Hey everybody. I'm Tim Mackie, 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 20 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 all be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

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

You can find all those resources at Bibleproject.com.

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

Well, this episode is going to be the first of a six-part series. It represents six

teachings that I gave as a part of a series back at Door of Hope when I was a teaching pastor there a number of years ago.

We challenged the whole church to read through the whole New Testament in 90 days.

And then on Monday through Friday mornings at 6 a.m. for those 90 days, we met together a group of a few hundred of us, and we would read aloud

the couple chapters for that day, and then kind of give a short teaching or exposition.

And then on Sundays, as we went through those 90 days, we just keyed in on whatever key

texts we had read that week and used a Sunday teaching series

as a way to explore major themes and ideas throughout the whole New Testament. So this first message

that I gave was about the introduction to Jesus and his message and mission that's offered in the Gospel of Mark chapter 1.

And essentially, it's a way of trying to help us as modern Western folks reorient ourselves

to the actual message in teaching of Jesus, not the normal way. It's not the normal way that

people think about Christianity or what Jesus

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