Hey everybody, I'm Tim McE and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebiboproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

Alright, well this is episode two of a six part series.

It represents a number of teachings I did a number of years ago at Doer of Ho Church when I was a pastor there.

We challenged the whole church to read through the New Testament in 90 days and we did it together

gathering every weekday morning to just read it aloud to each other and explore some of its main themes.

And then on Sundays, Josh White and I, the other teaching pastor, we would do our teachings based off of wherever we were in the read through in the 90 days.

And it was a super fun experience, really powerful.

This was a message that I gave a teaching based on Luke chapter 14, some of the very challenging sayings that Jesus gave about counting the cost of whether or not you are really going to be down for following him.

So it's exploring the balance of both Jesus's incredible generous grace inviting anyone and everyone into his communities at the same time giving them a stiff challenge of the great cost and sacrifices going to be required.

And I think many of us, we have a difficult time balancing those two like the overwhelming generosity and grace of Jesus that was balanced by a real challenge and a call to follow and make sacrifices.

And how do those two go together and that's what we're exploring in this teaching called the committed community.

So I hope this is help for you, super challenging for me, holy cow, Jesus is so intense. But anyway, there you go, let's dive in.

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