Course leader the Revd Matthew Hutton, from St Barnabas Church, Norwich explains:
I wonder how you’re choosing to engage with God during this strange time of lockdown. So, here’s an idea.
Wherever you are on your Christian journey, there’s always room for getting to grips more with the Bible as a whole. And this series of talks over 18 weeks is designed to enable you to do just that.
Paul writes that ‘… the Holy Scriptures … are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.’ (2 Timothy 3:15-17).
That, in essence, is the manifesto for our 18-week engagement with the Bible, starting on Monday 27 April and ending at the end of August. It will be not so much a course as an adventure, as we journey together through God’s word.
The Plan
In covering (somewhat ambitiously!) the whole Bible over 18 weeks, through three 20-minute audio podcasts each week, we will explore how God’s Grand Story hangs together and how He speaks to us through the unfamiliar as well as the more well-known bits. A particular aim is to see how Jesus inhabits the Old Testament. We shall ask the Holy Spirit to draw each one of us closer to our wonderful God of love.
By the end of the course we aim:
- To have a clear idea of what the Bible contains and what it means (to some extent, at least!);
- To be able to relate different parts of Scripture to each other: ‘The New is in the Old contained/concealed: the Old is in the New explained/revealed’; and
- To have reinforced (or to discover anew) the delight of spending time each day in God’s inspired word and of allowing His Holy Spirit to speak to us through it, explaining and enjoying various ways of approaching Bible reading both personally and in groups.
Whatever our stage in the Christian life, we will recognise that we need to know and to love the Word of God more deeply and to be trained in how to read and to use it, so that Jesus Christ may dwell by His Spirit more fully in us and we in Him. Together we humbly trust that the Holy Spirit will enable us to do just that.
Matthew has recorded a 12 minute introduction and the episodes are being published on successive Mondays on the STN website here.
Find more details email matthew.hutton@stn.org.uk
Article originally appeared on Network Norfolk, photos courtesy of Network Norfolk.
