Welcome to Gateway Church's podcast. Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

The series that we're beginning today is called Jesus BC. The communications team has done an incredible job again with the graphics and the design for this series.

And you might be very confused about what Jesus BC actually means. I would love to tell you now, but that would ruin everything that we're about to do.

I'll hold off on that. Today's message, though, is titled The Covenant. The Covenant.

I'd like to say also that a couple months ago, I got the opportunity to go to the country of Jordan.

And many of the events of the Old Testament took place in the country of Jordan. And we got to see amazing sites and things like that.

And right before I went on that trip, I picked up a book that had been sitting in my pile of books to read for about a year.

It had been given to me Pastor Tommy Briggs and Pastor Olin Griffin had teamed up together to give me this book.

And it had been sitting there for so long, and I thought I'm about to go on a trip, and I'm going to be on an airplane for a long time.

So I'll just read this book. And the book is called Who Eight Lunch With Abraham? And it's by a man named Asher Intrater.

I've made sure that we have copies in the bookstore at every campus, so if you want to grab it, you can do that.

What I preach has been influenced by this book, but don't take that to mean that I'm saying everything that Asher believes, or that I'm trying to give a summary of the book or anything like that.

So don't attribute what I say to be equated to him, but this book has been very impactful to me as I've been studying this.

And so that's available in the bookstore. If you would like to pick it up, I got a chance to even talk to Asher on a Zoom call for a little while he lives in Israel.

And it was a great conversation. So I'm extremely excited about this series and what we're going to cover.

If you want to go deeper on this topic, I would definitely recommend that book to you. Let's get started.

If you have your Bibles, you can turn to the book of Luke, chapter two.

If not, it'll be on the screens. We are going to start in verse 21.

And it says here in Luke 2, 21, eight days later, when the baby was circumcised, he was named Jesus, or the Jewish word that would be used here is Yeshua.

The name given him by the angel, even before he was conceived.

I know what you're thinking. Every single time you listen to a message, you turn on a podcast.

Every pastor starts off with the circumcision of Jesus. I know it's common. Everybody's, everybody's preaching about the circumcision of Jesus. I get it.

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