Okay. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him, all things were made, without him, nothing was made that has been made.

In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness hasn't understood it.

That's ambitious. That's the opening line of the Gospel of John. I'm Matt, by the way. Nice to meet you if we

haven't met before. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. We've been doing this for a while. This is

the seventh season of this show. If you're brand new here, don't worry about the other six seasons. We can get to that later. This is episode one of the seventh season of this

podcast. What we do on this program is we pick a book of the Bible and then every weekday in 10-ish,

some usually a little longer minute chunks. We just chip away at that book of the Bible.

We work straight through it from beginning to end. And today, we're starting on John.

And I just read you the first five verses of the gospel of John. And maybe right now you're

sitting there thinking, well, that's intimidating. That was pretty heady.

That was pretty bold. Uh, maybe you're wondering if you are in the right place because it seems like a lot.

Maybe you're brand new to this and somebody invited you and you were thinking, I was really hoping it would be more of a story with characters and stuff and not immediately super in-depth theology and philosophy that makes me feel intimidated because I haven't done much of this before. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're in the right place. This is going to work. It's going to make sense for you. And we're going to talk about it like normal people. We're going to use the kind of normal human language. The goal here is not to see how smart we can sound. The goal is to learn about a book of the Bible together. And I've been around the Bible for a long time. I went to school for this and stuff. I was a pastor for a long time. That went great. That ended well. Now I do internet stuff. I write things. I do this podcast. I do stuff on YouTube. but I'm around the Bible a lot. I'm really into

this. And I was raised around it. And my parents were great. They still are great. That was a

wonderful experience growing up for me. But I got into my 20s and the whole thing kind of broke a

little bit. I had to kind of take it all apart and

build it back together. So in a lot of ways, I'm kind of in faith build 2.0 here as I'm trying to

take a really honest run at sincere faith in Christ with eyes wide open, trying to do honest Christianity. I've been around the Bible

for a long time, and it keeps being more and more fascinating to me, and I keep marveling at how

much this thing wants to be understood. It's a really big book, and it looks intimidating, and maybe

the language I just read to you from the very beginning of the

book of John that we're going to be working on here in this season, maybe that was intimidating.

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