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Daily Transcripts
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12/31/2015
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Malachi 3:1-4:6 ~ Revelation 22:1-21 ~ Psalm 150:1-6 ~ Proverbs 31:25-31
Today is December 31st. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. Welcome to the last day of the year and a special but melancholy day for me. I mean, we start over tomorrow but we’re finishing together as a community now and so let's move into the scriptures and allow the Lord to speak to us for the last time this year from the scriptures. We’re reading from the New Life Version.
Commentary
And this concludes the Bible. Wow, I just need a minute. Ten years, guys. Ten years. Ten years we’ve been doing this together and we haven’t missed a single day. Ten years, 3652 days, and we haven’t missed a single day. I mean, I’ve known this day was coming all year. We get to the end of the Bible every year and I feel poured out, I guess. I was going to say empty, but that is not really it. Just melancholy because it is the end of a chapter, it is the end of a journey and it is like the community changes. It becomes a new family and it is different every year. But man, I’m just kind of speechless, I guess.
Ten years to do something 7 days a week for so long and then to reach a milestone…I was just a different person 10 years ago. That's the thing of it, I guess. We all were different people 10 years ago, but I was just starting a journey of obedience, a weird dream, an idea, something that wouldn’t leave me alone, that I was supposed to get from behind the console making music and jump in front of a mic and broadcast the Bible. I guess the only reason I said yes is I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Ten years, 7 days a week in the Bible, I don’t know anything about me that is untouched and unchanged. And 10 years ago today I read the very first Daily Audio Bible for January 1, 2006, with no idea that I would be here 10 years later. No plan at all. I truly, truly thought it was something I would stick to for a year. I truly thought there would only be a few people who would ever listen. There was just no agenda at all.
We try to keep it as close to that as possible because for 10 years I’ve actually held something holy in my hands and kept it pure and didn’t sell it out and didn’t flip it. It's been holy every day and it still is and I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. Now, 10 years later, here we are. Here you are, wherever you are. As you listen to me say these words, you are all over the world. We’re like one of the most vast ecumenical communities of faith in the world, one of the most diverse, spread out, culturally different, theologically different groups of people who are just coming together to say we agree on far more that we ever could disagree about and the only way we are going to get through this is if we are guided by God's Holy Spirit. The rhythm of life being the scriptures keeps our lives from absolutely coming off the rails. And it works.
Who could have known? I could have never known 10 years ago today. I would have never, ever known. It is like 10 Christmases we’ve had together, 2 Leap Years we’ve had together. Over the last 10 years, man, all over the United States we have broadcast the Bible, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, England, Scotland, Australia, Israel, Jordan, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, Lesotho, India, all over the world we’ve done this and all over the world we do this every day.
I’ve thought about what this day would look like, what I would say. Should I go back and look at all the journals and everything we’ve ever accomplished and everything we’ve ever done and say ‘look at…?’ I mean, that's biblical, to look at your history. It's biblical. But the thing is building a monument to ourselves, ‘look at what we did,’ it just has not been the style of the DAB. I feel like rather than touting all of the innovative things that we’ve done over these years and all of the projects that we’ve been involved in, it's probably just better to give thanks. It's probably just better for each of us in our own way to reflect on the last 10 years.
Some of you have been here for 10 years. Some of you have been here for 7 or 5 or 3 and some of you have been here for 2 weeks. But if you just look back at your life and think about the time when the Bible became a rhythm, about the point in your life when all of a sudden you were interacting with God's Word every day, think back to that moment and look at your life since. It speaks for itself.
It's not so much that we’ve done anything magic here at the Daily Audio Bible. This is an ancient rhythm. Being immersed in the scriptures is as old as the Bible. We just found a way that anyone can do it anywhere on this planet anytime of day or night and somehow we’ve found a way to stay connected. Somehow we found a way to build community. Somehow we found a way that we could be in the scriptures every day and know that no matter what is going on in our lives we’re not alone, that we actually have each other, that we actually are the body of Christ and God will not abandon us. That doesn’t make things less hard. But it does, right? It does in profound ways. We still might have to walk the path and some of the patches of road are pretty bumpy and dangerous and uncertain, but it just makes a difference to know there is no way we’re going to be abandoned by God. It doesn’t matter what this looks like. I'm not alone. It makes a lot of difference to know that I'm on this path and I'm walking with brothers and sisters who are suffering the same things, like the scripture says, and I'm not alone and I can do this. I can stay true to the end.
So I guess in an understated way, without any orchestra or fanfare or balloons or confetti, there will be plenty of that at midnight tonight all around the world, maybe just in our own understated way we can mimic the words of the book of Revelation – come, Lord Jesus. Come, make things right again. Help us. We are holding on. We are staying true. We are here for the long haul.
Prayer
God, I thank you for the Daily Audio Bible personally because it has made such a drastic, fundamental, life-altering shift in my family and myself. Thank you for letting me do this. I have no idea why, thank you. And thank you for connecting all of us together all around the world for so long. There are so many tens and tens of thousands of us here right now, but there have been hundreds of thousands who have passed, millions who have passed and encountered this community in one way or another, people that we may never meet in places we may never go, but we’ve gotten to share some of our lives together and it is remarkable. Thank you. Thank you for this community. Thank you for what it means to each of us in our own way. Thank you for the way that it overlays each of our own stories. Thank you for the way that your Word speaks to us in profound ways, in challenging ways, in comforting ways, in every way that we possibly need. Thank you for the way that your Word speaks to every issue of life. And thank you for letting us live at this time that we live in where this is even possible. Thank you for letting us steward your Holy Word and keep it holy and thank you for keeping us true. We step across the threshold tomorrow into another decade and we ask for your provision and for your power and for your protection as we move forward, as long as you let us. As long as you let us do this, we’ll do it and we’ll keep doing it together as a community. So we thank you for this year 2015 and every year that has come before it. We thank you for coming for us. Even as we just celebrated Christmas, you came for us and you lived a life among us and you were God with us and you’ve always been with us. We read the end of the story and you will be with us. You will never leave us. You will be present to us which is relationship, all we’ve ever been looking for because that is what is missing when we try to be our own God. We’re missing you. We cannot function without you and your Word every day in our lives. It constantly points us to that truth and reorients us to your heart. So we look forward to what comes next, knowing that you are good and your mercy endures forever. That is all we need. So thank you. Thank you. Amen.
Okay, well, I could just ramble on because it is like I don’t want it all to end, but it has to, so listen, I know some of you have been here for the year and that you’ll be jumping off and into something else. So I just want to say thank you for letting me be in your ears this year. My deepest encouragement is that whatever path that you're choosing and wherever it is that you're going that the Bible stays central to your life. Maybe somewhere down the path we’ll be back together again and you can just know that we’re here, that we’ll be here, fresh, new every day, every day marching forward.
For those of you who are like yeah, this is a community I'm a part of, I’ll always be a part of this, then obviously tomorrow is just the next day in community together forward. We start over and watch how God speaks to us in the New Year, but tomorrow there will be thousands and thousands of new family, thousands of people who have for the last week been looking for things that are going to order their lives more appropriately. Some people who are like, ‘I need to tend to my spirituality’ who don’t even know what they believe, and that's fine. People who are believers who are like, ‘man, I gotta find a way to get more into God's Word.’ They’ll all be here with a big surprise waiting. They will all be here after a certain goal, to achieve a certain level of spirituality, to find a certain amount of peace and try to find order and contentment, and what they don’t know yet is that hundreds of thousands of us are waiting for them with arms open wide to greet them. So we’re stepping into a new season, a new year, a new decade and man, I cannot wait to see what God will do next.
So all of you, friends and family, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May he make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May he lift up his countenance on you and give you peace. May the strength of God go with you. May the wisdom of God instruct you. May the hand of God protect you. May the Word of God direct you. May you be sealed in Christ this day and forevermore. Amen.
SONG played on today's DAB "Before This World" James Taylor. http://apple.co/1YqkihF
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Tamarie 12/31/2015 16:22 |
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