, so, it’s traumatic for them. And, so, we zoom forward all the way here to the Tower of Babel and see the repercussions that have happened since that event. We’ve read these repercussions and we’ve moved through a terrible flood on the earth. We’ve seen these repercussions. So, the people are exalting themselves and fully embracing their otherness, their separation and God’s like, “no. No. This isn’t going anywhere.” And, so, many theologians would say, “okay. You got…you got the lower gods or lower Elohim, you have the spiritual family of God, and they interact in different ways with the human family on earth and we see those types of interactions happening repeatedly throughout the Scriptures. But Gods not going to cooperate with His fallen spiritual family and His fallen human family attempting to exalt themselves. And this will not be the first time we see this kind of thing. God does not put up with that for very long, ever. And, so, one way of theologically looking at this is a disinheritance. God confuses the languages of the people and spreads the people out so they cannot be successful in sort of like deifying themselves. And, so, an end is put to that. When people begin to coalesce around their language. Then, immediately…immediately after that story we introduced to Abram. So, it’s like not out of place. This story happens, the people are spread out. Immediately we get interest to Abram who will become Abraham who will affect the entire rest of the Bible. So, God sends the people across the earth and then we get introduced to Abraham and it is through Abraham that God is going to do a new thing upon the earth and we’ll be watching that story and its challenges and victories for the rest of the year.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You. We thank You for the richness of Your word and we thank You for the opportunity to explore and to be disrupted and we ask Holy Spirit that You would come among us and help us to get comfortable with the idea of being disrupted or interrupted because we need to get used to this idea because this is one of the primary ways that Your word works within us. It challenges us, invites us to think, but it also invites us to tune into the ears of our hearts and understand that it’s much deeper than what are five physical senses can become aware of. There is a lot more going on than we ever perceive. And, so, we invite You Holy Spirit into this week into everything that we’re going to do, all the choices that we’re going to make, all the words that we’re going to speak. May they be good. May they be honoring to You. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, and its where you find what’s going on around here, so be sure to stay tuned and stay connected in any way that you can and in any way that you will.

I will mention at dailyaudiobible.com in the Community section you will find links to all the different social media channels that the Daily Audio Bible level is on. And that is a great place to get connected.

I means, some of the pages, you know, you’ll want to follow because if we, you know, send out an alert, “there’s a problem with this or here’s what’s going on or whatever” then you’ll be able to be alerted. Others are groups, You can just interact with other brothers and sisters who are working their way through the Bible, like the Daily Audio Bible women’s page that my wife champions. If you are a woman then…then it is her mission to encourage you and you find tremendous encouragement by staying plugged in to the women’s group there. Then there’s DAB Friends, which is kind our loving free-for-all where conversation is continually happening. So, check out those links in the Community section at dailyaudiobible.com and stay connected.

Another thing about social etc. is like, once in a while, you know we read the Scriptures and talk about them, but there are times when it’s like our hearts…the Scriptures have opened our hearts and the only way to really respond is in song or just to drive the point home it would take me, you know, 20 minutes and a bunch of words or it could be just this one song that moves beyond our intellect and just starts to speak truth into our hearts. And, so, we do that from time to time. And invariably, you know, we get asked, “who was that?” We post all that is to our social media channels so just if you’re following that you’ll always kind of know how that all works when it happens. So, there’s today’s tip.

And if you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link that lives on the homepage and I thank you with all of my heart for your partnership. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address, if that is your preference is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment you can now press the Hotline button, the little red button in the app at the top and just start talking 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

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hello Daily audio Bible family this is Stephanie from Bangalore and I just wanted to call in. Its Friday, December 27^th and I thank you all for praying, those of you who have been praying for me and my in-laws. This was my first Christmas, of course, as being married and my first Christmas away from my parent’s household as far as going there and celebrating and it really was in a lot of ways better than I could’ve ever imagined which is really, really great. So, thank you for praying and we were able to have a couple of my in-laws over for the afternoon and evening and that was actually just a really good time. So, praise God, thank you for praying. Please keep praying that I can build relationships there. And, of course, there’s always the next thing, always the next thing, always the next prayer request but thank you for that. Quick update on the little girl who got the kidney transplant. For the first time in 15 months she was able to go to bed the other night. She came home Christmas Day and she was able to go to sleep without any tubes at all. No catheter for dialysis, nothing. So, please just, you know, keep her in your prayers, keep the donor in your prayers as she is recovering from the surgery as well. But praise God for that. Thank you so much family and I am sure I’ll be calling back soon. Five.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family this is Rhula from the Sidney Australia. I was just listening to 27^th December reading and prayers at the end of the reading. Anonymous called and she said something that really prompted me to call immediately. Anonymous, I’m just praying for you right now because that feeling that you feel where you’re in despair and you don’t know why you’re in a relationship with God because why, like you said,  He’s always good and you’re not good and He’s always right and you’re wrong…you’re always wrong. Anonymous this is exactly why…why we need Him, because we can rest in his goodness and we can rest in his…in the comfort of knowing that the Lord Almighty who’s always right and who’s always…always knows everything, that He loves us unconditionally as we are. So, come to Him as you are anonymous, come to Him as you are because that is who He loves, you with all your flaws and all your mistakes and all your errors and everything that you feel like you’re just not good enough. Our Lord loves you as you are and that is the most profound and most amazing love that you could ever experience in the world, where it’s…He doesn’t judge us and He doesn’t condemn us and He’s a forgiver and He’s merciful and He’s grace and He’s good and his goodness will last forever and He will work all things for good because He loves us and He calls all things according to his purpose. So just remember that Anonymous. And remember that it’s not about you being as good as God. We will never be as good as God no matter what we do. He is enough, his love for us is enough and that’s what we need to know. And I just pray for you Anonymous. I pray that you get that strength for…from God…

Hi this is Marylin calling from the inland Northwest. This is my second call. I just started listening in October, somewhere around there. I do have an answer to prayer and that I asked prayer for my son who is in isolation in the psych ward, the hospital, he’s had a severe frontal brain injury back in 2002 and also mental illness. He is now out of isolation and actually they are wanting to release him, and he is very demanding and doesn’t listen, thinks he’s the medical professional and is going to be released. The problem is that I need prayer that he would be willing to…willing and understand that if he keeps doing the same old same old is insanity. He needs to be in a group home or something. He’s on very heavy-duty psych meds and he probably should be in a group home or some situation where somebody can be taking care of him and he can be monitored, and he can be also out of a very moldy sick apartment. So, I really appreciate it. I really appreciate everybody’s honesty on this podcast. I am so thankful for this program for everybody’s honesty and the vulnerability of everybody and I do pray for others as well and am so thankful I know I’m not alone being in a family with mental illness. So, thank you so much for your prayers and I am praying for everyone else that calls in. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Bye.

Good morning this is Sally from Massachusetts and I’m calling for anonymous. Today is Friday, December 27^th and I heard your call this morning. You were thinking about how you could meet Jesus if you pulled your car in front of the 18-wheeler. And I know what you’re saying when you say you feel like you’re very far from God. And when I feel that way, I remember that it’s me that’s turned away. God is still right there. And if you don’t know what to pray, sometimes “help me God” is the best prayer because that lets God know that you want Him to help you and He will help you. He will meet you wherever you are. And I know what you mean about how you don’t feel that you can go to anyone in your church or any of your friends to talk about your feelings. You know, you can call the suicide hotline. I did that myself. I was not suicidal but I just wanted somebody to listen to me cry and I had spent hours on the phone with a treasured friend but I still needed to talk and when I called them they didn’t offer advice or try to fix me the just asked me questions to keep me talking. And, you know, we as people, we want to offer advice, we want to help you and we want to reach out to you. Sometimes, just having someone listen and not judge is fantastic. So, I urge you to give them a call. And, also I’ve started journaling because I can get my thoughts down on paper and there out…

Hello, I’m calling myself “I am a Child of God”. I’m from Central Florida. I’ve listened since 2007 and this is the first time I’ve ever called in. I have two important requests. Sorry. I have two important prayer requests today. I’m praying for my father’s health. He has other issues that are causing him to have kidney problems. Of course, I pray that he be healed and not have surgery at all but if he does have surgery, I pray he is a very quick recovery. I’d like to have help from people that aren’t as stressful. I also pray for his salvation. He’s __ towards God. I pray God brings people into his life that he will listen to and that God talks to him in his sleep, in his dreams. I hope to call back again and get better at this. Thank you for your prayers. God bless you.