The Four Most Important Words In The Bible Series

It's a new year, and this morning we are beginning a brand new sermon series that we are calling “66 in 52.” The plan is that over the next twelve months—all of 2023, we are going to preach through the entire Bible. We can’t do that verse by verse, or even chapter by chapter. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible, and if we spent a week on each one it would take us twenty-two years.

So if all you did was come to worship each week, you would get a broad overview—like a 30,000 foot view—of the storyline of Scripture. But our hope is that you won’t just come to worship, but that you will commit to reading the Bible through on you own as well. We are going to use a chronological reading plan, which means we will read the Bible in the order the events actually happened rather than in the order they are laid out in your Bible’s Table of Contents. That’s why you notice on Day 4 we flip over to Job before we get to the end of Genesis.

We will publish the reading plan for the week in the bulletin. And the sermon each week will come from something in that week’s readings. So next week I will cover one of the Scriptures from week One.

In addition, we’ve set up a Facebook page for our church members that will provide links to a daily blog post, an opportunity for you guys to ask questions of our staff and Sunday school leadership, and will link to helpful articles and other resources to help you stick with this commitment. Also, each Monday we will publish a list of discussion questions for the week. You can use these as your Sunday school lesson, or in a small group, or just in your own quiet time.

And since today is January 1, you can go home and begin the reading plan now and you won’t be behind!

So, why are we doing this? Let me give you an illustration that might help you make sense of it:

If you've ever been to Paris you might have gone through the Louvre. It's the largest museum in the world. There are three hundred and eighty thousand pieces of art in the Louvre, and at any given time you can only see a less than ten percent of what's there.

There are only (only!) about 35,000 pieces that are able to be displayed at any given time.

One person has said that if you spent 30 seconds on every piece of art that is on display in the Louvre, it would take you 100 days 24 hours 7 days a week just to see every piece that's on display for 30 seconds each.

Some people look at scripture kind of like the pieces in the Louvre. They know the stories, and they know they're all great stories. They know they're all masterpieces. But they don't really see how they all fit together. When you go to the Louvre you might be in the Renaissance room, or you might be in the Egypt room or you might be in the Greek Room and you don't really see how all of the pieces fit together because honestly they don’t. While they're all works of art, they were done by different artists, over different periods of time, with different styles, and they are telling different stories.

On the other hand, some of you have been to Italy. That one's on my bucket list too. In Italy there is a chapel called the Sistine Chapel, and from 1508 to 15 12 one artist named Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

When you look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in the very center you see the Creation of Adam. But if you look just below that, you see what God created on on the sixth day. And if you look just above that you see the creation of Eve. In fact if you study the pictures on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, you'll see how every picture is all telling the same story. It's all painted by one artist, with one brush, telling one story.

What I hope will happen as we go through this next year is that all of you will come to understand is that the Bible is one story. It's not like the Louvre, with a lot of different pictures by a lot of different artists that don't all tell the same story . It's one picture by one artist telling one story. And that one story is about how God desires a relationship with human beings.

It's about how we who have fallen, who are far from God, who were born in sin, can find our way back to God. And most importantly, the Bible is about Jesus. Our Baptist Faith and Message says that “All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.” So even when we are in the Old Testament, as we will be for the first nine months of the year, we are still going to find the character of Christ and the revelation of Christ and the anticipation of Christ in every single page.