I grew up in a place where September is definitely still the summer. To be fair, it’s always summer in Arizona. But I now live in a place where the autumn definitely starts in September and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and preparing for it.
At church, we will be starting a new series after spending most of the year in Genesis and the summer looking at The Christian Life. From September through November, we’ll be studying 1 Peter.
I’m really looking forward to it. Where most of my time preaching at Ardgowan has been covering chapters, we will be spending 13 weeks on a relatively short book.
While I will only be preaching about half of the sermons, I have been spending the month of August trying to get a handle on the whole book. This started with simply writing out the whole thing by hand. I grabbed a pocket-sized Baron Fig Vanguard and spent a couple of hours slowly copying out the book.
Since then, I’ve read it almost daily (there was a bit of a break while we were travelling). This practice was heavily inspired (read: stolen) by Fred Sanders post about immersive rereading. To make a simple system even more simple, take a few weeks and read the same book of the Bible in its entirety every day.
1 Peter takes me about 15 minutes to read, 17-20 if I listen, and it has been my primary means of personal devotion time this month. It’s an incredibly challenging book encouraging the people of God to stand firm in their faith because Jesus stood firm, God knows what is going on, and he cares for us.
There is much more to be said about it, but for now, that message is the one I am focusing on as I continue to prepare for all that this coming academic year will bring.