A New Course, Some Milestones, and Other Things to Look Forward to!

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A New Course, Some Milestones, and Other Things to Look Forward to!

August 30, 2020

Find out more about and sign up for my forthcoming Davenant Hall course here: https://davenantinstitute.org/davenant-hall.

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Transcript

Welcome back. I wanted to take the opportunity to give a brief update on some of the things that I've been doing, some of the things to look forward to, and other things on the horizon. In the next month or so, I'm going to be teaching a new course on the subject of natural law and scripture with Brad Littlejohn for the Davenant Institute.

This is going to be a very intense, in-depth look at the relationship between nature and scripture as the two books of God's revelation. We'll be getting into works by Thomas Aquinas, by John Calvin, Hooker, and a number of others. I highly recommend this course.

Brad and I will be co-teaching it. It will be two hours of Zoom conference a week. You will have the recordings of the conference if you're not able to attend.

It will be an in-depth, discussion-heavy, interactive course, and there will be a lot of material to get your teeth into. Our courses in the Davenant Institute are designed to be accessible for a wide audience. They're designed also to be stimulating, to get you into the depths of a particular subject.

So it's not just learning broadly, but learning how to think deeply about particular texts. So I highly recommend that. If you'd like to find more, I will leave notes in the show notes below.

Within the next few weeks, you should also expect a number of episodes discussing Oliver O'Donovan's The Ways of Judgment with Susanna Black, and then I'll have a number of interviews and perhaps a few questions and answers. So many other videos on that front and podcasts to look forward to. If you have any questions, as usual, you'd like me to answer, please leave them in my Curious Cat account.

I hope to get to those at some point. I have a very large pile of questions that are building up, and at some stage I hope to get back into them. Today I produced my 250th biblical reflection.

I've completed two thirds of the morning reflections now, worked through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, almost all of 2 Samuel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. And today I start on the book of Ephesians. I've also posted some pictures of commentaries that I've used for each one of the books over on Twitter, and if you want to see some of the lists of the commentaries, you can also see them on my YouTube page.

Once again, I would like to express my appreciation for the generosity of donors and my Patreon supporters. I'm not aware of any other biblical commentary of the type that I'm producing, a complete audio commentary on the entire Bible. And I must say, it's really daunting.

I would not have started this if I'd known how much work it took. But it would not have been possible without committed supporters. It's incredibly demanding in just about every single way.

Every day I'm spending hours in preparation and in recording. I interact with a great many commentaries, spending hours reading hundreds of pages, and putting together extensive notes. And the workload is exhausting, but it's very, very rewarding.

I've enjoyed so much getting into the text again. I study texts in detail, but being able to look through the entirety of the text and fit all the pieces together and realise just how much more there is to explore that I've not been able to get into, questions that have arisen through my studies, it's been a delight, and I'm really pleased to be able to share it with you all. Studying through the entire Bible in detail has also made me even more aware of the importance and the value of giving this material to the wider church.

It's so important that we all spend time getting into the text like this. In part to express my appreciation and thanks to everyone who supports me regularly, I've set up a Discord group which is open to all who support me with $10 a month or more. It provides a place for discussion, for links, for questions and answers, sharing of prayer points, various other things.

Every few weeks I'll also have video conference calls with supporters. We can discuss books or we can have questions and answers, get to know each other and also have opportunities for studying through text. One of the things that I'm hoping to do is to go through some of the text that I'm preparing on in these conversations so you can see how I arrive at certain readings of the text.

So if you're interested in that, please consider supporting and I can give you the details of the Discord group. Most of all, please continue to support this work in prayer. I'm truly daunted by how much I have left to do and how I'm going to be able to do it well with all the other things that I have on my plate at the moment.

The remainder of this year in particular will be very challenging in this regard and so your prayers are very valued. If you have found my material helpful, please consider passing it on. It's important to keep my head above water financially throughout this project but my chief purpose throughout it has not been to make money but to provide material that is easily accessible at no cost to a wider audience, designed to encourage them to read their Bibles more and to read their Bibles better.

So one of the very best ways that you can support this project is by spreading the news and getting people involved and reading through the Bible for themselves. Thank you so much for your support and Lord willing, there will be a number of exciting things happening in the next few weeks and months. God bless and thank you for listening.