Category: DAB Transcripts

Habakkuk 1:1-3:19, Revelations 9:1-21, Psalms 137:1-9, Proverbs 30:10

Today is the 18^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s great to be here with you today. One week, one week from today is Christmas day and we are in the thick of this Advent and Christmas season. And today we will read, at least from our Old Testament reading, we will read the entirety of the book of Habakkuk.

Habakkuk:

And this book is the eighth one, eighth of the minor prophets in the Old Testament. And we don’t know a whole lot about Habakkuk, but Jewish rabbinical tradition would tell us that Habakkuk was the son of the Shunamite woman that Elisha raised from the dead in the book of second Kings. So, we don’t know that, but that is definitely the tradition. And because of the way the narrative is written, many scholars believe that Habakkuk may have been a Temple profit. In most cases, this would mean that he was a prophetic musician, gifted in the instruments of the time, like the liar, the harp, or the cymbals. And some scholars believe that Habakkuk’s lyrical and poetic nature indicates that he was probably a Levite working in the temple as a Temple profit. Habakkuk wonders aloud in this prophetic book what God is doing in his time. Right? So, we often wonder the same things. Habakkuk sees injustice. He sees misfortune around him. And he has what seems to be doubt. He dares question. Something that we frown upon in this day in age for some reason. But he dares question and God dares answer. And, once again, we’re shown in Scripture that don’t know all that we think we know. In fact, we know very little of what is really going on. And Habakkuk presses into that. And we see in this book one of the most beautiful pictures of the story of our lives, a story of doubt and questions that are then transformed into absolute trust in the sovereign Lord. So, we’re reading from the names of God Bible this week. Habakkuk 1:1 through 3:19.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we read from the ninth chapter of Revelation today. So, let’s just remember, we started Revelation with this image of Jesus, seven golden lampstands that represented seven churches, seven letters were written, one to each of these churches, and then a scroll was revealed that no one could open and it had seven seals on it. And the lamb steps forward, and he is the only one, Jesus is the only one that can open the seals. So, he breaks the seals and what is held by those seals is then revealed. Then we have seven angels before the throne of God who are given trumpets and they’re each now blowing their trumpets. And we went to the first four trumpets yesterday. And the fifth and sixth angels blow their trumpets today. And, so, we begin when the fifth angel blew his trumpet, I saw a star that had fallen to earth from the sky and the star was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. Okay, so we have to kind of go back into the different ways that this can be read. So, you read this literally, because we’ve seen a bunch of stuff falling from the sky. And, so, a star falls from the sky and then the star, the rock, this star somehow is given a key and opens up a shaft it’s on earth, but it’s a bottomless pit. And, so, you can see how, like, from a literal perspective, it would be kind of hard for a star to hold a key and turn a key lock. It would be hard to find something bottomless on earth. Like, if you started digging now, right, if it was even possible, we’d go through the center of the earth and out the other side and that would then end up in space on the other side of the world. How could that be bottomless? So, a completely literal reading of the book of Revelation…I mean…would be very challenging. The star falling from the sky, has been interpreted a number of ways, mostly dealing with that the star is actually an angel. But then the question becomes, is this a good angel or is this a bad angel. And it’s been noted by scholars that the star falling from the sky imagery usually refers to a judgment of some kind. And that there is no other reference in the Scriptures to, like, a good, a godly angel falling from the sky, like a star. That only happens when an angel is judged and cast down. So, for example, in the gospel of Luke, Jesus said, I saw Satan fall like a star from the heavens. So, many commentators, not all, but many commentators would say, this has to be the judgment of an angel that is being cast down. This may be Satan himself being cast down to do this task because he is under the sovereignty of God or one of his minions. So, this entity is given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. It opens the bottomless pit, and of course, the bottomless pit is probably a metaphor for the realm of the judged. And when this pit is opened smoke comes out of the shaft like the smoke from a large furnace and the smoke darkens the sun and the air. So, there’s a number of interpretations around this. I mean, so, if you’re reading literally, then its smoke, like there’s a lot of smoke, enough to darken the sun and the air. So, a serious amount of pollution. If we’re from looking a little more allegorically, then darkness is usually the metaphor for like a spiritual darkness, a blindness. And, so, this comes pouring out of the bottomless pit and darkens the world. And immediately following the smoke and the darkness, locusts come flying out of the bottomless pit, out of the smoke, onto the earth and that they’re given power, like that of the scorpion. And they’re not allowed to harm nature, like they cannot harm the grass or green plants or the trees. They can only torment the people. And they can only bring this judgment on those who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. So, obviously from a literal perspective we’re talking about insect like creatures that look like locusts, but have stingers like scorpions, and they plague the earth. If you’re looking allegorically, then, I mean, when you look at something allegorically you can interpret it however you interpret it, which is why this is such diversity and interpretations that are everything from rational to far-fetched, and many in conflict with each other because you don’t know exactly what the symbolism means. But if we’re taking a pragmatic scholarship perspective, trying to draw comparisons with similar visions that happen in other places in the Bible, then these locusts can represent those beings that have been held in the bottomless pit. And a good many scholars would say that that’s associated with the fallen angels, demonic forces that have been held there and they are loosed upon the earth, but they can’t hurt the earth’s nature and they can’t hurt those who have been sealed with the seal of God on their foreheads. And, so, God allows the trumpet blast to happen. This star, this angel falls and is sent down to earth with the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit, it’s opened, and all kinds of things come spilling out on the earth, things that can’t harm those with God’s seal on their foreheads, but those who don’t, they’re definitely receiving judgment. And that judgment will either harden their hearts and lead them toward their ultimate destruction or soften their hearts and they turn to God. And for a lot of scholars this whole picture, this whole scene, reveals that the judgment that was formerly limited to those demonic forces who are in this pit is now extending all across the earthly realm. Because of Christ’s victory through his death and resurrection, judgment has begun. Not only in the bottomless pit, but also upon the earth, and that is happening through the darkness coming out of the pit. People are being blinded in the darkness and tormented and oppressed, but this isn’t happening to those who have been sealed by God. And there is a bit of a parallel here in Jesus words from the Gospel of Luke, ‘I was watching Satan fall from heaven like a lightning. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall harm you. Your names are recorded in heaven.’ So, if this parallel is correct, then those sealed by God, have authority over these things that are coming up out of the abyss. They have authority over them and can’t be harmed by them, which would lead us to believe that this is allegorical. The imagery is symbolic. And then the sixth angel blows his trumpet and the sixth angel was instructed to release the four angels who are held at the great Euphrates River. Some would say these are like dark ark angels. So, like very, very powerful demonic forces. Some draw parallels with the four angels that were from the four corners of the earth and the four winds, but most translators and commentators would say these are evil, they’re being held against their will for a specific time for a specific task and their loosed. And, whereas in the fifth trumpet, everything coming up out of the abyss wasn’t allowed to kill anyone, wasn’t allowed to harm nature, wasn’t allowed to touch anyone with the seal of God on their forehead, and wasn’t allowed to kill anybody. It was just tormenting and oppressing people. Whereas in the sixth trumpet, when these four angels are loosed, they’re loosed, they’re loosed to kill one third of humanity. And John says that the number of those forces were 20,000×10,000. So, that’s 200 million. So, if you’re reading literally, then four actual angels have been being held at the great Euphrates River for a time period that we don’t have any way of knowing, but they’ve been held for a specific hour and day and month and year. And they’re released and there’s 200 million soldiers on horses that are loosed to do this task of killing one third of humanity. If we’re looking at this a little more allegorically, let’s remember, if we’re looking at things allegorically, then everything can have a meaning. So, if we’re looking at this allegorically, but with a pragmatic view, then powerful dark forces are released. They have been held for an indefinite period of time, but held for this time, this time of judgment that were reading about. And there’s a vast horde involved. And they unleashed three plagues: fire, smoke and sulfur. And these come out of their mouth’s. So, allegorically, what’s coming out of their mouths is bringing darkness, blindness, the inability to see clear. The power of these forces is in their mouths and in their tails. So, like, in their words and in their deeds. They are bringing such spiritual darkness and chaos and torment and depression that the result is death, and this affects a third of the earth’s population. Or if we’re not taking that number literally, a lot of people are affected by this darkness and death that spreads because of this. And then as we end our reading for today, with the sixth trumpet there’s kind of an aside, God’s commentary here. The people who survived these plagues still did not turn to me and change the way they were thinking and acting. If they had, they would’ve stopped worshiping demons and idols made of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood, which cannot see, hear, or walk. They did not turn away from committing murder, practicing witchcraft, sinning sexually, or stealing. So, using the formula that the Bible gives us for judgment, that it can have a refining and perfecting and purifying outcome or it can have a hardening outcome that leads a person who rejects it to their own destruction, we can see that, in spite of all that is going on, there are still those who have not died, but who are still rejecting God.

Prayer:

Father, Father, we don’t want any part of that. We don’t want any part of rejecting You. And yet, we confess that we have done exactly that in our thoughts, words and deeds, by what we’ve done and by what we’ve left undone. And, so, we invite Your Holy Spirit to continue to refine and purify us. And we reframe the suffering that we’ve endured in this world. We hate it. We don’t want to go through it. We want You to take it away. These are so much of the content of our prayers. And, although we will continue to ask You for Your counsel on how to navigate through things that are very difficult and unexpected, we choose to also look at what You are doing in these things, that You’ve got us, and these things refine and purify us. And truly, we want to be pure before You, true before You. We want to be sealed in You for all of eternity. Come, Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

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

And, so, it’s Christmas time, obviously. We’re one week away from Christmas. And the Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box for 2017 is still available. Today is the cut off day for arrival for Christmas and that’s if you are in the United States. If you are outside the United States that date is past. Certainly, we can still send them to you. They just won’t arrive for Christmas. Today is kind of the last day inside the United States that we think is safe for arrival for Christmas. And there’s all kinds of goodies in the box, things that you will want for your own life, things you will want to invest in another’s life by giving it as a gift, and you get to choose. So, check out the Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box at dailyaudiobible.com in the Christmas section.

While you’re there, you may want to check out the Lifestyle section. There’s a number of wonderful journaling ideas and bundles in that section that we think are fantastic, just to get ready for next year or for that that person, that journaler, that writer, in your life. So, check that out.

Early registration for the More Gathering is also available. And you can find out all about that moregathering.com.

But most importantly, this is kind of the cutoff date for Christmas arrival for the Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box 2017.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible here in the last days of the year, thank you profoundly for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. 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.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Hi. This is Victoria S. I just wanted to call and say something to my sister Joyce. I wanted to say to her that God knew that you were such a special baby, that even though your mother and dad didn’t see it in you, God saw it in you and stopped them. And God wanted me to tell you, before you get ready to take that test, you do the studying you do, but before you get ready to take that test, to pray about it and let the Holy Ghost bring all things to your remembrance and you __ that test because we need doctors with hearts like yours. And I want to pray for the DABbers that have been going through, those that have been going through in their marriages, those that have been having anxieties and things that the enemies been attacking. And we know why he’s attacking, because we’ve got something. The devil isn’t going to attack us if we don’t have nothing. So, let’s give Him the praise and let God have His way. God wants to show us that He is God and above Him there is no other. Continue, my brothers and sisters, to be strong in the Lord and to look to Him. Don’t let anything between you __. I don’t mind waiting, because remember, when we wait on the Lord He will renew our strength and we shall mount up with wings as eagles. We shall run and not be weary. So, continue to be blessed. I wanted to bless to Brian and Jill, and to little Ezekiel. I wanted to say hi to Blind Tony and Pastor Gene and Viola and all the people of God and my sister in New York, who she’s trying to get her mother. I wanted to say, be strong my sister, it’s alright. You can make it. In Jesus name. Have a blessed day. Bye-bye.

Hey Unis from New Jersey. I’m here to pray for you. Lord God I just lift up Unis, Father, in her diagnosis of cancer. Lord God, I hear her brokenness in her heart and I just pray right now for her to have strength. Lord, I pray that your spirit would come and rest on her in the name of Jesus. And that there would be peace that wraps her heart and that she would have strength unlike any other day, Lord God, so that no second is wasted. Father, that You will put Your hand on her, You will give her just the amount of energy and strength. Father, I pray that You would just make her bold. Father, these days are not here to show her numbers of the end, Lord God, they’re here to give her life right now, and that You intend for her to have life right now, abundantly, right now. So, I just pray that You would strengthen her for this last bit that she has…her leg of the race, I pray for healing over her body. I pray for her to have wisdom and boldness. I pray for her family to stand strong with her Lord God. I pray that You would give wisdom to the doctors overseeing her. And Lord, just give her joy. Pour out Your joy upon her that she will walk in a manner worthy of You, fully pleasing, that everyone she contacts and walks around in these days, her friends, her doctors, her nurses, Lord God, that they will be impacted and changed because Unis from New Jersey relies on You and that she trusts the Lord with all of her heart and with all of her mind and all of her strength. Sister, I’m praying for you. And I know it hurts and I know it’s hard to walk in, but you’re not alone and I love you.

Hi fellow DABbers. It’s Joe the Protector from Georgia. It’s December 13^th I believe, 14^th sorry. And it’s about 8 o’clock in the morning. I just got finished listening to the 14^th podcast and just calling in over a couple of the prayer requests that came through on…in the end. The first one was the lady, not sure where you’re from, I forgot, or your name, but you said you were having twins and there’s some complications going on, and you’re just concerned about that, which is a natural thing to be concerned about. But just remember to keep trusting God and don’t doubt His promises and what He has in store for you and the children. The second one was the lady in New Jersey who has just received word that she’s got stage 4 cancer. And, first of all, I am sorry to hear that, but it sounded like you’re fairly rooted and strong Christian. And just remember to stay grounded, to stay deeply rooted in His word. And just ask His will, just allow His will in your life to reign over you. And the third one was Pelham in Birmingham. Pelham, sorry to hear about the loss of your job or business or…and you know…but Gods got another door to open up for you somewhere. He knows His children that are faithful…

Good morning my DAB family. It’s December 14^th. This is Lawrence, the Yahweh’s Warning Sign on the Narrow Path. I have a special request to Diane Olive B. If you could call in please and pronounce your Shalom, Shalom, nothing is missing nothing is broken. I don’t know why…everything is going my way. Everything going my way right now in my divorce proceedings. And yet, I’m overwhelmingly sad. I don’t know why. So, if you could please, Diane call in. I need to hear you say those words. Thank you.

Hello, this message is for Unis on the Daily Audio Bible of the 14^th off December this year. And Unis, bless you, disclosing your stage 4 cancer. I was very touched by your prayer…or by your prayer request. I’ve never rung in before. I don’t normally do this kind of stuff. And when I hear people opening up I think they’re mad. I felt moved to pray for you Unis. And I’m going to try to pray every day for you. And I recorded a song and I joined a nutter club. I mean that in the nicest way. I really felt the need to sing my prayer to God but I haven’t found a way to be able to share it. So, my name doesn’t matter, it’s not about me. Sister, it’s about you. I’m Walter in a different country. I will be praying for you every day. We are around the campfire. And I pray to, that if it’s God will, you be healed as he did for my son three years ago. Have faith sister. Keep on going and thank you for moving this hard heart to actually do something. Bless you. Bye-bye.

Nahum 1:1-3:19, Revelations 8:1-13, Psalms 136:1-26, Proverbs 30:7-9

Today is the 17^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It’s great to be here with you at the cusp, at the threshold, of a shiny, sparkly new week. And this is a big week. I mean, one week from today is Christmas Eve, which makes today the third Sunday in the season of Advent. And that distant day, that distant beacon, that’s on every calendar, December 25^th, Christmas Day, that we see all year long, that’s been so far off in the distance is upon us now. And we’ll be making final transitions during this week. We’ll touch eight different books of the Bible. And by the time we get to the end of this week we will be settled into the final books of the Old and New Testaments as we press forward to the to the new year. So, let’s jump in. We’re going to read from the Old Testament, the entirety of the book of Nahum.

Nahum:

Nahum is another of the books of minor prophecy, which has nothing to do with significance and more to do with length. And, in some ways, we get a peek into the into the continuation of the story of Jonah. Right? So, Jonah was sent to Nineveh, we don’t have to retell that story. He was sent to Nineveh and they repent. Nahum is another book of prophecy written to the city of Nineveh. So, it’s 150 years later. So, a century and half earlier, God sent Jonah to the city and when he delivered God’s message Nineveh fell on its face and repented and were spared. Now, 150 years later, they’ve returned to their wicked ways and are as bad, if not worse, than they ever were. Nineveh was the capital city of the great Assyrian Empire and its conquests were known to be very brutal. And again, God sends a profit to Nineveh, Nahum, preaching repentance and a return to God. But this time the Ninevites did not listen and the prophecy of judgment came true in 625 BC with the destruction of Nineveh and the fall of the Assyrian Empire. This prophecy shows that God is merciful and patient, but He is not a pushover, and He will not stand for a nation’s sin forever, which should spur us all on to be agents of change in the countries that we live, to be the catalyst for light and for repentance and a return to our God. So, we’ll be reading from the Names of God Bible this week. Nahum chapter 1 verse 1 through 3 verse 19.

Commentary:

Okay. So, in the book of Revelation, you know, we began with seven golden lampstands, and then seven letters to seven churches, and then seven seals that no one but the lamb could open. And he opened six of them and we went through that and then today we get to the seventh seal. And, so as we begin our reading today, when he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And that’s a pretty dramatic scene, to think about silence in heaven for half an hour. And that silence has been contemplated for a long time, as has every other word in this book. Some scholars think that the silence has to do with the fact that  as the seventh seal is broken and opened, there’s no content, there’s nothing to be revealed, and the content of the seventh scroll is contained in the actions that happen next. Some have said that because it’s the seventh seal, there was a pause and God rested, in sort of Sabbath imagery. Some connect the silence to do a suspension of divine revealing or disclosure, or revelation. So, then you’ve got to try figure out how long half an hour in heaven, what that represents to time on earth, which is a tricky thing to do. Some would say it’s just a moment of silence because of what’s coming next. And others would say everyone is just simply struck to complete silence as the complete plan is finally revealed. And that’s just a few thoughts. Either way, there was silence in heaven for a half an hour as the seventh seal is opened. And then seven angels who stand in God’s presence were given seven trumpets. And a lot of times these seven angels are associated with the seven archangels that are found in Jewish apocalyptic literature. For example, we talked about them when we talked about the book of Enoch. So, a lot of interpreters think these are the seven archangels. These the main angels in God’s presence. And then another angel comes with a gold incense burner and stands at the altar, and he has incense to offer before the throne. And, so, he’s offering incense and also at the same time, the prayers of God’s people are being offered. And, so, the smoke from the incense goes up before God, along with the prayers of God’s people to God. And this imagery is ancient. And it’s still being used in the world today. So, depending on what kind of church that you go to, you may experience this every week, but no matter what kind of church you go to, you’ve probably seen it before, where, you know, a church service is starting, priests come in, they’re carrying certain things, like, they’re processing the cross, and maybe they have candles, and somebody has an incense burner and they’re swinging it. Right? And, so, the smoke is flowing out over the people as they process in. That’s what this represents, a pleasing aroma intermingled with the prayers of God’s people. That’s what it symbolizes. So, whether or not you like smells and bells in your worship experience, this is happening in heaven before the throne of God in the book of Revelation, which is not to say, this needs to happen in your church on Sunday. It’s just to say, this is how these traditions are born. They’re aren’t these weirdo things usually. They have a rootedness in something ancient and when you understand them they bring meaning. And, so, after this after these prayers are offered to God along with the incense, the angel then takes the incense burner and fills it with fire from the altar and hurls it down upon the earth. And, yea, then things get a little crazy - thunder noise, lightning, an earthquake, and then the seven angels who have the seven trumpets get ready to blow them. And we don’t get through all seven trumpet blasts in our reading today. We get through the first four. And many scholars and interpreters of the book of Revelation associate the things that happen after the trumpets are blown. So, for example, the first trumpet’s blown and hail and fire mixed with blood are thrown down on the earth. The second one blows his trumpet and a huge, something like a huge, mountain is thrown into the sea and one of the one third of the seas turn into blood. The third angel blows his trumpet, a huge star flaming like a torch falls from the sky and one third of the rivers and the springs, the waters turn bad. And the fourth trumpet blows and a third of the sun, a the third of the moon, and a the third of the stars are struck, so everything is darkened. Many scholars and interpreters find the pattern here to be very reminiscent of the plagues that were sent in the book of Exodus upon the Egyptians to set God’s people free, and that this, in fact, is the point of how God’s judgment works. Some people will receive the freedom brought from the refinement of judgment. Some people’s hearts will be hardened to it and they will subsequently be destroyed by it. And that holds a lot of water because that’s thematic in the Bible and helps us have a better understanding of God’s judgment and what it does. Those who are righteous, those who are true, those who are pure, who have to endure suffering and hardship are refined by it and we find that all throughout the New Testament writings. And, so, the way we have to look at that is that our endurance is bringing about in us something far more mature and strong and loyal and faithful, within us. It is sanctifying us. It is re-creating us in the image of the Savior, and is a necessary part of our transformation, our being reborn. So, a person who looks at what they’re facing from this perspective understands that all things are being worked together for our good, even if we lose our life in the process because we’ve learned to not hold onto it. We know that losing it is actually gaining it and nothing can take us from the presence of God. Nothing can steal us away. And we begin to realize that the presence of God is the one and only thing we can’t live without. So, when judgment and hardship are on the earth and we encounter it, it is doing something completely different in us than those whose hearts are being hardened by it and to it and who are rejecting God. They will ultimately find justice in their own destruction, in their own hard heartedness, in what they bring down upon themselves, whereas those who are being true are being refined, purified. And because we’re kind of moving into this territory. You know, the argument of, well, what about the rapture? Who’s going to go through this stuff? Won’t we be long gone and not have to experience in any or will we actually have to experience some or all of this? How is that going to work? Well, let’s wait and see how this whole story unfolds before us. So far, and were eight chapters into the book of Revelation, so far we could say, okay, we’re not trying to do a bunch of interpretation here, we’re just trying to move through this territory and point out things and understand what the Revelation is saying and how it has been interpreted in widely diverse ways. So far, we haven’t encountered anything like what we would call the rapture. We have encountered that yet. And we’ll see if we do or where we do as we move forward. But one thing that we can say for certain that were seeing is that, as believers, our lampstand, our light has to be burning, and we have to stay true. Those are both necessary. And we looked, pretty extensively, at what that actually looks like when we were looking at the seven short letters to the seven churches. And we can also say that remaining true in spite of hardship or tribulation is imperative because what we might be going through is doing something completely different in us than those who are hardhearted and rejecting it. When we stay true, when our light is burning, when we are faithful to the message of Jesus we are changing things around us. And as we change things around us it is changing us to the point that, in the end, even if we have to die, even if we have to lose our lives, we haven’t lost our life, it can’t be taken from us. These things we can say that we are, for sure, learning in the book of Revelation.

Prayer:

Father, we invite You into that because so much…anytime we talk about suffering…anytime we talk about tribulation it freaks us out. In part, because of this book of Revelation, and part because it has pictures in it of things that we would rather not see. And yet You are showing us this is how the new thing that You are doing is born and You have personally invited us to be a part of the story by continuing to bring light and life and good news into this world as we lose ourselves further and further in our relationship with You, as we lose our grip on what we think we can control and find ourselves in You. So, come Holy Spirit. Continue the work that You have begun in us. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what’s going on around here. So, this is the third Sunday in the season of Advent. One week from today is Christmas eve. One week from tomorrow is Christmas day. So, we’re fast approaching the end of our Christmas season.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box for 2017 is still available. This is getting right down to last call for delivery for Christmas. Tomorrow is the cutoff date for that. So, if you are in the United States and want to get a Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box in time for Christmas, now would be the time. If you’re outside the United States, you can certainly still order a Christmas Box and we will still ship them out, but it’s very unlikely that they’ll arrive for Christmas, but you can still get them. But if you’re inside the United States you have until tomorrow. So, check that out.

Reminding you that early registration for the More Gathering, our women’s gathering that we do annually, that will take place this April in the lovely mountains of Georgia, you can find out all about that and get early registration pricing right now. It makes for a great gift. So, check it out. You can go to moregathering.com for all of those details.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, as we fast approach the end of the year 2017 -  man…man… it’s  really like we’re almost there…it’s crazy. If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible in the waning days of the year 2017 then thank you. It has been quite a year indeed. And I’m looking forward, very much, to the new year and all that God will speak to us in His word in community. Thank you for your partnership. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. 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.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family. This is my first time to call. I’m calling from Nebraska. And I’m calling because I just heard the prayer request from the woman in Wisconsin who is upset about her cousin getting married and I just want to encourage you, I’m sorry I don’t remember your name, but God knows, that His love for you has nothing to do with the actions of your cousin. When you were a child and now, your love and your relationship with God is completely separate. And I just pray that God would reveal himself to you in a completely new way, that you would come to understand His love in such a fresh way that your life would no longer be mixed up with your cousins actions or your actions as a child, that you’d be able to step into your future in a new relationship with the Lord. I pray this for you in Jesus name. Amen.

Good morning guys. This is Jenn in SoCal, AKA Prayer Warrior Princess. Joyce, in California, I hear so many people calling who love and support you, who are rooting for you. I understand that none of us can replace and heal the wounded soul areas that were created by what happened with your family, but we are all intimately connected with the one who can. You struck a chord with all of us and it’s evident you can count on us to intercede with Him for your victory. I’m going to remember you each year on December 20^th because you share your birthday with my dad. Long after the echoes of your prayer request cease to ring in our ears from your call, they’re going to resonate in my heart each year. I bless you with quiet confidence, with securely anchored hope in Christ, with satiety, with the mind of Christ, and the power to think differently, according to His direction. May your soul tell your thought that I have enough, I am enough, I give and receive enough. May contentment flood your bones and refresh your parched cleff. May you consistently awaken with a strong sense of the Holy Spirit befriending you, seeing over you, delighting in you, encouraging you, upholding you, and propelling you forward, forgetting what lies behind and running your race with endurance as this great cloud of witnesses cheers for you. We love you Joyce. Victory in Jesus for you. Amen.

This is Claudia from Oroville, California. I want to pray that Christmas blessings of reconciliation for families that are difficult take place. Thank you, Daily Audio Bible.

Hi family. It’s Shannon from Texas again. And I called earlier today about my friend Sonya’s mom Rosie G. Rosie did not make it. It was unexpected. She went into septic shock. Sonya was forced to…not forced…but…she had to make a choice to take her mother off of life support because as she wasn’t going to make it…and it was awful. But just please lift her up. She lived with her mom and they came…fled to Texas together…and Sonja had her daughter removed by CPS after reporting some sexual abuse and her daughter’s for now in California and Sonja is left by herself. And I just can’t fathom the thought of her going back home. I’ve invited her to stay with me, but I don’t know if she’s going to do it. And she’s in the house by herself, doesn’t really have friends or family in Texas. And not even going to have anybody to put together a funeral for her mom. She needs it…she’s kind of…just now getting off of some prescription medication that she’s been addicted to and she’s gotten really close with the Lord, but, amen, she really, really needs the prayers because this is…this is hard on her. So, please lift her up. We know where her mother is. Rosie was an amazing lady, but she had a tough, tough life. She almost stressed herself to death, if she didn’t stress herself to death. She trusted the Lord. But she spent the last few weeks of her life worrying about Sonja and those kids. So, please lift them up. Lift Sonja up in her family situation. I don’t want her to be by herself right now. I will she’s not, but I love you and appreciate your prayers.

Hello DAB family. My name is Darren. This is my first year in sitting by the campfire with you guys and my first time calling. I honestly thought I was going to be able to ease through the end of the year without calling in and sharing my heart, but this morning my heart was just broken by a message that I heard from Marked as His, I believe, was her name, from Baltimore, Wisconsin. I wanted to let you know three things. The first thing is is that I thought you were so brave to share your story. And the second is that we are your family. We do love you. I don’t know you but my heart broke so I know that we are connected and God has connected us through the power of his Holy Spirit and through this ministry. So, we are your family. You know, as Jesus said in Matthew 12:49. But you said a couple of things and I wanted to share part of my story. You were saying that you were dealing with some anxiety and self-doubt and what I’ve learned is is that to find the underlying emotion underneath that. And mine was anger. I was so angry that I felt that I had been robbed of something and that no one understood, but then God showed me in Proverbs 18:21 that there is life and death in the power of the tongue. And what you were saying, you know, that you wanted to be married, certainly, but that God was playing a joke on you and that you got the raw end of the deal. Certainly, I know sister, that was just your heart speaking and that I could tell that you don’t truly believe that, but we have to speak it as we know that it is and that it is only a trial and a test and something to get you off the path that God has called you for. And believe me, if the devil messed with you so…

Micah 5:1-7:20, Revelation 7:1-17, Psalms 135:1-21, Proverbs 30:5-6

Today is the 16^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s great to be here with you as we close down another week. And we’ve been reading from the Holman Christian Standard Bible all week, which is what we’ll do today. We’ve been reading through the book of Micah in the Old Testament, which we will conclude today, and then take the next step forward in the book of Revelation, but first, Micah chapter 5 verse 1 through 7:20 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So, let’s take a quick look at what we read in Revelation today. As I said when we began this book, it’s interpretations are many. And that’s a gross understatement. And these interpretations in no way agree with each other in a lot of cases because we have lots of complexity in prophetic utterances and in symbolism and no way to concretely determine time. So, our goal here isn’t to interpret every nuance of the book of Revelation, or any of the associated Old Testament visions and apocalyptic prophecies that exist. We’re just trying to look at things as we go along to keep ourselves rooted in the story and have a bit of context so that we can engage with the text. So, there were seven seals. And Jesus, depicted by John as a lamb, was able to open these seven seals. And we’ve seen six of them opened. And four of those seals represented horsemen and their riders who were tasked with unleashing unrest upon the earth. The fifth seal had to do with those who had been killed for holding on to their faith, martyrs. And the sixth seal seems to depict the end of the cosmos as we know it. So, we’re expecting this seventh seal, but that’s not what we get today. We will get to the seventh seal, but what we have today is a discussion on people who are sealed. So, we had these four horsemen that were sent into the earth and then as we began today’s reading, we have four angels who are standing at the four corners of the earth, restraining the four winds of the earth. And most scholars would agree, this is symbolism that is meant to show that they have power over the earth. And then another angel rises up from the east and mentions that the earth or the sea or the trees shouldn’t be harmed until the servants of God are sealed, that the seal of God would be placed on their foreheads. And the number of those to be sealed are 144,000, 12,000 each from the named tribes of Israel, but the tribe of Dan and the tribe of Ephraim are omitted from this list. And it gets pretty complicated here, this hundred 144,000. You’ve probably heard of the hundred 144,000 in a lot of ways before. And there’s a wide range of speculation among scholars, and entire church denominations have been formed out of interpreting this. So, if you’re taking a literal view of the book of Revelation, then 144,000 people, 12,000 people exactly from specific tribes will get the seal of Christ. And these are all ethnic Jewish people who know the tribes that they come from, which would be rather complicated, because in a northern kingdom, the kingdom of Israel, the 10 tribes there were taken into exile by Assyria, they’re lost, like, they’re lost to history. And with the southern kingdom, which would be Benjamin and Judah, were taken in exile by Babylon. They were eventually able to go back and they were paying close attention to the Levites, like to the priestly tribe, but tribal identity was mostly lost. So, if John is talking about ethnic Jews then it’s complicated. And if we were taking a presentist attitude, interpretation, like, this is all happening, or this is about to happen, then it’s kind of complicated to find 12,000 ethnic Jews who know the tribe that they are from in this day and age. And it would be equally as difficult to find 144,000 ethnic Jews who live in modern-day Israel who are believers in Jesus. The number is more like 10% of that, just for a little perspective. I mean, there are mega-churches in the world that contain more people who are professing to be followers of Jesus then all of the believers who live in modern-day Israel put together. And for those who don’t take 144,000 as a literal number, some would say that this represents all ethnic Israel, all those who are ethnically Jewish will be saved at Christ’s second coming, while others would say the 144,000 isn’t a literal number, it’s a figurative number, and it represents all who would be sealed, the people of God, and the formation of a new and true Israel. And I’m not going to unpack that conflict right now, like, we’ll wait until we get into Paul’s letters next year, because it would take us on a bunny trail that would take way too long. So, I think it’s safe to say that most, but not all, scholars do not take this 144,000 number to be a literal number with exactly 12,000 people from specific tribes. Like, this is more of a figurative speech representing God’s true people and part of that comes from what comes next. So, we have this 12,000 from all of these tribes numbering 144,000, and we get to the end of that and then John says, after this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language which no one could number standing before the throne and before the lamb and they were robed in white with palm branches in their hands. So, if the numbers just 144,000, then the next thing we know we have people without number. No one can number them. So, more than 144,000, which leads some scholars to say, okay, there’s 144,000 and those people are being sealed in this time of testing, this tribulation, and they’re the remnant army of God. And then we move to this other visionary experience, where the host of heaven, all the souls standing before God and before the Lamb from every nation, and tribe, and tongue are standing before God. And we can easily think these are the ones that have been martyred, but the ones that are martyred are talked about here. So, who is this throng of people dressed in white, if not the hundred 44,000 and the not the martyrs? So, we get an answer that as we read along. One of the elders, so, one of the 24 elders, asks John who they are. Who are the people robed in white? Where did they come from? And, so, John’s like, sir, you know. So, he’s saying, like, you would know but I don’t know. And, so, the elder tells him, these are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. So, these are the ones that stay true. And some interpret this as that these are the true children of God, descended from Abraham. God’s promise to Abraham was that he would multiply their descendants and they wouldn’t be able to be numbered. So, these are the children of God who have come out of the great tribulation. So, for interpreting this futuristically, then there is a great tribulation to come that’s going to be very, very, very difficult on the earth. But if we’re a little more pragmatic in our interpretation, then tribulation has been around a while and Christian specific tribulation has been around since Jesus. And enduring that and growing strong because of it and allowing it to shape us and build character and make us true is part of the metanarrative of the New Testament. Either way, this throng of people from every tribe and nation and tongue are before the Lord and they have washed their robes and they have become white and they have washed them in the blood of the lamb. So, to look at this literally would present some challenges. Like, if you wash a robe in blood it’s not going to come out white. And where did they get these robes in the first place? And where can one acquire one of these robes? It just becomes difficult to make literal. Symbolically, the interpretations are that, you know, those who wash their robe in the blood of the lamb and it comes out white, that is representing the ongoing work of sanctification, the process of becoming pure and clean and Christ like, which requires endurance and perseverance and all the things that we‘ve been talking about all year. And for those people, beautiful, beautiful imagery is given. These people serve God day and night in his sanctuary, in his presence, and the one seated on the throne will shelter them and they won’t hunger anymore and they won’t thirst anymore and the sun won’t beat down on them and strike them anymore and heat won’t hurt them anymore because Jesus, the Lamb, who was at the center of the throne will be their shepherd. He will shepherd them. He will guide them to springs of living waters and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And I think that is beautiful no matter how you’re looking at this book, no matter how you’re interpreting this. It’s a beautiful picture that, in the end, there is God’s presence and things are as they should be, and nothing is lost, and there is no lack, and our   tears will be wiped away by God himself, which is where we end today, in the book of Revelation.

Prayer:

Father, once again we’re inviting You to speak through all that we’re reading in Your word and we’re taking it all in and inviting You. And it is our hearts desire to be one in that throng with people from every tribe and nation and tongue. We want to be one of them and we have the clear picture that we must endure and that we must remain true and that our lives can’t be spent just trying to be one in that throng, but one of many that You were able to reach and love and rescue because You were able to work through us. Come, Holy Spirit, give us the eyes and the ears of the Kingdom. May we each be responsible for a great cloud of witnesses celebrating before Your throne. Come Jesus, we pray. In Your holy name, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what’s going on around here. It’s certainly Christmas time, so it’s Christmas stuff that’s going on around here.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box for 2017 is still available, basically just through the weekend. Monday will be, sort of, last call for arrival by Christmas, you could still order, but by Christmas. And that is only if you live in the United States. If you’re outside the United States that time has passed. We certainly will still send them to you, but it probably won’t arrive for Christmas. So, we’re kind of getting down to it on that. The Christmas Box is, itself, full of goodies – things for you, things for you to give away. There’s the Advent CD from our friends at Mission Chattanooga in there to just continue the season of contemplation of the arrival of the Savior. The family Christmas CD is in there -  lush orchestrations of traditional carols. It’s very contemplative, perfect for a night of shutting off all the lights and just leaving the Christmas lights on taking some time to just drink it in. Two copies of Sneezing Jesus are in the box this year. A book by my friend Ian called The Road Back to You is in the Box. It’s been a book that’s been helpful to me this year. A Black Wing pencil. The Daily Audio Bible Christmas bulb for 2017. And you can only get that in the Christmas Box, is included. A pack of 20 of the Daily Audio Bible Christmas cards for this year. And then your choice of coffee or tea, our Wind Farm coffee or tea. So, check that out. They’re still available.

If you’re looking for that special gift for somebody that you just have been able to figure out yet, especially if their a journaler or a writer, I recommend one of the Daily Audio Bible journaling bundles. Those are fantastic. I love them. I use it every day. And you can look at those in the Lifestyle section of the shop.

Early registration for the More Gathering for women, which happens to make a great gift idea, is open until the end of the year, the early registration pricing until the end of the year. And you can and find out all about that dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section or just go to moregathering.com and you can get all the details there.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible as we approach the end of the year, and thank you for your partnership, profoundly, there’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. 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.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Hello Daily Audio Bible family. This is SarahJane. Yes, that SarahJane. And I would like to say Happy Jesus birthday to all of you. But particularly, Christmas, is a bit of crazy time. You all buy Christmas boxes, which is wonderful, but I get to pack them all and I could not do that without Brad and Patty B, Katy U. The Seabrun family helped out this year and also Al and a bunch of others. In fact, I always have to do a throwback to Marc and Sheryl M. I am very, very, very blessed that we have awesome help in Colorado Springs. So, if you live in Colorado Springs and you’re interested, drop me an email. And again, as for every year, thank you to my volunteer team and bless all of you enjoying your Christmas Boxes. Love you.

Hey family, it’s SarahJane again and I forgot to say thank you to Beth and Paul, who were also there…and I shouldn’t have named names…but I really am blessed for my volunteer team. Love ya.

Hey Daily Audio Bible family. This is Joyce in California and I had a really rough day with pain today. And I just finished hearing the prayer line. Thank you so much. I just love you guys so much. And I’m so grateful. These are…I’m just so happy. I’m so amazed at our beautiful family, that even if we haven’t seen each other or met each other that we can love each other so much. Thank you so much. I just…and mother Annette from Oklahoma City, I love your voice. I love all your calls and so many others. I just…thank you. Thank you so much, all of you for being here with me. And my studies have been amazing. I’ve been retaining things. I read it once and I can get through it. And I scored 100% on some of my practice tests and I slept well and I’m just praising God for each of you. The Lord’s brought me here so I could find family at last and I’m so grateful. Thank you so, so much. God bless you. I love you all. Ok. Bye-bye.

Hello everyone. This is Abiding in Him. I’d like to pray for our sister Marked as His in Wisconsin. Lord, we thank You so much for our sister and we rejoice with her in the news that her mother is doing well after fighting cancer Lord, that the harvest has come in plentiful Lord. We just thank You for Your wonderful goodness and Your mercy to us Lord. And I also thank You for my sister’s honesty in that she’s struggling, that someone that once took advantage of her in enjoying things in life that she’s yet to enjoy, but it seems horribly unfair in a life that has had many unfair moments. Lord, I pray that You come meet with my sister in a special way, that You reach out to her in the depths of her struggle and the pain and You reveal to her a deeper love, a deeper connection, a deeper abiding that is available to those who have suffered and lost much. It seems that in this world Lord, You strip many things away from us in order to bring us closer to You. And in a way, we should be thankful for these opportunities but they still hurt. They still cause pain. So, that great mystery Lord, where You enter into our pain and You manifest Yourself as being present and close, despite our anguish Lord. I pray for that peace to come to her for my sister. She says she’s Marked as Yours Lord, so, prove it to her, in a special, individual and unique way that only You can do. We ask for the comfort of Your Holy Spirit. Lord, we praise You and thank You for everything we have. In Jesus’ name.

Hi family. I desperately, desperately need your prayers. This is Amanda from Williamsburg, Virginia. I need prayers for my children’s school. We went to a parent’s meeting last night and they told us last night that we are going to be doing emergency fund raisers and things like that, but the landlord has really taken advantage of them and like tripled the rent and all of this. And they’re not sure how they are going to make this…through the school year. And the heartbreaking part is, this Greenwood Christian Academy is amazing. It has incredible academics and incredible teachers and it’s a small Christian academy. My 5 children thrive there. And it breaks my heart. I don’t know what to do. So, the only thing I know to do is to turn to you. Family, please, lift up Greenwood Christian Academy. Help us to raise $100,000, help us to find a new location. We just…we need God to move. And we know that He has a plan and we’re trusting Him and we’re are all working hard…but we just need…we just need intercession, please. Please just lift up the community of Williamsburg, Virginia, that they can come around this amazing school and these amazing kids and these amazing teachers and see it for the gem that it is and just be able to push forth and grow this school. We need this. Our children’s future needs this. Just, please, pray for our education. Thank you.

Micah 1:1-4:13, Revelations 6:1-17, Psalms 134:1-3, Proverbs 30:1-4

Today is the 15^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it’s wonderful to be here with you today. We’re just 10 days out from Christmas. A week and a half from today it will be Christmas. And it leaves us about 2-½ weeks left in the year. And we’re cruising along at a fast clip as we approach the end of the year. Today, we begin the book of Micah in the Old Testament. We’ll spend a couple days in Micah as we continue through Revelation in the New Testament.

Micah:

Micah was a prophet who was a contemporary with the prophet Isaiah. And Micah seemed to have the same kind of access and voice in the king’s life as an advisor as Isaiah had. And we learn this from the book of Jeremiah. Pretty much everything else we know about Micah is found in the book of Jeremiah, that he prophesied during the days of King Hezekiah of Judah, that he was from the town of Moreisheth. Micah’s prophetic utterances, the book that we’re about to read, speak directly against leaders who have led the people away from God and of the corruption that is involved in that. False prophets, rulers, priests, they’ve all misled the people. And because of this, judgment will fall, but Micah is not just a book of judgment and doom. It’s also hopeful and speaks of the restoration of God’s people and reiterates a message running through the entire Bible - there’s a right way and there’s a wrong way and if we step out of grace we’re certain to feel the repercussions of the wrong way. But after judgment comes restoration. So, through the prophet Micah we see a clear line in the sand as we often do. God lays out his requirements for justice, obedience, and loyalty, but he also shows what happens when those requirements aren’t heeded. And, so, we begin. Micah chapter 1 verse 1 through 4 verse 13 today. And we’re reading from the Holman Christian Standard Bible this week.

Commentary:

Okay, let’s move ourselves back into the book of Revelation since we’ve been away for a couple of days and try to catch ourselves up. So, we have these seven letters to seven churches and after John wrote down what he was told to say, a door in heaven was opened up and John was caught up in the spirit to a place that he identifies as heaven into a throne room or throne area of God. And we don’t know like if this is partially outside or fully outside or inside. The sea is like glass before the throne. We don’t know if that’s a liquid sea made out of something different than water or if that just means that it was super calm. All the sudden where getting glimpses of God. And John says, the one sitting on throne looked like jasper and carnelian stone and there was a rainbow around the throne. So, he’s describing what he’s seeing but he doesn’t really have words to describe what he’s seeing. And this brings us to a few things that we should look at and remember as we’re moving forward. So, first of all, when John was on the island Patmos experiencing these visions and writing these things down, it was his understanding that he was writing about things that were happening and about things that were going to happen. So, this is largely a prophetic book in the tradition of Old Testament prophets and Old Testament prophetic books that were in existence. And there are many, many parallels in the book of Revelation that hearken back to earlier prophetic books in the Old Testament, books like Daniel and Ezekiel and Isaiah, just to name a few. Some of the same imagery from those writings are found in the book of Revelation. And scholars have been studying these parallels, trying to interpret them, trying to understand what’s being talked about for centuries. Which brings us to the second thing that we need to pay attention to, and that is time. When a prophecy is given it’s usually not known when the events that are being described are going to take place, other than to know that it’s not now. It’s future. Maybe the immediate future, it may be a distant future, but it hasn’t happened yet. Which leads a reader to invariably question whatever prophecy they’re reading and wonder, if it’s now, like, is this all happening now, or is about to happen and be something that I witness, I see, I experience. And a lot of people read the book of Revelation, in particular, even though it’s heavily influenced by symbolism from much earlier prophetic writings, in terms of their immediate present. So, this would be called, like, a presentist interpretation. In other words, these ancient prophecies are coming to be fulfilled before my eyes in the here and now. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, the entire book of Matthew, the first gospel that we read, has very much a presenttist attitude toward Jesus. Like, he can’t hardly turn around in the book of Matthew without fulfilling some prophecy. This is a very, very important thing to the writer of Matthew. It’s very, very important to him. It’s one of the primary missions of his gospel. But no matter what time period we’re talking about or talking about, when we’re talking about prophecy, we’re going to find a wide range of opinion, scholarly studied studious opinion from historical and theological perspectives that are widely in disagreement with each other. And we see this all over the Bible. So, if we’re talking about Old Testament prophets, they were rarely heeded, they were very, very often ostracized. And most of the time the writings of the prophets weren’t affirmed as something inspired by God or something to be held sacred as Scripture until much later. In many of the Old Testament prophets, we see other “prophets” who are saying completely different things. Like, so, a prophet will come in and speak to the prophets who were prophesying things that aren’t from God. And, so, this other prophet comes along to denounce them. And then there’s like a battle between them. Not like a war, but like a war of words. So, prophetic disagreement has a long history. And some of the problem comes from dating. Right? So, from time. When will this happen? Because there’s a dominant apocalyptic worldview found throughout the Bible, which is essentially the idea that the world as we know it will come to a close and something new will be reborn. God will do a new thing. And this will be like giving birth. There will be labor pains involved. So, that leads everyone who reads to go, okay, are we in this? Are we about to be in this? When is this going to happen? So, we get to the book of Revelation and we have a very presenttist reading. Every generation does it. Everyone thinks it’s now. And a lot of what feeds that is the third thing that we need to remember, symbolism. And we begin to encounter symbolism as we move out of the letters to the churches and move more into the body of the book of Revelation. So, we have John, who has been caught up in the spirit into heaven, standing before, what appears to be the throne of God, with 24 other thrones the belong to elders and some beasts who look similar to Ezekiel’s writings - and I see, like, glass and rainbows. So, we have John who is seeing things he has never seen before and trying to describe what he is seeing. And, so, he does what we all do when we can’t literally describe something, we use metaphor or symbolism to evoke what we’re talking about. So, these three things: prophecy, time, and symbolism present tremendous complexity in trying to arrive at interpretation, because there’s no key. Like, John didn’t write down, I’m saying this literally, and I’m saying this figuratively, you should take this allegorically, you should take this as absolute fact. So, as we come out of these letters and John is caught up into this spirit into heaven and sees God and describes God, should we then say that God, our Father God, looks like jasper and carnelian stone? Or was that just the best use of his vocabulary, the best words he could use to describe what was indescribable and what he was seeing? And we could say, probably a little bit of both. There’s a lot of strange symbolism, strange creatures, strange goings on in the Old Testament prophets, in many of them, and in the book of Revelation. And Scholars have been trying to figure out the symbolism for millennia. And these disciplines vary widely from a pragmatic, nonreligious look at symbology to some of the very sensational but often very contradictory interpretations that we’ve always found and that exist in the world today. So, the symbolism has always been challenging. And predicting the timing of these events has also been challenging. So, like, when Daniel has a vision or when Ezekiel has a vision and he’s caught up and he sees these things or when John is in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and he’s caught up, and he sees these things, these guys are seeing into the heavenly realms. They’re being caught up into a place where there isn’t time. So, using prophecy, symbolism, and time still leaves a lot of challenges about what has happened, what is happening, what has yet to happen, and you can find scholarship of people who will point by point take you through all the entire thing and say it’s all already happened. You can find other people who would say it’s happening. And you will have other people who will say it is yet to happen. So, I just want to be clear. As we go through this and we talk about this, I’m not trying to interpret the book of Revelation. I don’t think I’m qualified enough to do that, but I do thing and qualified enough to point out some things. So, we had the letters, then we have John caught up into heaven, and he’s before the throne of God, and a glassy sea and rainbows, and 24 elders and creatures, and hymns, like holy, holy, holy, Lord, God the Almighty, who was, who is, and who is coming. These are things that John heard being sung in heaven, hymns of worship from heaven. And in yesterday’s reading from Revelation, the whole scene began to unfold. There was one sitting on a throne on the right hand of God who had a scroll or a book that was sealed up with seven seals. From a scholarship perspective, there is some basic consensus here, that seals historically mean that something is hidden and that can only be opened by one who breaks the seal and as each subsequent seal is opened more is revealed. The problem is there’s an angel, saying, who is worthy to open? Right? Who can break these seals and open the scroll? But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or even to look in it, the book of Revelation says. And John then says, he cried and cried because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or even to look in it. So, why is John in heaven before God crying and crying? Why is he so sad? It’s probably because he thinks what’s in the scrolls is the redemptive destiny of God’s people, but if there is no one worthy in heaven to tell that story then maybe it can’t happen. And everything that John and all of his ancestors of hoped in for so long isn’t going to happen. And that’s been a problem, because everyone including the apostle Paul thought things were going to happen much sooner than they had and they still hadn’t happened and they were still trying to figure it out. And, so, here’s John caught up into heaven, and maybe it’s not going to happen, but an angel invites John to stop crying. And then the lion from the tribe of Judah is revealed, the root of David was been victorious, he can open the scroll. And then we get another picture of Jesus. So, John was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and he turned around he saw some lampstands in the first place. Like, when all of this started and he saw Jesus with white hair and flaming eyes and this image of the cosmic Christ. Now he’s caught up into heaven and the scrolls can’t be opened until Jesus steps forward, and John describes him differently. Then I saw one like a slaughtered lamb standing between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders and he had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent into all the earth. And he came and took the scroll out of the right hand of the one seated on the throne. So, we have some symbolism here and can it be unraveled. I mean, if we were to take a literalistic view of what’s being said here, then we would say, Jesus has become an actual lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, and somehow as an actual lamb, he took the scroll with his hoofs out of the hand of God, and somehow with his hooves he was able to break the seals. Right? So, like, you can go, like, I’m just going to read this book literally and what it says it says. Or I’m just only going to read this book allegorically and see what it says or I’m just going to try and find a happy balance here, but how do you know? This is why these books of prophecy, especially with apocalyptic visions, have been examined for thousands of years. But nevertheless, Jesus takes the scroll and everyone falls down before the lamb, and more hymns are sung from heaven. And present at this event appear to be the living beings that Ezekiel saw and the elders that Isaiah saw and they fall down and worship the lamb. And beyond all of the debate about all of the symbolism that surrounds this, there is consensus among scholars in calling the scene that we’re seeing here an enthronement scene, where Jesus is being acknowledged. Which brings us to today’s rating where six of the seven seals are broken. And just to give you like a birds eye view of the minutia of scholarship that goes into these kinds of works, it’s been debated whether this document that has seven seals was a book, a codex, a scroll, or what. If there’s seven seals and each one that’s broken reveals something further, how could you do that with the scroll? Wouldn’t you need some kind of codex or some kind of book in order to be able to do that? And what’s in the book? Is this the Lamb’s book of life? Is this the names of everybody? Or is this some kind of prophecy about what’s coming next? Obviously, when the scrolls are broken, we find out that it’s not names. And yet, many have called this the names of life. This is where the names of everyone that gets in is contained. So, you can see that this is one thing, like, every single word here, every single symbol has been looked at from so many angles. But Jesus breaks seals and when He does break seals in succession things happen. And the first four seals, as their broken, reveal horsemen and horses and four things happen in succession. The first seal is broken, a white horse appears, the horsemen on the white horse has a bow and a crown that was given to him, and he went out as a victor to conquer. And then the second seal was broken and another horse appears and this one’s a red one and it it’s horsemen has the task and was empowered to take peace from the earth, so that there would be conflict in battle and death. And he was given a large sword to take with him. And then the third seal was broken and there was another horse and this one was a black horse and the horsemen had scales and it is widely thought that this this represents famine. And there was something like a voice from the four living creatures which appear to be the same kind of creatures that Ezekiel saw. So, John heard a voice coming from among the four living creatures. So, maybe they’re all saying something at the same time or they’re connected somehow. This is all very Ezekiel like imagery. And I say a quart of wheat for a denarius, and 3 quarts of barley for a denarius, but do not harm the olive oil and the wine. Those are the instructions to the black horse and its rider. And it’s been noted, like if we were to talk about the actual time that John was writing this, that these prices would be very, very inflated. So, in other words, to get enough food, you’d have to work all day just to get enough food to survive based on what the creatures are telling the horsemen to weigh out and how things are supposed to be priced. And, so, there’s a famine. And the next seal is broken and is a pale green horse. And this horsemen has a name, whereas the other ones don’t. And this horsemen is named death and Hades. So, the realm of the dead follows close behind. And his mission was to preside over the death of 25% of the earth’s population. And some of that will happen by the sword, by war, some that would happen through famine and plague, and some that would happen by the wild animals of the earth. So, the question is, okay, this is a prophetic utterance that was uttered some 2000 years ago. Have these things happened? When Jesus broke the scrolls, did that set about these events? Did they begin to happen? Have they already happened? Are they happening now? Or are they yet to happen? Well, I mean, conquest and victory, that’s been around a long time. Peace being taken from the earth so that people are in conflict with each other and go to war, that’s also been happening in the last couple thousand years and before that. Famine is something that has existed since this was written down and it happened before that. And significant loss of life through death in battle, in war, in famine, by plague, by wild animal, those things also happened and continue to happen. But this brings up some interesting things to think about. Jesus is the one breaking the seals. And whether these horses and riders are actual heavenly beings being sent to preside over these events or if they’re the same horsemen found in the book of Zechariah, or whether there more allegorical announcements that these things have begun or are about to begin, this is taking place because Jesus is breaking the seals and these horses and riders are being sent from the throne of God to take care of these things. And they appear to be in line with the prophetic tradition of warning and judgment. And now, Jesus is presiding over that judgment. And many biblical scholars and commentators have commented that this kind of judgment has a twofold purpose. One is judicial, its judgment, its justice. But two, its redemptive. And some have said compellingly that, if the book of revelations is to be looked at in the tradition of Old Testament prophecy then the children of Israel had to go through the things that they had to go through. It purified them. And then there was a new beginning, which brings us to the fifth seal that was broken. When this one was broken, those who had been killed for their testimony and their faithfulness to the Lord appeared under the altar and they had a message. They were saying something. Lord you are holy and true. How long until you judge and avenge our blood from those who live on the earth? And this, how long, kind of language is all over the Psalms. And the problem is we don’t know exactly when this is happening. So, like, if this happening in John’s time then it’s everyone who has been martyred up to this point. If we’re outside of time then it could be, you know, it could be any period. All we know is that it’s not done because a white robe was given to each of the martyrs and they were told to rest a little bit longer until everyone who was going to be martyred is. So, the opening of these seals is loosing upon the earth a judgment and purification and it’s difficult and it’s causing some to fall into the chaos in become in conflict and at war. It’s causing others to be purified and redeemed, because hardship, difficulty suffering, they have a way of peeling back the layers to what is essentially core and true about us. And we’ve seen example after example after example of this in the Scriptures, like in the book of Romans where we’re told to take up our own cross and follow Christ or that we will find our lives by giving them up, we’ll find our life by losing it. These ideas are all throughout the Bible. And then we come to the sixth seal. And there’s no horse and there’s no rider. There’s just sort of the end. And this is in remarkable parallel to the book of Isaiah. So, in Isaiah chapter 34 we read, ‘and the powers of the heavens will melt and the heaven will be rolled up like a scroll, and all the stars will fall as leaves fall from a fig tree.’ When the sixth seal is broken in the book of Revelation we read, ‘and the stars of the heaven fell to the earth as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind. And the heaven was split as a scroll having been rolled up.’ So, if you’re taking a literal view here, then what we’re reading about or what we’re seeing is a picture of the end of the cosmos as we know it. If you’re reading from a little bit more allegorical perspective, than this is this is the condition in the scene that is final judgment. And that is where we leave off today.

Prayer:

Father, Father, we invite you into all of this. It may be difficult for us to unravel exactly everything that’s being said here, but maybe the point is clear, that we have to hold onto You for dear life and that we have to remain faithful to You as You have to us. And that remains true no matter where we are on the continuum. And, so, Holy Spirit, we invite You to help us navigate in this life. And that those bonds of love and loyalty that exist between us become the things that are most valuable to us, that this relationship is the most valuable thing we have and we can lose everything else, but not that. And no one and nothing can take it away. Come, Holy Spirit. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what’s going on around here. And, obviously, we’re getting closer by the day to Christmas day.

So, it’s Christmas time around here too and the Daily Audio Christmas Box for 2017 is available. And we’ve curated a number of resources, some for you to keep, some for you to give away, into that box and we’re getting down to last call on these. Monday is the day that we feel like it’s the safe cutoff date for Christmas delivery. And Monday is one week from Christmas day. So, be to be sure to check those out in the Daily Audio Bible shop, in the Christmas section.

The other thing that I’ll mention today is advance early registration for the More Gathering for women is available now through the end of the year. And that makes for a unique and life changing gift idea. So, you can check that out at dailyaudiobible.com as well in the Initiatives section or simply go to moregathering.com and you can find out everything that you would want to know there.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible here in the last days of the year, as always, thank you humbly. It’s quite an amazing thing  that we do each year, going through the Bible together in community. And thank you for your partnership. That’s how this happens. There’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. Thank you for those of you who have clicked that link. 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.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Hi. Daily Audio Bible family. My name is Hose Carols. I’m calling from Mexico City and I want you to help me pray for all the recovering addicts around the world that are facing difficulties to stay sober or clean. As holidays come closer to all the celebrations and sometimes face or struggle more this time of the year with family or loneliness due to the consequence of addiction. I, myself am a recovering addict. I’ve been clean for 17 years by the grace of our God. I met Christ after 2 years of working the program and I still sponsor people in my home group and every time…the holidays and Christmas and unfortunately a lot of people quit and never come back. So, please help me pray. And if you are facing trouble with drinking or using drugs, know that Christ can set you free by his mercy, power, and love. Merry Christmas to all from Mexico.

Hi DAB family. This is Rebecca…I mean…this is Joyce in California. And I wanted to thank Rebecca in north west Arkansas and Kimberly and anyone else who prayed for me. I just wanted to thank you because I’ve been unusually productive in my studies and sleeping a lot more peacefully. This peace and confidence is something that I haven’t felt before and I know it’s got to be your prayers that are providing the spiritual covering so that I can finish my race well. Thank you so much for lifting me up. I’m praising God for you. I recently joined the DAB friends page on Facebook and I found that our community there is just as beautiful as it is here on the prayer line. I encourage anyone who is a little shy to join too so that we can all connect. Even if we haven’t met in person we are all brothers and sisters forever because of Christ who lives in us. We are all more than conquerors and we have not missed our windows of opportunity because of Him who is within us. He is the one who controls all time. I just love you all so much. I wanted to thank you, Brian and Jill, for creating this community. Thank you DAB family. I love you so much and I’m praying for you too. This is Joyce in California.

Hi. My name is Lizzy and I was hoping if you could pray for me about gymnastics because I just really don’t want to go to gymnastics and that it’s just hard for me because I really sweat and if don’t want to do something they still make me do it. It’s just really, really hard for me. So, if you could please pray for me about me not going to gymnastics and that my mom finally decides to get me out of gymnastics. Please. Thank you. Bye.

Hey guys. This is Cherry C. Cherry Pie. Hope all is well. I have a praise report. Malcolm got baptized and I am so excited. And when he went up he was like honey I’m getting baptized today but Malcolm tease so much, I’m thinking, whatever. I don’t have time to play with him in church. So, once the guys did altar calls he went up for altar call and he’s like hey, hold my wallet and glasses and so I’m thinking, maybe he’s going to the bathroom. But he went up and he got baptized. Halleluiah, let the angels sing. I’m so excited, I told him, I said, oh my God felt like I was getting married all over again. So, I just wanted to give you all that praise report. Malcolm’s got baptized. You guys have a great and wonderful and marvelous day. I always keep you guys in prayer. So, you continue to pray for me and I will pray for you. Love you guys.

Hey Daily Audio Bible family. This is Keith. Called to just…yea…like…almost a year ago I totally made a terrible, terrible decision and I just progressively thought I’d get better but the whole year and especially right now, I’m kind of losing it. I’m losing my mind. I try to…I try to draw to God but I feel like forgotten and ignored. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m about to lose everything and…I don’t even know what to say…I’m kind of…you know…losing my mind a little bit and need some prayers. I don’t know when anyone will hear this but please pray for me. I need peace. I can’t find peace. I’m kind of like panicking in this little…one…you know…trapped in my own brain and can’t…can’t find peace at all…can’t find peace…and it just seems like everything is getting worse. Anyway, please pray for me. This is all I have. I love you all. Thank you. Bye.

Jonah 1:1-4:11, Revelations 5:1-14, Psalms 133:1-3, Proverbs 29:26-27

Today is December 14^th. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian, like I’ve been every day, every day as longs I can remember. And, I guess I’m just reminding myself every day, as if you hadn’t figured it out by now. Here’s the thing though, there’s new people, new friends every single day. So, I’m Brian. I’m introducing myself. It’s good to be here with you today and I’m excited for where we’re headed into the Scriptures today. We will read the entire book of Jonah today before moving into the New Testament book of Revelation.

Jonah:

So, let’s talk about Jonah because Jonah is one of the books of prophecy in the Scriptures, but it’s got a twist. Jonah was a man who lived around the eighth century BC. So, many centuries before the New Testament times. And he lived just north of Nazareth, which at the time, would’ve put them in the northern kingdom. Right? So, this is the time where the kingdoms have split. You’ve got the southern kingdom of Judah in the northern kingdom of Israel. And, so, he’s living in the northern kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam. And, although he was a prophet, his mission wasn’t to call Israel back to repentance or to remind them of their covenant or anything like that. It wasn’t to forecast the destruction of Israel’s enemies either. His mission is to leave his homeland, go into the land of Nineveh, people who were enemies of Israel enemies of God, and to call them to repentance. So, Jonah’s not happy about this, and his pride and fear of his fellow countrymen have them on a ship, sailing in the other direction, quickly. And, obviously, the story of Jonah and the whale is a famous story. Jonah ends up in the belly of a great fish. And after three days of repentance he’s then spit out on the shore alive. And, so, there’s obviously a foreshadowing here. And many see it as a foreshadowing of Christ in this story. And there are also obvious parallels in our own lives. When we allow fear and pride to lead us into disobedience, which is similar to the proverb we were talking about yesterday. Right? The fear of man is a snare, is a trap, but those who trust in the Lord will be protected. So, when we allow fear and pride, anxiety to lead us into disobedience, we find ourselves quickly on the run, but running away from God is a pretty difficult thing to do because He has decided not to surrender us, which is the story we have been reading all year long. God loves us enough to never stop pursuing us. And, although Jonah found himself in the belly of a great fish, it became his salvation. He would’ve drowned in the open sea. And, although the journey must have been unspeakably uncomfortable, God used the great fish to deliver him alive and well on the shore. And we may find that our journeys look similar. And it’s important to consider the fact that maybe God isn’t punishing us. Maybe we’re in a really uncomfortable situation because we’ve been running, but maybe what’s happening right now is that we’re being rescued. And, so, we begin. Jonah chapter 1 verse 1 through 4:11. And we’re reading from the Holman Christian Standard Bible this week.

Commentary:

Okay. We read the entire book of Jonah and we need to talk about Jonah, just a little bit, since we have only this one day in the book of Jonah because it’s a story that’s meant to hit us on a number of levels and to cause us to examine our thoughts and words and deeds. So, when we are talking about Jonah at the beginning, before we read it, we gave a little bit of the backdrop, that Jonah is a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel, but he’s being sent to prophesy to his enemies. And Jonah knows God’s reputation as a merciful, compassionate God. So, we have Jonah’s personal struggle inside himself, he does not want to go to the people that he considers his enemies and see anything but God’s judgment descend upon Nineveh and destroy it. But he also knows how compassionate and long-suffering God can be and that he’s being sent to prophesy repentance to them. And what if they actually listen? Then God will be merciful. And he doesn’t want Nineveh to receive God’s mercy. He wants them to be destroyed because of their history. Nineveh was a very, very powerful, influential city. The prophet Nahum prophesies against the city of Nineveh. So, here is Jonah being sent there. He’s got to go on a 500 mile journey and he doesn’t want to do this, not only because of his own feelings, but what’s he going to tell everybody? Hey, my fellow prophets, hey, my fellow Israelites, I know I’ve been prophesying around here, but I’m going to head to Nineveh and deliver the word of the Lord to our enemies. Hopefully they don’t listen any better than we do, and that they receive judgment, but who knows. I mean, if Jonah goes to Nineveh and Nineveh repents and turns toward God, then how can he go home? So, instead he gets on a ship and he’s heading for Tarshish. So, he’s like going 2500 miles in the other direction, if he can succeed. He doesn’t want the reputation of being the prophet that went to Nineveh. And, so, he runs in the other direction, which gives us ample opportunity to look at how were running right now, and why, and what patterns this brings up, and how we’ve been running for so long. So, as the story goes, Jonah’s not successful in running from God. He finds himself in the stormy seas to drown and he’s swallowed up by a fish and you can only imagine…I mean…you can only imagine that experience because there aren’t very many fish we would sign up to be swallowed by to find out what this is really like. This cannot be anything but terrifying. And, so, Jonah is praying, as you would expect a person who’s been swallowed by a great fish to be doing, because Jonah realizes at some point, he’s not dead. He may have been in the belly of the fish thinking, okay, I’m dead, like, I don’t what…this is the afterlife. But, at some point, he begins to call out to God saying, like, in my distress You answered me, in the belly of death of Sheol You heard my voice. I know that everything is happening is happening because You had a mission and I didn’t listen. But if I return to the daylight, like, if I return to the land of living then I will. And that’s how it happens. Jonah is spit on dry land and one can only imagine what a person would look like after they’ve been in the belly of a great fish for three days. He probably looks similar to what Hollywood would depict as a zombie, come back from the dead. Like, he doesn’t look right, and the word probably begins to spread. And Jonah’s got to finish his journey and go to Nineveh, which is a very big city. And he walks in a day and he gets somewhere, you know, in the thick of the city, and gives the message and the people respond. And they respond in a way that Jonah, still, after all that he’s been through, still does not want to see. He does not want their repentance. He wants their destruction. And he’s obeyed God and he’s seeing God at work in the city of Nineveh, and he doesn’t want to see this. And he’s outside the city, kind of waiting to find out what the final verdict is - will God spare this city or will God destroy this city? And he’s just like, I knew this was going happen, like, I knew this is how it was going to go down. This is why I didn’t want to come here in the first place. And God asks him a simple question, a simple question that we should hear in our own head, a lot of times. ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Because Jonah’s just sitting out there going, I want to die. It would be better for me…like…I can’t deal with Your mercy for these people. I knew you were going to do this. Just take my life. And God’s like…’is it right for you to be angry?’ Of course, then, you know, this plant comes and shelters him and then the plant goes away the next day. And he’s so mad, Jonah’s so mad, because it looks like Nineveh is going to be spared and his shade is gone. And God asks him, ‘is it right, Jonah, that you should be angry about the plant?’ And Jonah’s like, it’s absolutely right, I should be angry about the plant. I’m so mad I want to die. And it’s here that God speaks the final words in the book of Jonah on the lesson that we all need to pay attention to. God tells Jonah, you didn’t do anything to make the plant grown give you shade. I did that. You don’t have any right to be angry that it went away. You didn’t have anything to do with it in the first place. And as for these people in the city, they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t their right hand from their left. And basically, who are you to tell me who I should care about. You don’t have a voice in this judgment. You don’t have anything to do with it. You didn’t make this city. And this should give us pause because we judge all the time. And it finds its way into nearly every aspect of our lives. And as we do it, we can’t imagine that that God doesn’t feel the same way that we do. And then we run into brick walls, like the book of Jonah, realizing that were sitting in judgment of things that we don’t have anything to do with. Or walling ourselves off from people that we don’t agree with and with that we can’t imagine that God feels any different. We even do this inside the Christian faith, who understand things differently than we do. The book of Jonah is showing us in a very, very dramatic story what we do all the time in all kinds of ways in all kinds of contexts. And when we find ourselves going to these places, we need to remember God’s question. Is it right for you to be angry? Jonah thinks he has every right to be angry. His culture and his history are telling him to be angry. The problem is, he’s angry about what God is doing in a redemptive way. And as God points out, he has no right to be angry. He’s looking at the Ninevites through the lens of his culture, but God wants to give them a chance to repent. And they do for a while and they are spared. So, we have to wonder how many times we have judged something or been angry about something that, ultimately, God was in and doing. And this invites us to be a little bit more patient and a little bit more observant and a little less judgmental about things we don’t have anything to do with. Thank God that He is merciful and that He is long-suffering and that He is patient or we would all be toast. And if God wants to be merciful and long-suffering and patient in situations that we would rather that He just, you know, send fire from heaven and consume in judgment, then is it right for us to be angry, which is the ultimate question God poses to Jonah.

Prayer:

Father, we invite Your Holy Spirit into that because the truth is, if we could just step outside of ourselves and observe ourselves for a day, we would see they were judging a lot of things, wanting a lot of things that happen, so that they will happen in our favor. And it brings us to anger when it’s not like that. And so often we find ourselves in anger without even asking the question, are You in this, are You doing something that I cannot see. So, we invite Your Holy Spirit into that. We need You in those places within us. Come, Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what’s going on around here. Plenty of Christmas time things are going around here.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box for 2017 is available and can still arrive to you for Christmas, if you’re in the United States. If you’re outside the United States you can certainly order it. We will certainly ship it. We’re not sure it will arrive in time, but there’s still some time inside the United States, basically just through the weekend. So, check those out.

The More Gathering for women that’s coming up this April that we been talking about here for last week and half, early registration is available for the event. And you can find out all of the details that you would want to know at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section or you can just go to moregathering.com and that will get you there as well.

The Daily Audio Bible journals along with the pairing of the Black Wing pencils and the sharpener and all of the kits, the different bundles, are available. Perfect time to set up to journal your way through your life and through the Scriptures next year, but also a really, really wonderful gift idea as well. So, you can find those in the Daily Audio Bible shop, in the Lifestyle section. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible here at the end of the year, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link, it’s on the homepage. If you prefer the mail, 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.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Hi Daily Audio Bible. This is __ from Arizona. I’m calling for a prayer request for tomorrow. I have a surgery scheduled. We’re pregnant with twin girls and they were diagnosed with ___ syndrome and they’re doing a laser surgery in utero. And I just would just ask for your prayers, that God would sustain their lives and bring them forth in the physical bodies to full term in my womb and continue to knit them together __ that I would hold them together one day. I pray that you would ask God for strength and hope and __ through this whole process. __ that He would hold hearts ___ that we would look to Him in all of it and that we would trust Him and know that he’s good for everything. I genuinely appreciate your prayers.

Hello. Merry Christmas from Becca in Arizona. I just want to say hello everyone, Daily Audio Bible. The reason I’m calling is to wish you Merry Christmas. I just got the Christmas Box. I absolutely love it. I haven’t tried the coffee yet but I can’t wait. I gave a copy of Sneezing Jesus away. I listened to the Advent CD, which is awesome. And I’m about to listen to the Christmas CD. And then I am giving the Advent CD to the pastor of our church. And just thank you so much. I haven’t tried out the pencil yet either, but I really love the podcast and I just thank you for bringing the Bible to everyone. Love you.

Good morning. This is Unis from New Jersey and I am a Daily Audio Bible listener and I think this is the second time I’ve called. And I really need your prayers. I’ve been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and I’m traumatized and just in shock and it is like a nightmare, suffice it to say, it’s like a nightmare. I believe in prayer and I believe that all things work for good for those who believe in God and love God. It’s been really hard on me and my family and so many things have been revealed. Cancer has a way of revealing the truth about your life and about the people around you. I really ask my Daily Audio Bible family for prayers, that God give me the strength that I need in order form me to carry this through. I believe in healing if it’s His will, I will be healed. It doesn’t matter what the graphs say or what the CAT scans say or what anything else say…if it’s God’s then I will be healed and if it isn’t and I die with this illness then let it be God’s will. Thank you so much. Thank you audio family.

Hello Daily Audio Bible. This is Rebecca from Michigan and I wanted to share something with you because I asked you to pray that I have a great Christmas. I got something new that just happened. Like, today is December 10^th and I went to this pantry restaurant. They like serve a lot of breakfast and lunch. I had like a breakfast and this person went by me and said Merry Christmas and then the next thing you know, the waitress came to me and said, somebody paid for your breakfast, you’re free to go after you get done eating. So, I just want you to know, somebody paid for my breakfast today and I’m like, I’m already having a merry Christmas just because that guy said Merry Christmas. So, I thought I’d share that moment with you and let you know how things are going so far on my Christmas. It’s just awesome. God is so awesome, how He just reaches out His hand and does stuff for you. And I’m like…I mean…I’m working on being thankful and I’m been praying God will help me clean up my clutter, my life. You know, my spiritual life, my physical life. Everything about me, I just want God to renew, restore my life and make me a brand-new person in him. So, Daily Audio Bible. Thank you for praying for me. I love you. I hope you all have merry Christmas’s too. And I hope God blesses you guys too. Thank you.

Hello everybody. This is Pelham in Birmingham calling because I need some prayer. The owner of the food truck that I work on needs…or worked on…needs prayers. They just had his third child and they have major medical issues. And, so, he’s having to shut down the food truck that I work on. And, so, I don’t have a job any more and I have rent and bills and I can’t be unemployed and I’ve been… we’ve got a…it’s quite frightening here in Birmingham in the Morris household. So, please pray for the Morris’s and Hagen’s for their baby. For God to give us peace and joy, that we know that he has right in the palm of His hands and He’s got us right where He wants us, that He wants me to find a new job.

Obadiah 1-21, Revelations 4:1-11, Psalms 132:1-18, Proverbs 29:24-25

Today is the 13^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s good to be here with you today. And that from the Old Testament today, we will read in its entirety, the book of Obadiah before moving onto the next step forward in the book of Revelation.

Obadiah:

The book of Obadiah has but 21 versus, making it the shortest book in the Old Testament. And, yet, it deals with a very long-running family issue. Contained in this one chapter is a prophecy of the complete destruction and doom of the Edomites. And if we look back on the beginning of our adventure through the Bible, we’ll remember the story of Jacob and Esau. And Jacob’s descendants became the children of Israel. Right? Jacob’s name was changed to Israel. He had kids. They were children. The children of Israel. Esau’s descendants became the Edomites. And they were often in conflict. When God delivered the children of Israel from slavery and bondage in Egypt, the Edomites wouldn’t allow them to pass through their land on the way to their promise land. And at other points in history, when Israel was being attacked and overrun, the Edomites stood by silent just watching it all go down. And God reached the end of his patience. And, through the prophet Obadiah, predicts destruction. We have good application for this today too, for although we’ve been redeemed by the blood of Jesus, and have been made children of God, therefore making us all family, all too often we see brothers and sisters at war with one another. We’re standing by silently as brothers and sisters are destroyed before our eyes, often on the Internet. And perhaps they’re getting what they deserve in our judgment. The book of Obadiah shows us a very clear picture of how God feels about this. And, so, we begin Obadiah chapter 1 verses 1 through 21.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we need to talk about this proverb for a second because Proverbs 29:25 is worth committing to memory, is worth carrying around with you, is worth having at your fingertips. Because heeding it can change the path that your life is on. It can change the trajectory of where you’re going. It can shift your orientation to what you think is going on around you, inside of you. Because, for the most part, as a culture, as a people, even as believers in Jesus, we don’t heed this proverb’s wisdom. And when we look starkly at what not paying attention to what this proverb is saying is doing to us, it becomes pretty clear how profoundly this is affecting us. And the proverb says, ‘the fear of man is a snare, but the one who trusts in the Lord is protected.’ Now this word fear, as it’s translated into English here, is a word that means trembling, anxiety, care, dread, as well as fear. And we all seem to carry that as sort of like a base layer of a motion somewhere down inside of us, this anxiety that’s just always on the alert. And its deep within us. It touches our identity. Our fears can speak that deeply. And then to gauge how anxious we should be in a situation, we begin the comparison game. How I am I doing compared to him or her or them? And then it feeds into all of this anxiety. And because it’s uncomfortable or painful, it feels true, and it shifts our identity and value of ourselves, and it becomes for us exactly what the Scriptures say, a snare, a trap. And all we have to do is kind of look back over the last 24 hours. Look at our interactions and find the point at which anxiety was rising up in us, fear was coming up inside of us, and for the most part we’ll find that there attached to a fear of man, fear of others in some way. And so, we’re being counseled from thousands of years ago that this is a trap. It’s exposing where our trust truly lies. And as the proverb goes on, ‘the one who trusts in the Lord is protected.’ So, when our identity is rooted in the trust of the Lord, that’s a totally different outcome than when our identity is rooted in the fear of man. And if we’ll just go through the next 24 hours, watching ourselves when we were feeling anxious, when fear seems to be overwhelming us, we can detach from that for a second just to observe - where did this come from, why is this happening, how can I follow the trail back - and we’ll find where our fears lie, and we’ll find that we’re not trusting the Lord in it.

Prayer:

Father, we take this counsel, we heed it, it’s true, and it certainly can change things. So, we begin to observe ourselves and invite Your Holy Spirit to show us how so many of our fears are connected and are trapping us, are snaring us, because we’re ultimately afraid of each other or in competition with one another, rather than resting in the fact that we are Your children and You’re protecting us, and that we can, should, must trust You. Come Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

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

A few things are going on around here. Today is about the last day to call in your holiday greetings for the annual Daily Audio Bible family Christmas that we do each year, our kind of virtual Christmas party that we have together. So, definitely, definitely don’t delay anymore. If you’re planning on participating, all you have to do is call one of the prayer lines. So, for example, here in United States, 877-942-4253 is the number to call. And, like I’ve been saying, the only rule about this is just don’t combine a holiday greeting and a prayer request in the same call. If you have a prayer request, certainly, certainly call that in, but if you also have a holiday greeting, call that in separate. And we’re going to get to work on putting our Christmas party together. So, don’t delay anymore. If you want to be involved, call that in.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas Boxes are going fast, as they do. We still have some available. If you’re in the United States and you want to get the Daily Bible Christmas Box in time for Christmas, because it is full of things that you'll…some things you’ll want for yourself and some things you’ll want to give away…if you want that to arrive in time…then Monday December 18^th is, kind of the cutoff date for that. You can certainly order after that and we will certainly ship, but it’s kind of…we’re looking at the delivery schedules and…thinking that’s about where we’re getting close. So, keep that in mind.

Early registration for the More Gathering for women is open right now. And early registration pricing will last until the end of the year. This makes a wonderful gift idea. So, take advantage of that. And all the details about the more gathering can be found at moregathering.com or in the Initiatives section at dailyaudiobible.com. All of your questions and the details that you would want to know about it are there.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible as we approach the end of the year then, thank you humbly and profoundly, like every day, with a heart full of gratefulness that this community exists and that the global fire burns on, and that we keep taking steps forward together. Thank you for making that possible. So, there’s a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. 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 or holiday greeting, at the moment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Good morning Daily Audio Bible community. This is Diane O. B. in Newburg Indiana calling. And this is a prayer call and a praise report. And first of all, I want to say I am praying for this lady in California that is studying for her board exams, that had some really tragic things happen to her because her parents wanted a boy rather than a girl. I’ve been praying for you honey, every single day, and the Lord has been giving me a heart to pray for you and I believe you have the mind of Christ and you do think the thoughts of Christ. And when you take these board exams, I believe you are doing them at the end of December, you are going to pass with flying colors. And I thank You Lord for granting this wish and desire and prayer of mine. I’m going to be praying for you every day, that you have peace and no anxiety. And I’m praying for all of the others in the community. I thank you for hearing my prayer requests and lightening my load. And I just want to say do not be discouraged do not be disheartened. God loves you and He’s with you. He made you and He will take you back to heaven with Him if you have invited Him into your heart. So, God bless everybody and that’s what I wanted to say. Amen. 

Hi DAB family. This is Marked as His. I’m calling from Balsam Lake Wisconsin. I haven’t called in probably over 4 months now but I hope you all are doing well. Two praise reports. My mom, who was diagnosed with breast cancer around Easter time just successfully finished up both chemo and radiation and her prognosis looks great. So, that’s awesome, and thanks. We did get all off our corn harvest in on time and our soy bean harvest. So, thank you again for that. Right now, I am struggling with feeling very overwhelmed and attacked by anxiety and self-doubt. My cousin, who abused me as a child is getting married. And I feel very betrayed because getting married is something that I’ve always wanted and I feel like God is playing a huge joke on me, giving that gift to my cousin first. And I know I’m supposed to trust in God’s wisdom and His sense of timing but right now it is really hard. It seems like I’m getting the raw end of the deal again. So, I hope all is well with you. And thank you so much for being a family to me too. I’m so glad I turned here than other really bad coping mechanisms, that they soon pass. So, anyhow. Thank you all. Bye.

Good morning my DAB friends. It’s Margo from Australia. We have this morning had a bit of a miracle and I thought I would love to share it with you guys and you could share our joy and excitement. I’ll have to talk quick though. Some of you may remember, my husband and I are applying to join the mission aviation fellowship and as part of that my husband had to pass a class on medical for his pilot’s license. And he’s been having a bit of trouble with his blood pressure. His diastolic blood pressure needs to be under 90 and he’s been up to the doctor multiple times getting it checked and just can’t seem to get that number below 90 despite the fact that he’s quite slim and quite fit and healthy. It’s just some unfortunate reason. And he’s also been getting quite bad headaches. So, this morning he woke up with a really bad headache and we thought perhaps it might be associated with the blood pressure. So, we went up to our local pharmacy to get it checked and the diastolic blood pressure was 97, which is upsetting. But, just after that the doctor phoned and said, you have to come up today and get that blood pressure checked. It’s the last day we can do it for your pilot medical. So, we thought, oh no, we already know it’s really bad, this does not look good. So, we just straight away prayed, asking the Lord for a miracle and he went off to the doctor and guess what the number was? It was 85 and he even checked it twice. And we just praise in God because He is a God who works miracles. I can’t actually remember the last time his diastolic blood pressure was that low. It truly is a miracle and He is a God who answers prayer. And just Glory to God. He loves us. I hope that encourages you as it’s encouraged us. Bye for now.

Hi Joyce in California. Hey, this is mom Annette in Oklahoma City. And little sister, little girl, I wanted to wish you the most happiest of birthdays on December 20^th and I wanted to call you and sing [singing] Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Our beautiful DAB daughter, Happy birthday to you. [singing stops]. You know, we can’t always pick the families that we’re born with but we can pick the families that we surround ourselves with. And, I’ll tell you, I know around my job, I’ve made many daughters and sons and I would wish nothing more than to have you be my honorary daughter. And I wish you the best. I wish you the success that you are looking for. I pray that your studies go well and your examinations are exemplary, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Joyce, I love you and I’m giving you a great big hug, all the way from Oklahoma City. Have a beautiful birthday December 20^th, a day we will honor from now on.

Amos 7:1-9:15, Revelations 3:7-22, Psalms 131:1-3, Proverbs 29:23

Today is the 12^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is, indeed, a joy to be here with you today in the heart of the Christmas season. And we’re working our way through the book of Amos in the Old Testament. We will conclude the book of Amos today. And, of course, in the New Testament, we’re working our way to the book of Revelation. So, we’re reading from the Holman Christian Standard Bible this week. Amos chapter 7 verse 1 through 9:15.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we are several days into the book of Revelation and we’ve been just kind of looking at its layout because it begins with seven small letters to seven distinct and individual churches. And we’ve moved through five of those. And we read the two remaining ones, the letter to the church in Philadelphia and the letter to the church in Laodicea today. So, with the previous five little letters that we’ve read, Jesus affirms the different churches for things that they are doing well and then corrects them on some other things. Some churches are holding true to the faith but have basically gone underground while others have been very engaging in the culture but have been shaped more by culture than the other way around, them shaping the environment they’re in. So, with his letter to the church in Philadelphia, it’s a little bit different. Jesus starts out saying the holy one, the true one, the one who has the key of David, who opens and no one will close and closes and no one opens. So, that’s how he’s describing himself. So, this language, the one who has the key of David, we talked about that one when we were reading the book of Hebrews. This servant, King David, who also was a priest in the order of Melchizedek, even though he was not from the tribe of Levi. This kind of understanding, when applied to Jesus, pretty much in the entire New Testament, is messianic language. And we see that show up for the first time here in the book of Revelation, in this letter to the church in Philadelphia. So, Jesus is saying He’s holy, He’s true, He possesses the key of David, He opens and no one can close and closes and no one can open. And then He tells them, I know your works, which is what He tells the other churches. Because you have limited strength, have kept my word, and have not denied my name, I have opened a door and no one is going to be able to close it. It’s open to you. And He tells them to take note. So, pay attention. Those who are claiming to be Jews but are not, they’re lying. They’re from the synagogue of Satan and I will make them come bow down at your feet. And they’re going to know for sure that I have loved you, which would be very, very encouraging words to this church at Philadelphia. But it also harkens and it causes us to remember some of the things that we were reading and for second, third, John, and first, second Peter and Jude. But this forces us to acknowledge and see the debate that was going on. Who were the real and true Jews? On the one hand, you have a people who were born this way. So, they could say, I’m Jewish by ethnicity. The majority of those Jews, who were practicing Judaism, did not recognize Jesus as Messiah or anything else but a rabbi, and many wouldn’t even acknowledge that. So, you have Jewish people, who were born Jewish, who had been practicing Judaism in one way or another, rejecting God to his face, basically, as they reject Jesus. And you have other writers of the New Testament basically saying, those people aren’t true Jews, they’ve rejected God to his face. And on the other side of that coin, you have practicing Jews who are doing all that they can to distance themselves from these people who follow Jesus. Because in the wider culture, the Christians are just, they’re looked at as, people who have come out of Judaism, who are part of the Jewish community, even though in most cases there were more Gentiles in a family of faith than the Jewish people. The religion itself is looked to be an offshoot of Judaism, as part of Judaism. And the Jewish people are trying to say no that’s how it is, they have nothing to do with us. And this language that we find in that little letter to the church of Philadelphia seems to affirm that idea. And it’s a big idea. Because what we see taking shape here is that God is forming a new family, a new people. And you come into this family, this door that can’t be shut, through Jesus, and are welcomed into this new thing that God is doing. And it doesn’t matter your ethnicity. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Jew or a Gentile. So, we can see some of the conflicts that we’ve been looking at throughout most of the New Testament finding their way here into the book of Revelation. And Jesus is affirming the church of Philadelphia, in spite of all the marginalization and conflict that they been enduring both from the Jewish community and from the culture at large. They are staying true. They are staying engaged. They are bearing witness to the gospel of Christ, and they can walk through this door that no one can close. And then He encourages them further – ‘because you have kept my command to endure, I will also keep you from the hour of testing that is going to come over the whole world to test those who live on the earth. I am coming quickly. Hold on to what you have so that no one takes her crown.’ What we can’t say for certain about this is, is it planet Earth? That’s what it seems to be written as. Or is it the world as they understand it? Is this a planet earth tribulation or will this testing take place in the Roman empire or simply the known world? Scholars continue to debate that. And what kind of tribulation are we talking about - a spiritual one, a physical one? And how will the church of Philadelphia be spared? On the one side, you have those who are like, Jesus will come back and they will be spared. He tells them He’s coming quickly. So, He will come. And this has been called the rapture, which is a word that is not used in the New Testament. Which is not to say that the concept can’t be formed. It’s just to say that word is used in the New Testament. Or were they going to be spared spiritually, protected spiritually, but perhaps would have to endure physical hardship? Because so much of the New Testament deals with endurance, and suffering, and staying true in spite of it. So, like, even John, in John’s Gospel, when we have the high priestly prayer of Jesus. Jesus says to the Father, I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, I’m asking you to protect them from the evil one. And, so, this leads others to believe that this is about spiritual protection that takes place in our union with Christ. But no matter what this looks like, Jesus tells them if you’re victorious, if they will hold on, if they will endure, they will be made pillars in the sanctuary of God and they’ll never go out again. The name of God will be written on them in the name of the city, the new Jerusalem, that will come down out of heaven. And we’ll hear more about that later. And then we get to the final of these seven little letters, the letter to the church at Laodicea. And Jesus introduces himself by saying, ‘the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the originator of God’s creation says.’ So, this faithful and true witness language has been a theme to all the churches. What are they doing with the light that’s on the lampstand? What is their witness to Christ saying? And then He says that He’s the originator of God’s creation. That has been debated. Was He saying that He was the originator of the creation of the world as we know it? Or is see He originator of a new creation, this new family of God, where all are welcome through faith and not because of the origin of their birth? There are commentators and scholars on both sides of that. But getting into the letter, we see that the note to the church in Laodicea is more pointed than any of the other letters. As Jesus said to other churches, He tells them, I know your works. But what their works are is that they are neither cold nor hot and he wishes that they were cold or hot, but because their lukewarm and neither cold or hot, he’s going to spit them out of his mouth, which probably under any circumstances isn’t a good thing to be hearing from Jesus. So, it’s not a good thing. The metaphor of hot or cold or lukewarm has also been a point of debate. So, traditionally, you know, if you’re on fire, if your hot. Right? Then that’s a good thing and if you’re cold then that’s not so much a good thing. And if you’re lukewarm you’re a mixture of the two, that’s even the worst thing. And I basically grew up here hearing it like that. But there are scholars who would say, no, this is rooted to the place of Laodicea itself, the situation of the city itself. It was a good place for a city, in terms of geography, but they didn’t have a good freshwater supply. So, they had to a pipe it in. So, on the one hand they were getting some of their water supply from places that had hot springs and then maybe they were getting their water from other places that had, you know, fresh, cold, clean, life-giving water. But by the time it piped its way to another city it wasn’t cold anymore, it was it was lukewarm. And, so, it wasn’t a palatable. The hot water coming in had become lukewarm. The cold water coming in had become lukewarm. In other words, it had gone from its original state to this kind of lukewarm, less palatable, less usable form, which would more accurately describe the state of the church at Laodicea that Jesus is speaking of. And Jesus assessment of the church at Laodicea contrasts, pretty sharply, with their own view of themselves. Jesus says, ‘because you say; – so, like, this is their assessment of their condition – ‘I’m rich, I have become wealthy and need nothing.’ So, they think they’re doing pretty good. And Jesus is telling them, you don’t know that your wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. So, they seem to be about as blind to their situation as we often find ourselves to be. They found a way to be economically prosperous, assimilating into the culture, and probably reaping the benefits of that and they think they’re doing pretty good. And Jesus is advising them that they need to get their gold. Right? So, they need to get their wealth from a different source. Him. They should buy gold from Him because it’s a different kind of riches. They may think that they have material wealth and that they’re doing pretty well, but they’re actually blind and poor spiritually and they need to come to Jesus where they can get true wealth. So, Jesus is being pretty pointed toward the church in Laodicea, but He does have a kindness. He tells them, look, I rebuke and discipline those that I love. So, He’s telling them,  even though we’ve got some pretty serious problems here, and you’ve put yourself in pretty grave danger,  I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t love you. So, He tells them, listen, you’ve got to be committed and you’ve got a repent. Which brings us to one of the famous passages in the book of Revelation. ‘Listen, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and have dinner with him and he with Me. And if you’re victorious I will give you the right to sit with Me on my throne, just as I also won the victory and sat down with My Father on his throne.’ I kind of always grew up thinking, behold, I stand at the door knock, this was language used to describe a person coming to Christ. But we can see that this is more language to the people who had kind of lost the plot. They had heard the good news but had become lukewarm. So, they started out one way and then had become another. But Jesus was saying that He still loves them and they can come back, they can repent, they can recommit themselves. He’s been standing at the door and knocking and if they’ll hear His voice that will be opening the door and He’ll come, and they can be victorious. So, that that gives us a little bit of a look at these seven letters to seven churches that give us our introduction into the book of Revelation. And I have to tell you, every word of this book has been looked at from an academic and scholarship and theological perspective for so long that we could spend a good portion of our lives trying to unravel all of the nuances. Even in what we just talked about today, there are many cross-references to many places in the Bible, many places in the Old Testament, like the book of Ezekiel or the book of Daniel or the book of Isaiah, that provide the backdrop for all of this. So, there’s no way to touch on everything. What I’m trying to do is just keep us on track because most biblical scholars would agree the book of Revelation is one of the more challenging books to follow. So, I’m trying to keep us moving forward and pointing out some things that you can dive in as deep as you want to go in your personal walk. Because a lot of people think a lot of things about this book and we would do well to pay attention to what it is actually saying and what it is actually bringing up in us and inviting the Holy Spirit into that and following where the Holy Spirit leads us in that.

Prayer:

So, that’s our prayer Father, that Your Holy Spirit would come as we continue to move forward day by day toward the end of the year. And as we watch those days dwindle down to where we only have a few weeks left, we invite You to speak as strongly to us now as You have since the beginning of the year as we’ve gone through the entire Bible and lead us into all truth as You have promised. Come, Holy Spirit. We pray in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

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

Several things are going on around here and they all relate to the holiday season that we’re in.

You can call in your holiday greeting for the annual Daily Audio Bible family Christmas, which is our kind of Christmas party that we have as a community each year, as we go through the Christmas story, and hear each other. It’s a beautiful thing. So, you can call in your holiday greeting by using any of the prayer lines that we have 877-942-4253 is the number here in the United States. If you’re in the UK or Europe 44-20-3608-8078. If you’re in Australia or that part of the world 61-3-8820-5459. The only rule about this is don’t combine a holiday greeting and a prayer request in the same call. Make them separate. We’ll only be doing this for a couple more days. So, don’t procrastinate.

Another thing going on is the Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box for 2017, chock full of goodies as all of the Christmas Boxes are. And you’ll find things that you’ll want to keep in things that you’ll want to give away in the Box. You can get them now at the Daily Audio Bible shop at dailyaudiobible.com. And if you’re in the United States, there’s definitely still time to get them in time for Christmas. If you’re outside the United States, not as much, not so sure. But you can certainly still order a Christmas Box. So, grab one while we still have them.

Also, early registration for the More Gathering that is coming up this April, our annual women’s conference is open. And we have early registration pricing for that. Makes for a great gift. Hope you can come, if you’re a woman that is. Hope you can come. All the details about the More Gathering are at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section or you can just go to moregathering.com and that’ll take you straight there.

Also, in the Daily Audio Bible shop is the Daily Audio Bible journals, along with all of the Black Wing pencil stuff that we have that makes for a great kit, a great thing to be carrying around and writing down what’s happening in your life as you Journal your way through the Scriptures and Journal your way through life in a year. And we have a number of bundles that make for great gifts or just a great opportunity to set yourself up for the new year. And those can be found in the Daily Audio Bible shop, in the lifestyle section. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible here, as we approach the end of the year, I can’t thank you enough. Thank you for your partnership. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do if we didn’t do this together as a community. So, thank you. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. 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 or holiday greeting right now, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Hi this is Bonnie from Virginia. This message is for Joyce in California. I heard your story, which is similar, somewhat, of mine. As my dad also left me near the temple to die but somebody found me and started taking care of me. It’s a long story, so, I do not want to share, but I wanted to encourage you not to give up on your test. As you mentioned, you failed twice, and you are attempting to do the test on December the 29^th and 30^th. If you don’t get through that time also, I would ask you not to get discouraged and be strong and pray to God. Maybe God may have some other plans for you. And I would encourage you to read Jeramiah 29:11. That verse has really helped me because I am also doing the job which I was not even thinking or didn’t even like before when I started. But God has plans for everyone and now I enjoy doing this job. I do the ___ job, which is very difficult but God is helping me. So, I would encourage you to pursue what God has planned for you. Love you sister. Bye.

Hello. This is Sharron. Not Sharron in California, not the original Sharron that called before. So, I’ll call myself The Rose of Sharron. I’m calling asking for prayer for myself and my family. We’re going through a tough time right now, financially. My daughter…I have 2 daughters and 2 sons…and they are not living to their potential. So, I pray God’s grace and I pray for His presence in our lives, that they all would find church homes. And love you guys. This is my first time calling, but I’ve been listening for three years. So, I love this podcast. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Hi Daily Audio Bible. This is Beloved from Texas. I’m a 4 year listener and I just want to say thank you, Brian and Jill and all the others behind the scenes at DAB. Thank you for all that call and who agree in prayer. I’ve never called in before. I’m requesting prayer for my son. He’s a prodigal. He has a great calling on his life and I’ve praying for his great destiny for years. He walked away when he was 18 and he’s been through a lot of hurt and pain and rejection. And the enemy just used it to distract him from what God has for him. He is mighty warrior in the making. I’m grateful what the Lord has taught me in these 17 years to be fighting for my son, learning about spiritual warfare and drawing close to the Lord. But I’m praying for my son and hoping that you would pray with me. His name is Michael. And I’m asking my DAB family to lift him up. And not just him, but for all the prodigals to come home. I know as prodigal parents we’re all hurting. And, so, I pray the harvest of the prodigals. I pray that you would just agree with me in prayer for their destiny in Christ. I love you all.

Hello Daily Audio Bible. This is Duane from Wisconsin. All praise and glory to God. I’m calling in for Joyce in California, who called in, who is going to medical school and has some exams coming up at the end of the month. Joyce, I just wanted to say to you we are calling in for encouragement for you. My wife is a nurse. Her daughter is a nurse our daughters husband, our son-in-law, is a doctor. So, we know how hard it is to be in the medical field. So, it is amazing that you chose this profession and that you are attempted and to get into that. And you will succeed. I don’t doubt that at all. So, I just wanted to call in and give you encouragement, Joyce, to give you comfort, peace. And you can’t be a disappointment. All my fellow Daily Audio Bible, fellow members here, we are all lifting you up Joyce, we are all with you. You can’t disappoint us at all. You can’t disappoint God at all. So, I just wanted you to know that is a blessing that you’re going into that field because I assume you want to help people and I have no doubt that you will pass your exam. You’ve forgiven your parents, what an uplifting story that was. Thank you for that story, Joyce. So, I just want you to know that we are lifting you up and we will be with you. And, please, keep us informed on those exams and we’ll keep you in prayers, always. Calling in for Patricia in Minnesota also. She wanted to just call in about her son Tony. He is taking a trip to Vegas. We want you to know, Patricia, that we pray that the Lord be with your son and that he will stay on the right side and be safe. So, like to lift that up along, independent on him ___ with your husband and your marriage. Lifting that up as well. Lifting this all up. In Jesus’ name. Amen. God bless and love you.

Hi. This is Victoria S. I’m just calling to pray for some of the DABbers. Sorry I haven’t been able to call. My calls have been getting blocked, but I just thank God that tonight that God has allowed it to be unblocked so that I could reach Amy. Oh my God, Amy, my heart goes out to you. You’re beautiful mom that somebody hit. The Bible says, in the last days the heart of many will be wax cold. But we are faithful. God is faithful and God is able. We need to pray to God that they find who it is. But I’m sorry that your mom died. I pray that God would be with her, that she’s at peace now, and not in pain. Lord, in the name of Jesus, You touch Amy and You touch her Lord, in a mighty and special way. You touch that family. Oh, Father, in the name of Jesus, You rebuke the enemy on every hand and cast them out of their lives. Oh, Father, we pray in the name of Jesus. Lord, You have Your way Father, in the name of Jesus. Lord, I also want to pray for our sister on last night. She was going through with her husband and was going through a divorce. I don’t remember her name, but Lord, I ask you to touch her Lord. I ask You to touch her and I ask you to touch that marriage. You touch that husband Lord. You touch that heart and you open up his blinded eyes and let him see what he has in the wife that he has. Lord, You have Your way. I thank You for touching the DABbers. Touch those that need You Lord. Touch those that feel like they are about to give up. Touch those that feel like they need a man Lord. You bless them and show them the man that You have for them. Oh Lord, in the name of Jesus. Lord, You touch my sister Gloria and You open up doors on her mom Lord. You bless her that her mom be able to come and spend Christmas with her and that she’ll be able to be with her permanently. Lord, You have Your way Father. I thank You for this broadcast and I thank You for Your people. I give You the glory and the honor and the praise. In the mighty name…

Hello Daily Audio Bible family. This is Nathan from Bloomington Illinois. I know it’s been several months before I called in but I listen every day and I pray along with most of you guys. So, I just want to let you know. When I first started listening to the DAB, which was…I don’t know…several years ago….six of seven years ago…my goal was to just get through the Bible. I just wanted to read through the bible and be done. And, so, I was skipping the prayers and all those kind of things. But, you know, I reached my goal. I got it done. And then I still felt just as empty because I felt like I did it for the wrong reason. It’s December. It’s already…this year’s almost over and…which means we have a choice. December 31^st rolls around to January 1^st and are we going to stick with it? Are we going to continue on? Because this isn’t just about getting through the bible in one year. It’s about community through the bible. And, I don’t know about you all, but I’m going on. I don’t know how many times I’ve been through the bible. I don’t even count, but this is family and I’m here for the family. So, that’s my word for today. I hope to see around in the middle of the year 2018. So, have a great day. Make it a great day.

Amos 4:1-6:14, Revelations 2:18-3:6, Psalms 130:1-8, Proverbs 29:21-22

Today is the 11^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s great to be here with you as we fully immerse ourselves in this brand-new week. And from our Old Testament reading, we are smack in the middle of the book of Amos. We will conclude that tomorrow. And, of course, we’re working our way through the book of Revelation in the New Testament. But first, the book of Amos. We’re reading from the Holman Christian Standard Bible this week. Amos 4:1 through 6:14 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So, as we go through the book of Revelation it’s important that we try to keep our place and that we try to approach it with new ears. And what I mean by that is, that the book of Revelation has a lot swirling around it. A lot of people think of it as the scary book of the Bible because it has to do with the end and it’s full of symbolism and people try to make that symbolism a lot of things. And, so, there’s incredibly diverse interpretation. So, we need to try to keep track. So, basically where we are is that John is on the island of Patmos and he hears a trumpet call and he turns around and their seven golden lampstands with Jesus in the middle of them holding seven stars. And Jesus tells John to write down what he hears, what he sees. And we learned that these lampstands represent seven specific churches, not churches that are symbols, actual real churches that exist at this time. And, so, as John is basically taking this dictation from Jesus and writing the words that he has to say to these churches down, we see that these little notes or letters to the individual churches are addressed to the angel of that church. And although there are several interpretations, we think these Angels of the church are the leaders of the church, churches, because the letters are specific to what’s going on in the church. And yesterday we read the three different letters to the first of the three churches - Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum. Today we read the letters to Thyatira and Sardis. And then tomorrow we’ll read the of the last remaining two letters to the last two remaining churches. And, so, to the church at Thyatira, Jesus encourages them that He knows their works, what they’re doing. He knows their love. He knows their faithfulness and service and even their endurance. And He says that their last works are greater than their first. So, in other words, there growing in this, they’re living into it, they’re doing better now than they were when they started, which is an incredible complement. But Jesus does have a problem with the church at Thyatira. And it’s basically the same problem with the church at Pergamum. There holding onto the faith and they have no problem engaging the culture, but that has led to the problem that they are too engaged and things are seeping back into the church that shouldn’t be there. And Jesus describes that by saying you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and teaches and deceives my slaves to commit sexual immorality and to eat meat sacrificed to idols. So, we don’t know if there is actually a woman named Jezebel who calls herself a prophetess in this church or if Jesus is simply talking about the behavior of Jezebel found in the Old Testament stories about her, because Jezebel led God’s people away into Baal worship, which also led them into sexual immorality. But, anyway, there’s someone or some people who are following this someone that are in the church and this kind of behavior is being tolerated. And Thyatira was an economic hub at the time and it was a working city and there were trade workers. And there were many trades to keep a city and region going. And these trade workers would collect themselves together in guilds and these guilds would be communities of people who did the same kind of work. And, so, people knew each other and lived together in community. And these guilds would have their own customs. For example, there would be like a patron god or deity of the guild. So, if the trade was iron working, for example, then there would be a god that would overlook that whole process. And, so, no matter what other gods might be worshiped in the home, these people would worship that god, the god of the guild. And if you refused to do that, then you can see how quickly you could be ostracized and economically impacted, blacklisted. And, so, people would assimilate, they would belong to the church and worship Jesus but then go to their guild and worship that god because it was required in the culture and then maybe they would visit other temples and feasts and do all kinds of rituals and things and then show for church on worship day. And, so, we can see it was it was just as hard if not harder for them to be in the world, but not of it, as it is for us. And they’re trying to figure this all out. But some churches are taking this too far. And, so, we’ve seen references to Balaam, to the Nicolaitans, to this Jezebel prophetess person or people and it stems from a teaching that this world is passing away and our human experience in it in exchange for a new world and a new glorified body and the family of God. And, so, while that’s being awaited it’s a free-for-all. And the cultic practices of the culture are seeping their way back into the church in the guise of freedom in Christ. And, so, this was going on and Pergamum. This is also going on in Thyatira. By the wording of the letter, it looks like it was going on longer in Thyatira than it had been in Pergamum because in the letter to Thyatira Jesus is talking about judgment and He’s saying time has past. Specifically, He says, I gave her time to repent, but she does not want to repent of her sexual immorality. So, she’s going to get sick and those who commit adultery with her are going to fall into tribulation and it’s not going to go well. So, Jesus is calling out a specific group of people in the church that are living this way and then he closes the letter by talking to everyone else, those who are not, by telling them that there is no additional burden for them. In other words, there’s nothing else, you’re doing it right, well done. And that brings us to the letter to the church in Sardis. And the thing going on in Sardis seems to be similar to what is going on in Ephesus. The light or the witness of the gospel of Jesus is going out. And Jesus is fairly frank with them. I know your works. You have a reputation for being alive, but your dead. So, wake up. Be vigilant, be alert, strengthen what you’ve got left because it is about to die and you haven’t finished your mission. Repent, remember what you heard in the beginning, remember what you received and heard and keep it and repent. Because if you don’t wake up if you’re not alert, I’ll come like a thief, and you have no idea when, when that will be. And in this letter Jesus says you have no idea at what hour I will come against you. With the church in Ephesus, Jesus said that if He has to do that He’ll remove the lampstand. In other words, the light will go out. So, we can probably assume that what Jesus is saying to the church in Sardis is similar. So, we’ve gone through five little letters to five different churches and there are different things that are going on in these churches and they all seem to boil back to the question, how do I be in the world and not of it? In the case of some of these churches they’re true, they’re holding very, very true, but because of the marginalization of the culture that they’re in, they aren’t able to shape and shift the culture, they’re not out in the world showing a better way. They’re getting every conceivable opposition and it’s making them grow smaller and quieter. They’re being true, but they’re also basically being invisible. And then the other side of that, you have churches that are out and engaging, and kind of showing that, hey we Christians, we’re people too, we can do all things you can do, we’re just part of this, we just have a different way of looking at things. But the end result is, rather than shaping culture and being a positive influence in showing a better way, the opposite is happening and their being shaped. And it’s seeping back into the church. And, so, Sardis is one of the churches that is growing smaller and invisible and they have a lot of pressure. The Jews are very vocal about denouncing the Christian faith, very, very much about the business of trying to differentiate Christianity with Judaism. And the Jewish community in Sardis was large and influential, one of the most important in the entire region. And, so, they have cultural opposition and then they have spiritual or religious opposition as well. And they’re finding it easier just to keep their mouth shut and be together rather than to shine bright and be a light in the darkness, because that will likely only amp up the opposition and it could lead to death, persecution, marginalization, blacklisting, all of the things that would bring suffering. So, we still have two more letters to two more churches to read, but we’re getting a pretty good overview of what’s going on in these churches and we see that these are still issues that we have to face today. How can I be in this world but not of it? And the picture that were getting from Jesus is that, remaining true is very, very important, critical, crucial, but also crucial is the outflow of that. We are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. We’re not just here to stay true and wait for the world to change, we’re here to stay true and change the world, and those are different things.

Prayer:

Father, we bring that question to You. How are we being in the world but not of the world? What is shaping us and what are we shaping, and what is out of balance? And we acknowledge that this is different for each one of us. We are in an individual relationship with You, walking with You, and this is different for each of us. We’re in all kinds of cultures and in all kinds of contexts, but it does boil down to what we are allowing to shape us and what we are vigilantly trying to shape. And we invite You into that question. Holy Spirit, speak to us we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what’s going on around here. And, so, a number of things, all Christmas related, since it’s Christmas time.

It is time to call in your holiday greetings for the annual Daily Audio Bible family Christmas, which is kind of our virtual Christmas party together. And we’ll only be doing this for a few more days. So, don’t procrastinate. It’s really easy. You just use the prayer line 877-942-4253 or you can use any of the prayer lines that we have for different parts of the world. And you just call in your Christmas wishes. It’s that simple. The only rule about this is, because of the fact that were using the prayer line, don’t like call in a holiday greeting and then add on to it a prayer request. That’s too hard to edit and make it make sense. If you’re calling in for a prayer request, call it in. If you’re also calling in a holiday greeting, call it in separate. And that’s it.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box for 2017 is also available and going fast. And if you want these to arrive for Christmas, jump on it. We’ve got just several more days on that too before we kind of feel like we’re getting close. And I’m speaking domestically. So, like, I’m speaking inside the United States at this point. If you’re outside the United States, we’re kind of past that, not sure. You can certainly order it and we will certainly ship it. We’re just not sure it will arrive for Christmas. Inside the United States we’re good for a few more days. But the Christmas Box is full of goodies, some that you will keep for yourself and some that you will give away. We have the Advent CD from our friends at Mission Chattanooga in the Box. The family Christmas CD that I produced and it’s lush and contemplative and full of the carols of the season. So, that’s in there. The book by my friend Ian, The Road Back to You, is in the Box. Two copies of Sneezing Jesus are in the Box. A Black Wing pencil is in the Box. The Daily Audio Bible annual Christmas bulb is in the Box. So, it’s got Daily Audio Bible 2017 on it with our word ‘Margin’ for the year. A pack of 20 Christmas cards, the Daily Audio Bible Christmas cards for 2017 with the envelopes, are in the Box. And then, your choice of our DAB blend of coffee or if you’re a tea drinker our honey bush and rooibos tea.

And speaking of The Daily Audio Bible Christmas cards, those are available separately. If you’ve got a lot of Christmas cards to send, we have them in packs of 20 with the envelopes for $4.99. It’s just a great way to invite those that you love to take the journey with you next year. So, you can get those in the shop.

And the More Gathering for women that is coming up this April, early registration is open for that right now. You can find it in the Initiatives section at dailyaudiobible.com. All the details about it, locations, just the kind of questions that you would have, they’re all answered there. You can also just go to moregathering.com. And early registration pricing is available until the end of the year. And this, this makes for a very unique gift. So, 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. And, as always, I thank you profoundly. It’s pretty amazing, what we get to do together every day. Thank you for helping that happen. So, there’s a link on the homepage. If you prefer the mail, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

This is Candice from Oregon, let’s pray. Dear Lord Jesus, thank You that You are Holy and that You are present and that You’ve done everything to save us out of the pit of hell. And even though this earth has not been restored yet, it has not been renewed yet, even though it’s pretty much a war zone and You’ve left us here. You’ve left us here for a reason. You will empower us for mighty things that You want us to do. I mean, we’re just trying to get through the next day, sometimes the next hour. I have trouble getting the vision for all of the aspects of Christmas when my husband of 40 years is no longer sure to do that with me. And he was so inspired about it. And I just heard the community prayer and I know that so many others also have really no idea how to move forward in the dilemma of whatever their situation is. So, Lord, we look to You. We look to You and we know that we have but to keep our eyes on You and You will give us a vision for this moment, this hour, the next step. And that we only have to do the next right thing. You’re the one who’s sovereign. You’re the only one who can redeem the situation. And You love us Lord, deeply, that we can even begin to imagine. You’ve counted every hair on our heads and You will show us how to move forward in a way that brings honor and glory to You and wholeness to our hearts.

Hi DAB family. It’s James here from the UK. Long time, no call. But once again, just inspired by a young lady today. Joyce from California, your request and your story really touched my heart and I just want you to know that I’m sitting here in my little car in a back quarter of the UK after just listening to what you said and I’m just wanting to channel such positive energy to you by the Holy Spirit right now, that you would just know God’s transformation and His peace and His grace, which you already seem to have experienced in incredible ways in your life. That He would take you into the next step part of the journey, and the healing and restoration that you are going to experience would be beyond your comprehension and that what He would be doing would be preparing you for a great, great work. That is what I believe in my heart. And I just hope you can embrace that joy along with hopefully many other people calling. We love you and I know that God has got an amazing plan for your life. Thank you for calling in and sharing your story with us. Bless you. Bless everyone. Happy Christmas.

Hello, my brothers and sisters of Daily Audio Bible. This is Randy from Rocket City. I haven’t called in while, but I was so touched by Joyce from California. My precious sister, daughter in the Lord. Oh Lord, may you just shower Your love upon Joyce and just know how precious she is. And I definitely lift her up this entire month of December that she might have victory over this exam, that she might go on to serve you, Lord, in the medical community. Lord, help her to know how precious she is to You, how valuable she is to You, and to all of us. And we lift you up, sister Joyce in California. God bless you.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family. It’s James Redeemed in LA. I know it’s been a while since I called in. I was just listening to prayer requests this morning, and Joyce from California, yea, it’s been a while since we heard from you. I’m glad you called in. I remember praying for the last time you took your boards and I’m sorry to hear that you didn’t pass them. But, even more, I just want to pray for you now. So, that’s what I’m going to do. Father God, we love You. And we rejoice that Your love for us is not like our parents love for us, which, even for the best of parents, can still be conditional and flawed and based in the flesh. You took ___ the world sees and we thank you for that. You don’t see Joyce the way that parents saw her, the way that cultures see her. God, I pray against the spirit that hated her and got into her family, and pushed them, urged them to do evil. ___. I pray that there would be redemption and reconciliation fully in that family, that as that relationship heals, that Joyce would heal fully as well. Let her pass those boards Lord. Most certainly, let her find her place in You. Lord God, we love You and we praise You. We know and trust that You are going to do exactly Your will in Joyce. Thank You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Hi, my names Tom and I’m calling from the UK. I just want to give a shout out to Joyce, 4^th year medical student from California. Joyce, I’m a doctor and I graduated medical school 2 years ago. I know the struggles of studying for medical exams. I’m studying for my postgraduate exams now. It’s had but God is your strength. We need Christian doctors to deliver God’s healing. God wouldn’t have brought you this far for you to fail. God is greater than any exam. He is the great physician and I’m praying that you’ll ace your exam. God, bless.

God is my refuge and my strength, a very present help in time of trouble. Amen. It’s is Jubilant Perseverance in Indonesia and I needed to call and give you guys an update. I just found out that I will not be continuing my time in Indonesia next school year. I will not be invited to return to my current teaching position. I am not angry. I’m not sad about it. I am disappointed because I have __ myself up and been vulnerable in this season of growth and tried to develop my relationship here through honest conversation and sincere choices, but that’s neither here nor there. God knows exactly what He’s doing with that and He’s still using it to give authority and to make sure that I’m growing. Right? For our good and for his glory. So, I just need to call and ask you guys to pray with me as I job hunt and explore the right moves to take next because I know that God has amazing things planned for my future. I trust, honestly, but I don’t know exactly where my feet need to step next. So, please pray with me for clarity and direction there. And I hope to talk to you all soon with a wonderful update of what’s to come. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Amos 1:1-3:15, Revelations 2:1-17, Psalms 129:1-8, Proverbs 29:19-20

Today is the 10^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It’s good to be here with you today as we take the next step forward. And we’re running out of steps in this year. We’ve got quite some ground to cover, but it’s going to happen fairly rapidly as we move to the close of the year. Of course, we’ll continue to take steps forward, we don’t stop doing that, but we’re quickly moving toward the final chapters of the Bible. And today is the second Sunday in the season of Advent, the season that leads us up to Christmas, a time for us to contemplate the mystery of the arrival of the Savior and our longing for his coming return, his second Advent, or arrival. And this week we’ll read from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

Amos:

We read the entirety of the book of Joel yesterday, which brings us today to the prophetic words of Amos, written down in the book called by his name. And these words are interesting because they come from the lips of a very ordinary person. Amos isn’t trained in anything spiritual. He’s not a man of status or great influence. He’s not trained in the priesthood. He’s just an ordinary man living pretty much in ordinary life. He lived in the Judean city of Toccoa while Jeroboam the Second reigned over Israel and Uzziah reigned over Judah. So, in the time that we would call the divided monarchy, where there is northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. And the northern and the southern kingdoms are experiencing tremendous prosperity and peace. They’d not seen this kind of prosperity since the days of Solomon. So, it would seem odd to by our standards that God would take a very ordinary countryman to deliver a very harsh message of impending judgment on Israel and the surrounding countryside. But that’s exactly what He did. Everything looked prosperous and well, but corruption had found its way to the core of the people. And they had abandoned God and were consumed with idle and pagan worship. The poor were being misused and oppressed. Greed ruled the hearts of the nation’s leaders. And true to form, God sends a messenger letting everyone know, hey, this isn’t going to work, and this is leading nowhere good, and the judgment is upon them. But, also true to God’s character, He always leaves a way out. And He foretells of the remnant that will experience revival and restoration in the land. You would think, after these many thousands of years, mankind would know the drill. And yet, it seems that we are still grappling and trying to grasp the very simple concept that God is God, sovereign, and we are nowhere near as powerful as we think. One way or the other, the hard way of judgment or the easy way of repentance, every knee will bow to the authority of God. And, so, we begin. Amos chapter 1 verse 1 through 3:15. And we’re reading from the Holman Christian Standard Bible this week.

Commentary:

Alright. Let’s talk about the book of Revelation for a second. So, we got started with that yesterday when John says he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day and he saw some things. There was a voice like a trumpet that told him to write these things down and to send them to seven churches. And these weren’t metaphorical churches or allegorical churches, these were real churches, some of the earliest churches that we know about. So, the church in Ephesus and Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, and Philadelphia, and Laodicea. So, those were the instructions and when he turned around to see who he was talking to him, he saw more things. He saw seven golden lampstands. And in the middle of the lampstands he saw Jesus. And we get this incredible picture of Jesus, this incredible depiction, where Jesus is standing in a long robe, and He’s got a gold sash, and His hair is all white like snow, and His eyes are burning like flames of fire, and His feet is like burnished bronze, and His voice was like a rush of many waters, and He’s holding seven stars in His hand, and out of His mouth comes a sharp sword, and His face is shining like the sun, full-blown, full-strength sun. So, John, like all of us would, fell down as though dead, but Jesus comforts him and tells him to not be afraid, that He’s the first and the last, that He died but He’s now alive forever, and He holds the keys of death and Hades, and John needs to write down the stuff. And right off the bat we have some imagery. So, we have seven golden lampstands. And these lampstands represent the churches, the seven churches. But what do lampstands do? Well, they hold lamps. Right? So, they hold the light. They hold the flame. So, using this symbolism, the lampstand is the church. Right? The faith community. And the light is their witness of the gospel of Jesus. Right? The light shines in the darkness. But Jesus is also holding seven stars in His hand, and these represent the angels of the seven churches. And what the symbolism means there has been debated for a long time. These can be actual angels, who are the guardian angels of the seven churches. But it’s also thought that these seven stars could be the pastors of those churches. Right? Or the priests or presbyters of those churches, because what follows, what we started to read today, are seven brief letters and they’re addressed to these angels. So, like, when we begin our reading today, it would begin, ‘to the angel of the church in Ephesus.’ And all these little letters are to the angels of the church. So, you can see why that’s a little complicated. Because we have the cosmic Christ, the resurrected Jesus appearing to John, the human, being told to address these little letters to angels. So, it’s just like you have God coming and appearing to a human being who is instructing the human being to then tell the guardian angels a message. So, you can see why the stars are angels have been looked at as symbols for the church leaders because the contents of these little letters are specific to the human church. Like, the church in Ephesus was a real church made up of real people. And each of these little notes speak directly into what that church is physically, humanly facing. And it’s these little notes, these little communications from Jesus to the churches, that we begin to get into today. So, first up was Ephesus. To the angel of the church in Ephesus, write the words, of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand who walks among the seven golden lampstands. So, Jesus is saying, I’m holding you in My hand and walking among you, and I know what’s been going on, I know what you’re going through. So, Jesus commends the church at Ephesus because they’ve endured patiently, they’ve toiled, they’ve kept the faith, they’ve resisted false doctrine and false teachers, false apostles, and a lot of all of that that was going on, all this false teaching and stuff we see in the writings of Paul, and we saw in Peter, and in first, second, and third John, and Jude. And we talked about that when we read them. Here in Revelation we’re seeing this church, the church at Ephesus, has successfully been able to go back to the beginning, to what they were told in the first place and hold onto that. So, Jesus commends them for that, but he says, ‘I do have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first’. Right? So, your first love. So, look at that. Look at where you were at first and look at where you are now and see how far you have fallen and repent and do the works you did at first because if you don’t I’ll come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. So, what is the first love that they abandoned? It’s not likely that it was their love for Jesus because Jesus had just commended them for staying true. So, a good many scholars would agree that the first love that they lost was their light in the darkness, their witness of the gospel of Jesus. So, they’ve done well in holding onto the truth, that they had originally expected this is change, this sudden change of the world to have happened a long time ago. And now are getting into a new generation and it still hasn’t happened. And, so, they’ve stopped talking about it, sharing the light, sharing the good news into the world. So, they are a community of faith, they are all in this together, they are holding on to Jesus, they are holding onto the things that they were first taught, but they’ve lost their passion to share this good news. And Jesus is telling them they need to repent from that and reignite the passion they had at first, to rescue everyone by sharing the good news of Jesus. Otherwise there is no need for the lampstand. It’s not shining light in the darkness. And, so, Jesus says he’ll remove the lampstand. And then we have this little note to the church in Smyrna. But Jesus tells him he knows that their suffering and that their poor, but spiritually their rich. He knows that they’re being slandered by people who are claiming to be Jews but aren’t. They’re actually part of the synagogue of Satan. And Jesus is encouraging them to stay true, that they’re going to be persecuted, but if they’re faithful all the way to death, then they will receive the crown of life. So, the probable back story here has a lot to do with the Roman empires posture toward Christianity. From a wider cultural perspective, like the Roman empire, cultural perspective, this belief in Jesus was just part of Judaism, that’s its origins. But most of the Jews, they were not on board at all, and in fact, were in opposition to these teachings about Jesus. So, they had no problem being vocal about denouncing followers of Jesus, and saying that they had nothing to do with Judaism. So, they would slander the Christians, marginalizing them. And, so, a clear distinction between Jews and Christians was developing. So, in this little note to the church in Smyrna, Jesus says, I know your tribulation and your poverty but your rich. And I also know about the slander of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but there are of a synagogue of Satan. So, that’s what was likely going on here. And Jesus is simply saying, I see you, I see this, and I can see that it’s going to lead to some trouble and some suffering. And I’m telling you that if you’ll stay true, even if that means you have to die, you’re not going to die, you’re going to receive the crown of life. And then lastly in our reading today, we have this little letter to the church at Pergamum. And in it, Jesus commends their loyalty, their faithfulness to them. He says, I know where you dwell, like, I know where you are and your where Satan’s throne is. And from a biblical scholarship perspective, like, there’s not many people that would say, ‘Pergamum, that’s where the actual throne of Satan is.’ Rather, it’s thought that this is just referring to the false idol worship that is pervasive in all of these cities, some more than others. I mean, there were large temples. When we read through the Bible, we think of the temple in Jerusalem as this amazing pinnacle an awe-inspiring structure, and it was. But in the Roman Empire, they worshiped many, many gods. There were many, many temples. Some far more ornate than the temple in Jerusalem had ever been, temples with a vast horde of priests and all of the support staff that it would take to run something like that. Pergamum was the first city in that region to build a temple to the Emperor, to Augustus, for the cult of Emperor worship. So, this is what we think is being referred to here. So, Jesus is commending them, that in spite of their marginalization and persecution, even with some dying. For example, a person named Antipas, who Jesus calls ‘my faithful witness’, was a person who was killed. Unfortunately, like, we do not know who Antipas is, which is kind of a bummer. I want to know who Antipas is because Jesus mentions him by name. Unfortunately, from at least a scholarly perspective, we don’t know for sure. What we do know is that this person was a witness who was killed in Pergamum. But, anyway, Jesus commends them for their loyalty, but, he says, I have a few things against you. Some of you, some there in the community of faith hold to the teachings of the Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. And you also have some who hold to the teachings of the Nicolaitans and the Nicolaitans are another thing that’s hard to pin down exactly. But here’s a thought, Balaam is mentioned.  And, so, Balak was a king and he summoned Balaam to curse the wandering children of Israel in the desert and he couldn’t curse them. He could only bless them. But, as tradition holds what Balaam did was later to suggest to Balak that, basically, he send the ladies in. If the women could get the attention of the men who were wandering they would go with the ladies and be seduced. And, so, they would be seduced through sex, but eventually that would seduce them to the worship of the other gods. And that happened. And, I mean, we’ve read through most of the Bible now and we can see that the problem of worshiping other gods is a pervasive problem in the Bible. And, so, the thought here is that this is what was happening. And it’s a problem that we saw earlier in some of the letters in the New Testament. People thought an imminent change was going to happen, the end of humanity as we know it, the introduction of the family of God, of which Jesus was the firstborn. And, so, the time remaining with the human experience as we know it or as they knew it was coming to an end. And it didn’t matter what they did. It didn’t matter if they assimilated into their culture and went to the temples of other gods and participated because they didn’t believe in those gods and they were real anyway. And many of the cultic practices of these other gods that were being worshiped all over the place included temple prostitution as part of the worship. And this was kind of spilling into the church. On the one hand, people had no problem going other temples, having sex with the temple prostitutes, all that kind of stuff, because it didn’t matter anyway. And then there were those wouldn’t go into the temple and worship these other false gods. But they had no problem having sex with whoever they wanted to have sex with because it didn’t matter anyway. And then this begins to seep into the church itself in the way that they observe the Eucharist or communion. this would be a feast, a love feast. And we have other examples in the New Testament of these things getting out of control. And, so, this sexual component of the culture was seeping into the church, resulting in sexual immorality. And we know that this kind of stuff was happening because there are witnesses to it in the New Testament. And in some ways, this worked to marginalize the believers. They began to get this weird convoluted reputation of a religion of incest. Right? So, because the believers all felt like they were part of the same family, the family of God, and they called each other brother and sister, and the reputation of these love feast wasn’t so great, and in some cases led to sexual immorality in the church. And, so, you have people that are claiming to be brothers and sisters having sex with each other. There you go. You have this religion of incest. Now, obviously, this isn’t like the teaching that they heard from the first. This was obviously never talked about or condoned or suggested by the apostles. The apostles are totally against this. And it’s not the wider teaching of the church at large, but because it’s so juicy and over-the-top, you know, rumors spread, this is how stereotypes begin. And, so, it’s thought that this is some of the stuff that the Nicolaitans were doing. So, in the case of Ephesus, the first church that we have this little note to from Jesus, he commends them for shutting that down. In fact, He says He hates that. But in the case of the church in Pergamum, we see that it’s present and He’s calling it out. So, that’s how far we got today, but we see at the beginning of the book of Revelation is some notes to specific churches and we can see that they are going through different things. And Jesus is encouraging them specifically but also calling them out specifically. So, like in Ephesus, the problem isn’t that they’re not holding onto the true faith, the problem is that they’ve lost their first love. It’s not shining, they’re not passionate about shining out into the culture and affecting the culture. In the case of, like, Pergamum that we just talked about, the problem isn’t that they’re unwilling to engage the culture they’re doing that just fine. But in some cases they’re doing that way over the top and engaging in a way that is shining the light of the gospel, but is exploiting their freedom in Christ so that they can do whatever they want. And it’s a problem. And Jesus asks them to repent. And there’s lots of jumping off places that we can apply this to our own life. I mean, what would Jesus commend you on? What would He say you’re doing this really, really, really well, but I do have this against you, there is this problem and you need to repent because this is going to take you where you don’t want to go.

Prayer:

Jesus, we invite You into that because even as the words are spoken, things begin to bubble up. And Your kindness, Your kindness is so apparent. You begin all of these little notes, not with what’s being done wrong, but with what’s being done right. And, so, we listen for those words Holy Spirit. How are we doing things well? This encourages us so deeply that it exposes the things that we need to repent of for what they are. And we invite Your Holy Spirit to speak to us individually and personally. Come, Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.

Announcements:

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

And as with most of the world, it’s Christmas time. So, the Daily Audio Bible annual Christmas Box for 2017 is available now. And they’re going fast as they always do. So, grab them while you can. We have about another week before it’s getting dangerously close to shipping for Christmas. So, don’t hesitate if you want a Christmas Box this year. We’re still in good shape and we’ll get them out to you, that is, if you are inside the United States. If you’re outside the United States, not so sure about arrival for Christmas, but you can certainly still get the Christmas Box.

Also, in the Daily Audio Bible shop is the Daily Audio Bible Journal and all of the writing paraphernalia that we have to go along with that to make for a great opportunity to Journal your way through the Scriptures next year, but it also just makes it’s a fantastic gift. There are number of bundles that are just fantastic gifts for those who like to Journal in your life. So, check that out.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas cards for 2017 are available in the shop. You can get 20 cards and envelopes for $4.99, which is tough to beat, but it’s a great opportunity to invite those that you love to take the journey through the Bible next year with you.

And then, early registration for the More Gathering, which is our women’s conference that we do each April in the mountains of Georgia, that is open and early registration pricing is available till the end of the year. So, you can check that out as well at dailyaudiobible.com. That’s in the Initiatives section.

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 prefer the mail, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174. And thank you. Thank you for your partnership here at the at the end of the year.

And lastly, our annual Daily Audio Bible family Christmas, our virtual Christmas party, is coming up and you can call in your holiday greetings now. You just use the prayer lines wherever you are in the world. So, for example, here in the United States the number is 877-942-4253. And just call in your Christmas wishes. It becomes this beautiful tapestry of community and I love it. It’s one of my favorite things that we do each year. The only rule about it is, don’t combine a holiday greeting with a prayer request. Make those separate and that will help us out a lot.

And I just mentioned the prayer line. If you have prayer request or, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Good morning. This is Rebecca from northwest Arkansas and it’s December the 6^th and I just heard Joyce from California, her prayer request. And I just want to pray for you Joyce. Holy Father, we come to You right now begging for Your mercy upon Joyce. I pray that You would give her strength and, in the days to come, especially on December 20^th as she remembers her birth and the things that happened around her birth. I pray that You would comfort her ad give her great peace. I pray that You would give her Your Holy Spirit to walk with her in this month. And every day, I pray that you would give her comfort and peace. Father, she has accepted so much…her circumstances…and she’s willing to embrace that and I just…God this can only be you in her life and I pray that you would continue to walk with her and help her to see how you’re working through the things that have happened to her. I pray, Lord, that you’ll be with her while she studies. Give her wisdom to apply the things that she’s learned. Give her a sharp mind. Help her, please, to retain the things that she’s studied. I pray that you’ll help her to get good rest. And help her to, once it’s time to take the test, Lord, I pray that you’d go with her and help her to remember the things she’s studied. Lord, we want her so much to pass this test and she wants so much to pass. I pray that You would make this happen because You can do anything. Father, thank you so much for this Daily Audio Bible family. And all the people, the loving people that pray for each other. It’s been such a blessing to me. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Hi DABbers. This is His Little Cheri from Canada. I woke up very early this morning and I had such a strong impression that I should call and read this to someone. I think you’ll know who you are because you’ll hear the Lord speaking this to your heart. The Lord says to you, thank you, thank you for staying when you didn’t know what to say, when you didn’t know what to do, when you didn’t know what to believe, you stayed. In the darkness, when you couldn’t sleep, I waited. In the silence, when your pains surfaced I waited. I waited ready for anything, even your rage. I embraced the violence of your accusations and waited to see if you would go through with it and walk away. But then, you stayed. You stayed long enough for me to touch you. Even in your disappointment, you let me touch you. Do you know what that means to me? Do you know how many times I’ve been left standing alone, staring after someone, bleeding my need for them, even after they tell me I’m not worth it. I know it would have been easier for you to do the same, to cut your losses and start over. But you turned and looked at me. You didn’t understand. You didn’t even trust me, not really. It’s alright, I know. And yet, some part of you couldn’t bear to go. Some part of you needed me. I’ll never forget what you gave me in that moment. Thank you for that moment when your heart refused to let go of me.

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family. This is Kimberly calling. There are two gals that left a message wanting prayer. The first one is the mother who is losing her temper and yelling at her kids. And I just want to let you know that I’m sure there's…oh…it’s not a hundred…a thousand of us have been down that road who have just hollered at our kids or done something like that where we either get into a pattern or we lose sight of what’s important. And I just want you to know that I stand with you and I am lifting you up in prayer. I know how that feels. I’ve hollered at my kids and sometimes I got in the pattern of doing it for a long time. And it took a lot for me to get through that and a lot of focus on the Lord’s word and a lot of work in the proverbs about anger. And all I had to tell myself is __ are soon parted. And that usually helped me out a lot. The other gal I want to pray for is Joyce in California and your medical exam coming up. I am lifting you up to the Lord as often as you come into mind. And I pray this you pass your exam with flying colors. And I pray that God honors your hard work. You are such a beautiful testimony to endurance and perseverance and I just want to celebrate your birthday, which is on the 20^th of December and I want to say how grateful and how thankful I am for you being on this earth so you can have such a strong testimony for the Lord and be such a blessing for others. You are so loved. Have a wonderful day Daily Audio Bible.  

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family. It’s Sheila in Massachusetts. I felt the call to phone in this morning and just ask us all to pray for our leaders here in the United States, the leaders of our country. And I’m asking everybody in the DAB from around the world to pray for our leaders, that they experience the heart of God, that they are awakened by the Holy Spirit, that they…just are touched by our lord with the wisdom and the compassion and the love that Jesus wants. The politics in the United States, in fact, the entire world in different countries in different ways and everything is just so interconnected…I just…my heart breaks for our leadership right now. And some of the things we see, some of them on social media, and the way things are going, and I’m not taking a political stance but whoever is representing us and impacting people around the world, I really want to be touched by God. So, let us pray. Dear Jesus, Lord, You are so powerful. You have the ability to touch hearts and impact spirits and minds any second. And Lord, please touch those that are so powerful and in powerful positions that they influence and impact us in so many and various ways. All age groups, all nationalities. It doesn’t matter that they have an impact. And, please Lord, we want Your representation out there in the world. We want to be guided by people who know You, people who love You. Please touch their hearts Lord. I hope if will help if we all collectively pray, God answers our prayers and…

Hey Daily Audio Bible, this is Sarah in Chicago. And just calling in with a praise. Yesterday this __ guy ___ and I guess they taught us more about prayer. And it was just such a cool thing to see that some people in this __ myself included be reenergized…myself included…and be re-encouraged to try prayer. So, let’s pray. God thanks so much for today. Thank You that you give ___ of encouragement along ones path. That You strengthen us in __ ways and that You are capable of working in spite of our poor motives or great motives, whatever they may be. I ask that You would encourage every person that hears the Daily Audio Bible today, that their souls would be revived. And especially going into this holiday season, that people who have lost loved ones or have broken hearts that You would show them in such a beautiful way that You are near to the broken hearted and ___ in spirit. Thank you so much for Brian and his family. We ask that You would protect them from the evil one and that you’d give them wisdom on how to continue spreading Your light and Your love and Your truth through the Daily Audio Bible. Amen. Bye guys.

Hi. My name is Sheila. I’m calling from South Carolina. And this is my first time calling and I’ve been listening for a while and I’m getting…so sorry…I’ll try to get it together…and I don’t cry pretty…so I hope you can understand me. My heart is broken for my daughter. First, I want to back up, Jill, Brian, thank you for all you do. I’ve been listening or a while, like I mentioned and…I just…you’re the first thing that happens in the morning. I grab my phone and listen in. I want to be with my brothers and sisters in the Lord. Alright, so, back to my daughter. The bottom line, she’s 37 with a little 3-year-old and a 10-month-old and out of the blue had asked her husband for a divorce and it was quite clear, she’s having an affair. And, so, it’s very clear to me, she’s been in pain for a while. As to what is at the root of that pain, I don’t know. So, I know with pain going unresolved it can push into very dark places. And there’s no bottom to that pit. So, I would appreciate your prayers and I appreciate all of you. And just thank you so much and standing with you all in prayer as well. Alright, thank you family.

Joel 1:1-3:21, Revelations 1:1-20, Psalms 128:1-6, Proverbs 29:18

Today is the 9^th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian and, of course, it is always great to be together around the global campfire. And as it gets colder and colder outside, it’s warmer and warmer when we’re snuggled up in community. So, it’s great to be here with you today. And today marks a little bit of a shift. And that is this, for the last little while we’ve been moving more rapidly through the New Testament, as we read through a lot of letters and those are shorter documents. Today, we reached the final book of the New Testament and will be spending the rest of the year in that book, the book of Revelation. At the same time, we’re moving through, what is known as the minor prophets, not so much because the profits were minor, but because the books are shorter, some as short as the letters that we read in the New Testament. And we’ll start moving more rapidly through the Old Testament. So, for example, in just a second, we’re going to read in its entirety, the book of Joel from the Old Testament.

Joel:

So, let’s talk about the book of Joel. The prophet, Joel, wrote this book of prophecy, more than likely, somewhere around the mid-800s BC. So, we’re talking seven or eight centuries before Jesus. And he writes of a vast horde of locusts that have invaded the land and subsequently obliterated the crops and just about everything else causing great famine. And he uses this natural disaster as his backdrop to call the children of Israel toward repentance. And, as is true with most of the Bible, this brings the children of Israel to a fork in the road where a choice must be made. They can return to God and enjoy his blessings and restoration or they can continue to reject God and face what is called the day of the Lord, the day of God’s judgment. And of course, as we can see the arching narrative of the Bible, it’s not ever God’s will that His people suffer these terrible repercussions. So, He’s constantly calling them back, just like He still does today. And we’ll see that there is some of the most beautiful promises of restoration and hope that we’ll find in the entire Bible. And they are spoken in this very short book of prophecy, the book of Joel. And, so, we begin with Joel chapter 1 verse 1 through 3:21. And we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week.

Revelations:

Okay. So, as we move into the New Testament, like I said at the beginning, we’re moving into the final book of the Bible. But the book of Revelation is not really a book at all. It’s more like a letter. But from a literary perspective, it would be classified as apocalyptic, apocalyptic literature. In fact, for a long time this writing was known as the Apocalypse or the Apocalypse of John. And apocalypse is Greek, it means Revelation. And we know this writing by that name because that’s what an Apocalypse is, a revelation. It’s this unveiling of things that were not known previously and that couldn’t be known outside of the Revelation, outside of the unveiling. And we normally think of, like, the word apocalypse as a scary word that speaks of like the ultimate end in destruction of everything, but there’s all a lot more going on in the book of Revelation than that. And there are a lot of other apocalypses. Like, so, there’s a lot of other apocalyptic writing in many cultures, and other apocalyptic writings that were, or that came out of the Christian tradition, the early Christian tradition. This one was canonized into the New Testament. And traditionally, the author has been thought to be the apostle John. And that this was written on the isle of Patmos, where he had been exiled. And there’s a lot of scholarly debate, there has been a lot of scholarly debate for a long time, about who this John is. Is this really the apostle John, or was this a Christian prophet who was a follower of John, or whose name happened to be John? And that continues to be debated. However, early Christian writers, apostolic fathers, so like the second generation after the apostles, so like the grandchildren of the apostle’s generation, identify John the apostle as the John of Revelation. And the isle of Patmos is an island that’s southwest of Ephesus. And the Romans used this island to banish people who had committed crimes against Rome’s. So, if we’re talking about the apostle John writing this from the Isle of Patmos, he would’ve been a very old man at this point. And he wrote this letter to different churches that had been established during the time of Paul’s missionary journeys in the early church’s activity some 50 years earlier. So, some of the earliest Christian churches that were now into and moving into their second generation. And Revelation is one of the more controversial or misunderstood books of the Bible, but no matter which school of interpretation you adhere to, when you boil this all down, it’s a call to repentance and spiritual renewal. It’s a letter to encourage Christians, not to scare them and freak them out, to encourage Christians and bolster their faith in the face of tribulation and trial. And it’s actually a letter of great hope, because once again it shows that our Lord and Savior, Jesus, is in fact all-powerful. And in the end, He remains victorious and because He remains victorious we can remain victorious with Him. And, so, we begin the final book of the New Testament, Revelation chapter 1.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You so much as we do every day for Your word and the gift that it truly is in our lives. And we see the promise today from the book of Joel that You will pour out Your Spirit on all people, and Lord, let us be those people. Our hearts are open to You God. we ask that Your Holy Spirit lead and guide us, rebuke us, correct us, shape us as we move deeper and deeper into the relationship that You have offered us. Come Jesus. Come, we pray in Your holy name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what’s going on around here. And a lot of Christmas things are going on around here right now.

And one of those things is your calls, your holiday greetings back into the Daily Audio Bible community. We do this every year. It’s a joy, a joyous time. It’s our version, as a virtual community, of our annual Christmas party, our family gathering for Christmas time. So, we take these calls for a period of time and then we start assembling this all together and move through the Christmas story and talk about the year and hear from each other and it’s just a wonderful time. And you can get involved in that. You should get involved in that. All you have to do is call the prayer line. 877-942-4253 is the number. But you can call any of the prayer lines. If you’re in the UK or Europe, 44-20-3608-8078, or if you’re in Australia or that part of the world, 61-3-8820-5459 is the number. And you just call in your Christmas greetings. And the only rule about that, because these are the prayer lines, are that you don’t mix a holiday greeting with a prayer request in the same call. Make those separate. And it’ll just be a beautiful time as it always is. So, we’re doing that right now for the next few days.

The Daily Audio Bible Christmas Box is available and it’s full of resources and goodies - some that you’ll give away as gifts, some that you’ll want to keep for yourself and you get to kind of go through and pick. So, that’s available in the Daily Audio Bible shop at dailyaudiobible.com.

Registration, early registration, is open for the More Gathering for women that’s coming up this April. That’s our annual women’s conference. And you can find out all about that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. Just go to the Initiatives section and you’ll find the More Gathering 2018. And all the information that you want or need to know is there. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible as we approach the end of the year, thank you. Thank you, humbly, profoundly, deeply, gratefully for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage of dailyaudiobible.com. If you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And I mentioned the numbers before, but if you have a prayer request, or comment, or holiday greeting, 877-942-4253 is the number.

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

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports:

Hello my DAB family. This is Goddess, the Kings Daughter. I am praying for every single request that comes through. As I’ve stated on here before, I’m not really the one to call in but I am praying in the background. I feel that is where I am called to operate. So, I am calling to speak to my sister Gloria. I’ve been praying about your mom’s situation, and also the situation between your brother and yourself. And all I hear in my spirit is that you should be still and know that God is God. Be still and know that he is God. I will encourage you to read Psalm 46, with emphasis on verse 10, saying that be still know He is God. He is our refuge in times of need. He is not going to…He hasn’t abandoned you. He is fighting for you. Because you’re not hearing from Him doesn’t mean that He’s not working. So, be still and have that peace in your heart my dear and know that God is working on your behalf. You may not see it, but I for one, if I have to tell you what I’ve been through, what I went through all of last year, and I’m still going through, which I need to actually call for a prayer request for myself and I haven’t done so yet. My sister be still and know that that God is with you. All is well. Praying for you. Bye-bye.

Good morning DAB family. This is Spoken By Faith from New York City. Today is December 5^th and I’m calling to just let you guys know that I’m praying and I heard Christi from New York asking for prayer for marriages and that’s always been on my heart. I’ve have a request also for my sister in Virginia, she’s doing much better. She was bleeding out from a vain in her esophagus and have made several transfusions and now they are finding bandings and therapy so hopefully they will stop the bleeding and she won’t need a __. I’m asking for prayers for her. Her name is __. And I ask for prayer for my brother also in his marriage. And today my heart is broken because my son’s wife, just yesterday, told him that she needed space and just…my grandson…and I’m just broken hearted for him. That’s why I just feel such a burden, I’ve always had such a burden for marriages, and I’m praying with him to be able to…just… hold onto the Lord as so many are going through…spouses that just want out for no reason…they want space…whatever it is…it just doesn’t make any sense. God is in control and I pray that you would intercede with Him as he’s going through this very trying time. And I intercede with those that are also in difficult marriages and difficult situations and need healing. Whatever your need is, and I’ve been listening every day and I pray and intercede and I ask you to keep my son in prayer as he’s also going through this and that. That God would speak to…

Hello Daily Audio Bible community. This is Greg from Stow, Ohio. And my prayer request is for all international students that are visiting our country, that they would hear the gospel and respond to the gospel, especially during this holiday season. There’s over a million international students from countries where the gospel is not really proclaimed. So, let’s pray that God draws them to Himself while they are here visiting us and that Americans would reach out to them. Lord, thank You God for bringing these people from all across these nations, from all across the world to our doorstep and God, I pray that You would draw them to yourself and that Christians would be motivated to invite them to church services, to Christmas programs, to befriend them, and to share the love of Jesus with them. I pray that many would find Christ and become missionaries to their own countries. Thank You Lord. And I pray for the missionaries that work with these students, that You would bless them and protect them from the enemy, protect them from the spiritual warfare they encounter and guard their marriages, provide for them, funding wise. And I just thank You for their work and I thank You for the amazing opportunity we have as believers to share the gospel with people who don’t know You. Help us to do it with this with boldness but with humility. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen. Thanks a lot. This is Greg. I’m on Instagram actually on @daily_bible_devotional or you can find me at gospeldriven.org. God bless you guys. Thank you so much for your ministry. I’ve been reading through the bible every year for the last 20 years and your audio broadcast…

Lord, our God, how majestic is Your name in all the air. The heavens and creation all around us declare Your glory. You are the source of all things. You sustain all things. You keep this world spinning and my feet moving. Lord, the cares of this world are threatening to overwhelm me. You know what they are. Help me to let them go and give them to you. Help me to cast my anxieties on You. Help me to trust in Your love, Your strength, and Your provision. Help me learn to be content. Help me know that I can do all things through You who gives me strength. I’m sorry Lord for all the times I’ve relied on myself to get me through when I should have trusted and relied on You. I’m sorry for the times I’ve doubted. Help me to remember Lord that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Thank You Lord for how you’ve made me and help me to remember that I am loved by You and that You made me to be me. [singing] If I were a butterfly, I thank You Lord for giving me wings. And if I were a robin in a tree, I thank You Lord that I could sing. And if I were a fish in the sea, I’d wiggle my tail and I’d giggle with thee. But I just thank You Father for making me me. For you gave me a heart and you gave me a smile. You gave me Jesus and You made me your child but I just thank You God for making me...