I have 25 years left.
Ok, so maybe a slightly morbid beginning. I am 60 years old (or will be in about 6 weeks and I live in Tennessee (or, again, will be in about 2 weeks). My name is Jeff Miller.
My prayer is that The Lord will give me about 25 more viable years to be able to read, pray, study and write. Of course it could go beyond that. After all, Willie Nelson is still touring the country at the age of 93…however what Willie uses to get himself up and going every day is not something that I wish to indulge in.
I want to leave a legacy. Stephen Covey famously said “There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase ‘to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy’. The need to live is our physical need for such things as food, clothing, shelter, economical well-being and health. The need to love is our social need to relate to other people, to belong, to love, and to be loved. The need to learn is our mental need to develop and grow. And the need to live a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence and contribution.”
This is the beginning of that contribution. For the last 40 years I have been aa student of the Scriptures. I have seminary degree and have served on staff at 2 different churches in the San Francisco Bay Area (ah, perhaps you have picked up that my family and I are moving from California to Tennessee…the reasons are myriad and I will not go into them here but if we ever meet for a beer I will give you the whole story.
And that 10,000 hour rule that was popularized in the book ‘Outliers’ by Malcom Gladwell which says that you need that much time to master and become proficient inn any one thing? I have not used a stopwatch but am pretty sure I blew through that barrier a few years ago.
Does that 10,000 hour mark mean that I am proficient in God’s Word? Far from it. I may know more than others…the church that I just left to move to Tennessee where I was a teaching and preaching elder often referred to me as ‘the theology guy’. No one can ever be proficient in the Scriptures because there is never an end to the knowledge that is available through careful prayer, study, and meditation. Even the apostle Paul could not plumb the depths of what even he wrote. In Romans 11:33 he wrote, “Oh the depts of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgements and how inscrutable His ways!”
I am not an expert in the Scriptures but perhaps in some ways I have been able to scratch the surface of it in some ways that could be an encouragement to others.
The purpose of this project is to tell the story of Scripture over the next 25 years. Even irreligious people know stories from Scripture…Abraham being called to sacrifice Isaac…Moses and Israel crossing The Red Sea…David and Goliath…the stories and parables by and about Jesus. But Scripture is one story and it can be told as a single story broken up into 66 books and 1189 chapters. Even the non-story passages are stories. For example, the letters that Paul writes are in response to specific things happening in specific churches at specific times. The 2 letters to the church at Corinth are stories. The letter to the church at Colossae tells a story. And these are what we will explore from Genesis to Revelation.
This is not a simple task for a culture which is consistently on the run. This takes time…and it will.
This is not a Biblical commentary as we normally think of such. There are very good commentaries and very poor ones, with most of them being in the middle and either repeating each other or contradicting each other. Or, as Bruce Springsteen in his song “If I were the priest’ said, “There’s just too many outlaws tryin’ to work the same line’.
This will be different. This will be a story.
Shall we begin?
Leave a Reply