I remember my college strength coach for baseball and volleyball occasionally

standing over us in the weight room maybe we're on the bench or whatever.

I mean, all right, 10 reps.

You bang out the 10 reps, and then he doesn't take the bar from.

He's like, nope, four more.

What?

Come on, n no, four more.

What the benefit you're gonna get out of these four you could only get after you did ten.

These next four, this is the part where it really pays off.

Now you can get everything out of it.

Go, and then you battle and grunt and sweat and he even spit and try to get

out another rep or two and make him happy.

Probably the guy had a point.

The early reps, they don't really do a ton. they just set you up for the bigger payoff that

comes later. Likewise the way we're working through the book of Matthew together we're

700 and some days into this we've been doing this for a real long time, and you might notice that if we could

chart this thing out on some kind of graph, that it's taken longer to get through each successive

chapter.

But think of it like the reps and the weight room, right? There was stuff early on that, you know, it's just all fresh. We're just getting into the story. There's some payoffs from the Old Testament, but like Matthew Chapter 2 is only paying off one chapter at that point,

Matthew Chapter 1. Now we're to 26, and it's paying off 25 chapters worth of other stuff,

plus all of the stuff from the Old Testament

and Matthew is a book that stood the test of time whether you think there's a god

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