Volume 2, Issue 10

January 14, 2025

I was sitting on the couch crying out of frustration. It had been a bad day! 

 

I’ll be honest, First name / friend,I rarely try new things. If I don’t know I’ll succeed, I steer clear.

 

But this time, I didn’t have a choice. My husband needed my help at our family business. For the last 13 years, my job has been in our home, but now that our youngest has graduated, I don't really have an excuse.

 

So I showed up, but I stunk at that job! I didn’t have the answers customers wanted. I didn’t know the products. I didn’t even know where to go to find what I needed. And at the end of the day, I hung my head in defeat. Was I even capable of doing the job?

 

After a pep talk from my husband, I showed up on day 2. While it wasn’t much better, at least it didn’t end with tears. I still cringed every time the phone rang, knowing I wasn’t going to have the answers for whoever was on the other end. 

 

Little by little the job has gotten easier. Not only do I know way more than I ever wanted to know about truck accessories, but also I look forward to the interactions with customers. I’ve even scheduled some really BIG jobs!

 

I tell you all of this because when I first started studying the Bible, I wasn’t good at that, either. In fact, when I tackled my first book, the book of Joel, I literally wrote in my journal, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of this!” 

 

I mean the book is about locusts. What am I supposed to learn from a book about locusts?!

 

But by the end of the book, I was in tears (this time good tears) because God had shown me some amazing lessons from Joel.

 

The truth is we stink at new things we try…until we don’t.

 

If you’re diving into the Bible for the first time or in a new way, it might feel like you’re not making any progress. But keep going. The time will come when you realize how much you’re learning. 

 

One day you may even surprise yourself by answering a question or giving advice that couldn’t come from anyone by the Holy Spirit and your time in the Word.

 

If you are brand new to Bible study, and it feels overwhelming, check out my Bible Study Basics mini course. It is a great foundation for diving into God’s Word! Click below to learn more about it.

If you are reading through the Bible this year using a chronological reading plan then you have spent the last week in the book of Job. And you might be asking yourself how it is that God could allow these terrible things to happen to a righteous man like Job. So this is a great time to introduce the concept of concurrence.

Concurrence is a complicated topic, and though we may not fully understand it because God’s thoughts are higher than ours, it sheds a little light on how God can ordain evil and not be guilty of sin.

God’s intent is always holy, never evil, yet He uses evil for His purposes.

The book of Job is one of the most prominent examples of this idea. Job himself is the “victim” of the concurrence. All of the other players are active participants:

All of these worked together to accomplish God’s intent.

A good definition for concurrence is “two or more parties can act in the same event and produce a given outcome without all parties having the same intent” (Ligonier). So while God’s outcome always prevails, because of the evil intent of the other participants, they are held responsible for their actions.

 

While we’re talking about mysteries in the book of Job, here is another blog post I wrote to help explain some of the other confusing aspects of the book. Just click the button below to read it.

You will be jumping back into Genesis this week, so here is a blog post to give you some direction. Click the button below to read the blog post.

Before we dig into the book of Hebrews, First name / friend, how is your Scripture memorization going? Have you come up with some tricks to help you? If so, I would love to hear them. Just reply to this email and let me know.

 

Now, who is this Melchizedek guy we keep reading about?

 

Melchizedek is mentioned briefly in Genesis 14:18-20. He is mentioned again in Psalm 110:4. It appears that he is a “type” of Christ, which means he teaches us something about Christ; he foreshadows Christ. Here are some things the passage tells us:

Verses 1-10 of Hebrews 7 tell us who Melchizedek is. Verses 11-28 show how this description applies to Jesus.

The audience of the book of Hebrews would have been very familiar with Melchizedek and the meaning behind this passage. The author is making an argument (or apologetic) for Jesus being the fulfillment of this promise from God. He is reminding his audience that Jesus is the promised Messiah who opened the veil so we could approach God without the sacrificial system.

If this is your first Faith FULL Echoes newsletter, you can access previous issues by clicking the button below. Feel free to reach out to me to let me know what topics you would like discussed in the future.

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