It's a New Year

   Hello Blogger followers, it's a new year, this is my 100th blog, imagine that, and I'm just thinking out loud here on my first day back to the church in this new year 2017.

   First of all I would want to recommend a commitment to grow in your faith this 2017. It will take some decisions on your part to keep finding something new you did not know about  in your walk with God each day. Some days are overwhelmed with other stuff.Thanks be to God, there is Grace and Mercy on God's part. Think how someone at home would feel if some days you didn't come home? And no one knew where you were? Skipping our time with God could be like not coming home, weird, hunh?

   Having been a pastor for 40 years, it's hard to find new things too. I keep looking though, because I don't want to be the pastor that spends his last few years just coasting on what has been my spiritual life up to now. I have this hunger and thirst for something new with God, I always have.

   So I want to recommend something I found today that is available on Kindle, which is easy, or available on Amazon as a hard cover or paperback book. The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible by Kenneth Boa & John Alan Turner.

   They have tried to cover the 52 most important stories in the Bible so that it might make sense in helping us live our lives as followers of Jesus. They chose 26 from the Old Testament and 26 from the New Testament and make it a five day devotional, Monday through Friday. It's about looking at the story and then kicking it around a little, to see what it could mean, how it might help us now, what part does it play in the whole story of God with us?

   I like the illustration they gave about a clothes line. I remember those. They were outside and you hung wet clothes on them to dry. You still see them in movies sometimes when they want to make you think back. My grandmother had the line on a spindle with four sides so the line was not too far away, and it could be reached by turning the line holder.

   The reason I bring that up, is that in the book, they realize that when we study the Bible we tend to hang up the thought on our clothes line. But fewer of us have a clothes line to hang them on. We don't get the story or the connection or even see how that has anything to do with me. Hence the book.

   Let me urge you to get the book, use it for your devotions, and write me and let me know what you think or how the reading for the day, stirred something within you for improving your spiritual journey. Or if it was confusing, let me know about that too.

   Happy New Year. Please pray for one another and for our country a lot. May the Peace of God be with you.

Pastor Jeff
macpastor@gmail.com