Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy 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 thebibelproject.com.

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

Alright, well, in this episode we are going to begin a new series that's going to go for quite some time.

We're going to walk our way through the entire first book of the New Testament, the Gospel according to Matthew.

I was a part of this teaching series when I was a pastor at Doer of Hope a few years ago.

And we just decided to do something we hadn't done before.

And then we did a teaching series in four to twelve week blocks.

Sometimes we take three months to explore a book of the Bible.

But this was a commitment to exploring one of the longest books in the New Testament and just going through it every section by every section no matter how long it took.

I ended up taking almost two years worth of Sunday gatherings and it was incredible.

It was a really remarkable experience for our whole church community.

And for me personally, and I know for many people, the stories about Jesus, if you grow up in and around Christianity, there's some of the first stories that are burned into your memory and as a little kid.

And so these stories can become so over-familiarized they begin to lack the power and passion and brilliance that they actually possess.

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