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Well hello, everybody. This is Lon, as you probably know,
and I wanted to take a minute just to kind of let you know where we are as a church,
because I'm very excited about it.
We are at a point where I think we're going back
and we're recapturing a lot of really
basic information that, I'm afraid, for years I've just assumed,
but it's wrong to have assumed.
You know I went to Bible school, and so as part of Bible school
I got, you know, great survey teaching about what each book of the Bible is about,
and how each book of the Bible fit together...
how God's plan of salvation ran from the Old Testament
into the New Testament, you know, that whole macro
look at the Word of God. And so, because that's so
innately ingrained in me from the very beginning of my Christian life,
when I preach and when I teach I just kind of assume that when I say
Galatians, everybody knows that's about freedom in Christ...when I say
First Timothy, that's all about how the church should run.
Yet I came to realize
a lot of folks don't have that built-in
innate knowledge and I think that that really compromises our ability to fully
grasp what's being said in these books and how they all fit together.
All of that to say that when we got into our Bible survey series,
I really intended, as you know, just to do four messages, to cover all the New Testament
letters
in one message, but I realized (a) that's impossible
and (b) that's not even profitable! I have been dreaming for a while about doing
a series where I took one
week each on each of the Epistles and just wasn't sure, never got around to it, but
this just seemed like to be the perfect spot.
So I want you to know I'm all about expository preaching;
you know I love expository preaching but I really feel expository preaching,
when we go back to it, will be better here if we've all got a better grasp on
how the whole Word of God fits together,
and particularly the letters of the New Testament, which form
the backbone, and really the spine of our Christian faith.
So that's why I've decided that we're going to take
a week on each of the major New Testament letters - talk about what it's
about,
how and when and why Paul wrote it,
so that the next time I say "In Galatians 4..."
you'll be able to say, "Oh, Galatians, about our freedom in Christ.
Okay I know that, I understand that." Also this is why we're doing the second half of
Multiply, because it, too, gives us that
macro view of God's plan of salvation,
going all the way back to the fall and through Abraham
and then into the New Testament. So, this is kind of like going to Bible school for a year and getting
yourself
a really good foundation on the overview
of the Word of God, so I want you to be excited about it too.
I'm having fun doing this series and I'm very jazzed about doing the second half
of Multiply because I really believe we're all going to become better
students
of the Word of God and that it's going to mean more to us when we study it
if we have that basic sense of what's really going on on the macro level.
So I just wanted to share with you my heart on that.
I mean we are going back, God willing, to the book of Genesis and
doing it chapter by chapter again, but I want to lay some of this foundation before
we go back and do that. So I hope you're enjoying it
and I hope you're gaining a lot from it and
thank you so much for understanding and giving me a chance to explain why we're
doing it
and what we're doing, and I hope that you'll engage
and that you'll walk away with a much better sense holistically
of the Word of God. So, we look forward to seeing you
this weekend, and God bless you.