Welcome to a year in the Bible with daily grace. The Bible tells one big story

of redemption, and we want to spend five minutes every day, journeying through

the Bible from start to finish, and exploring how all of it points to Jesus.

Hey everyone, welcome back to a year in the Bible with daily grace. My name is

Christel, and today I will be your host for this special bonus episode covering

the books of Galatians through Philemon. We have been releasing these bonus

episodes periodically to provide some encouragement as you continue to read

God's Word. In today's episode, we are going to be discussing a large portion of

letters in the New Testament, also known as epistles. There are 21 epistles in the

New Testament, and Paul wrote 13 of them. When we read these letters today, we

can sometimes lose sight of the context in which Paul was writing these letters.

Paul was writing to a certain audience during a specific time period about

particular issues. These were lofty theological papers that Paul was writing. He was

writing to minister to the local church and in turn to all believers today. Many of

Paul's epistles were written to certain congregations. We may even see this

reflected in the book titles that are listed in our Bibles like Paul's letter

to the Galatians. When we remember these are letters written within a particular

social and cultural context. It helps us to rightly read them keeping the

original audience in mind. By doing so, we can then interpret and apply the

biblical truths without neglecting what Paul originally meant when it was first

written. It cannot mean something to us today that it didn't mean to its

audience back then. Reading through these books, you may have noticed that these

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