bible survey course – 300 words a day

Wondering how the story ends.

A friend and I were starting to read the Bible together. He has been around church a lot, but he hasn’t been around the Bible a lot. So I said, “read Mark and we’ll talk.” It’s often where I suggest people start. “The Gospel According to St Mark,” usually shortened to Mark, is the shortest […]

by Jon Swanson

Context: the book and the corpus.

Yesterday we starting talking about looking at particular sentences of the Bible in four contexts. First, look at the sentence in the context of the book it’s in. In the class I was teaching Sunday, we were looking at a sentence from Colossians. I suggested that we needed to look at the whole letter, not […]

by Jon Swanson

Looking at the context.

My favorite teaching is when I get to walk through part of the Bible with a group of people. It’s how I started 300 words several years ago, walking through the book of Matthew. On Sunday, I was teaching about part of the letter of Colossians. Rather than spend all of our time examining particular […]

by Jon Swanson

Burdens and breakfast.

It was Saturday. The disciples were tired and hungry. They followed Jesus, sleeping wherever, eating wherever. On this day they were hungry. They were walking on a path leading through a field. The grain was ripe. The disciples picked some, rubbed their hands together so the hulls broke away from the grain. They ate. It […]

by Jon Swanson

while i’m away.

I was speaking at a conference about what I do. I said that my passion is helping people emotionally understand the truth of God’s work. I decided to see whether I could illustrate what I meant. So I said, Some of you are bosses. Some are parents. Some are spouses or coworkers. Many of you, […]