Sorry, I had to use the title to get the Barry Manilow song in your head, but I DID IT! Cover to cover, I read the Bible in a year. Well, it took me a little over two years to actually do it and I started over at the beginning of the year and did it in less than a year, but I did it. My Bible and I did it. We made it. WOW, it is pretty cool.

It is all pretty summed up for me in the last day of reading of Revelation:

“Look, I am coming soon! Blessed are those who obey the words of prophecy written in this book.” Revelation 22:7 (NLT)

What’s next. To read it again. It’s funny and I am embarrassed to say it, but when I first starting reading the Bible, I did it almost as a “bucket-list” type thing. To say that I had read the entire Bible. And I am excited about the accomplishment, but it did something to me. This has begun a lifelong habit of reading the Word and applying it. So now I start the new year with a telephone book sized Study Bible that I got for Christmas to dive in even deeper. I am fired up and I am excited about sharing in the next year with tools to help my friends do the same.

7 The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
8 the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
9 the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
11 Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward. Psalm 19:7-11 (ESV)

Thank you again for joining me on the journey. We’ve only just begun (yet another cheezy 70′s song reference). Get ready because we are only getting started! Here we go…

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Man, what an awesome day it has been! I got to spend the whole day with my family, we served together pouring love into babies in the nursery at church while their parents attended service and then we got to attend that service which was just plain amazing. Everybody that served in it was just radiating their love for the Lord.

But, a highlight of my day was to spend time with my friend Ryan. He is the son of a woman that works with my wife and fortunately, they got to attend church with us and along with his dad, we got to eat dinner together. You see, Ryan is special in that he has Down’s Syndrome, along with many other ailments. That is not what makes him special though. He is special in the fact that he just is so full of love and hope. When you are with him, he makes YOU feel special. The joy that comes out of the guy is just contagious and it was a special gift to me this Christmas and I will never forget it.

In thinking about dinner with our family and Ryan’s family, it reminded me of how much God loves us. Like Ryan, he makes us all special. He loves us all so much that He gave us His Son. I think we get so wrapped up in the Nativity story on this day that it is easy to forget:

Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. – Ephesians 1:4 (NLT)

“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. – John 3:16 (NLT)

I feel like when we celebrate this time of year, we tend to focus on the fact that Jesus just erases our sins, but it is so much bigger than that. God came to experience what we deal with because He loves us so much! Really, if you were God, would you put yourself through that? I would have to say that I would probably not, but He did and I am just so thankful that Jesus came this day because God loves us. There is nothing more awesome than that. Simply amazing. Merry Christmas.

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When I began this blog, it was to keep me on my Bible reading with the help of friends who would stop by to read and comment on what I was reading. It was with the following verse that this was established:

But you, dear friends, must build each other up in your most holy faith, pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, and await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will bring you eternal life. In this way, you will keep yourselves safe in God’s love. Jude 1:20-21 (NLT)

It has truly been a blessing to write about what I am getting out of the Bible and sharing it with others. And I want to share this blessing with others, but I am a bit stuck. Last night, Carrie was checking out the site and she said, “I love to read it, but I just don’t want to comment.” Without her knowing it, she kind of blew my plan out of the water. But, this was a good thing.

I come to you now. In expanding this site, what do you think would be most helpful to you? Here is what I have come up with so far:

1. Make it a community site, like Facebook or MySpace. You would have a profile and your own blog to join the conversation. This is where I have been leaning, but I am not sure enough people would want to add another profile and password to their lives. Some people just don’t want to write, but they love to read. I totally get it.
2. Make it a magazine site, with others writers other than me to share their observations as we go through the next year reading through the Bible.
3. Keep the way it is.

The bottom line is this:  I feel God is leading me to add more voices and visions from the Word here. The Bible speaks to everybody in different ways to different people. If everybody saw it the same way, we would all go to same church! But we don’t and I love that everybody gets it differently. Let’s discuss, debate and revel in the Word of God. That is the vision for the site and I want to do it in a way that reaches the most people.

So, what do you think? I am ready to start a movement to get everybody reading in 2009 and I want to provide the tools to help everybody continue through the year, but I need your help. Comment below and let me know and let’s see how many people we can get to read the Good News this year. Thanks.

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My friend Greg and a group from our church are currently on a trip to tour the Holy Land. I have been helping him out with some of the pictures and I have to tell you, it has been fascinating following his travelogue. So, if you would like to experience the trip along with them, click here to catch all the details. It is a blast. I can’t wait to hear about it when they get back. Enjoy.

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As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I am working on making some changes to the site and as I had experimented with in the past, it moves this blog to another location. If for some reason you get here and this blog has gone away, you can find it at http://matt.mybiblejournal.com. This probably won’t happen for a few days at the earliest, but I just wanted to give you the heads up. Thanks again for checking in.

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Now that the Thanksgiving holiday is over and we begin looking to the new year, it is time for me to reflect and nothing struck me more in my reading recently than this verse:

Dear friends, don’t be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be very glad – for these trials make you partners with Christ in his suffering, so that you will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory when it is revealed to all the world. 1 Peter 4:12-13 (NLT)

I put emphasis on “strange”, because there have been a number for instances this year that were totally weird and timed out with some signifigant spiritual events. Before I share I must disclaim that: 1) I am blessed to have my health and that of the family. We are great. 2) I am not complaining and am joyful in these experiences. 3) We are blessed to have problems like this, but you still need to break out the Maylox bottle anyhow. 4) If this is “sharing in Christ’s suffering”, I am totally getting off easy. Nothing compares to that!

A number of things happened to me over the last year that have been crazy. They include:

• We had a blow out on the freeway coming home from California. Happens all the time, right? We were racing home to serve at church at the time! Funny how that happens! Evil has its ways. The girls still made in time to serve. YAY GOD!
• The day before I was to leave to go to High School Church camp our air conditioning went out. Oh yeah, it was 105 degrees outside. Thank you God for such wonderful parents who could come help out financially and emotionally. They are a true blessing to our family.
• I got laid off from a job that I loved. A blessing in disguise, but still a hard pill to swallow at the time.
• My laptop fried recently. Just as I am getting ready to take this website to a God-sized vision. Again, it’s mysterious timing to me.

I have to reiterate, I am not trying to whine and complain about these things, which is why it took me so long to actually write about them. That is the last thing that I want to do. I just found it interesting how this came about when I am getting ready to read through the entire Bible, from start to finish, for the first time and I am more connected to the Church body than ever before. It has been so exciting to connect with the Living Word online and off and this verse from 1 Peter really kind of summed it up. Like it says, strange…

So there you have it, major spiritual growth. I know there is more on the way and I can’t wait. Thanks for taking the journey with me.

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Not High School Musical or Camp Rock! Seriously, there has been way too much Disney Channel in this home. But, my chance to escape was with High School students enjoying the wonder of God’s Creation in the Durango, Colorado area and learning in His Word. It was awesome and I have yet to fully recover. In fact, I debated posting because I am still wiped out. It was full of activity at 12,000 feet up and I have been reflecting on how He worked on me with those students, so I have not gotten the rest that I need. And although I was able to help Greg with his posting (you can read the play by play at his blog), I didn’t have the opportunity to blog while I was there. But here is some stuff that I took away from camp:

• My friend Fred and I were in charge of team building activities. We made a good team taking a couple of each to make our own and it was so cool. I really enjoyed Fred’s Blind Faith Obstacle Course and Self Control Gum activities. It was fun to work on those with him.
• Speaking of which, Fred is a total Levite. Dude is strong! He could put the giant grill together in about 5 minutes and I marveled at his abilities. It was such an honor to serve along with him.
• It was awesome to serve along with my daughter who was babysitting Greg’s daughter. I was so proud of her.
• The students were stellar. They were digging all the messages that they were taught and got along so well. God was pouring into them and they were loving it.
• I love my guys from Two Days Til Tomorrow. One of the highlights for me was when they got together in front of the condos and just started playing worship songs with a bunch of the students singing along. It was an incredible site that was made even better when a woman who was also staying there walked by and asked me, “Are you a part of this?” When I told her that I was she said, “That is so wonderful, good for you guys.” Man, was my heart filled with joy.

Finally, I got to get up in front of the group and present a couple of our team building activities and it was awesome! I hate to overuse that word “awesome”, but there is really no other word to describe it. On the day of our hike, I reminded the students how it represented our walk with Christ and how we should support each other the entire way. I dug into the book of Romans for this:

We who are strong must be consderate of those who are sensitive about things like this. We must not just please ourselves. We should help others do what is right and build them up in the Lord. Romans 15:1-2 (NLT)

Being in the advertising business, my favorite activitiy that I got to lead was the “Commercial for God”. We gave the students up to 2 minutes to do a commercial that would sell God to somebody who had never heard about His glory and the students nailed it. They had a blast, but more importantly, they brainstormed ideas that would help them in conversations with their friends that don’t yet know Christ. Again, awesome.

And although we had a blast with the activites at the ski resort, hiking in the mountains and white river rafting, it was very spiritual and reminded me of the believers in the book of Acts:

All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper), and to prayer. Acts 2:42 (NLT)

God is working in me BIG TIME and I just have to thank all the students, pastors and adults that were there. I think everybody had pretty much the same take away and I makes me even more anxious for each Sunday and next summer. What a way to start the new school year. Big things are coming. I will keep you posted.

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As Christians, we’ve all had the conversation with other Christians. It is the “my Church is better than your Church” conversation. Now, we would never say that, but it begins as, “This weekend was incredible at my Church. Pastor Soandso said…”. At which point, your friend says, “Well, my Church was even more incredible…”. The fact is, we are all one Church and that is why I was so excited when I found out about the One Prayer series.

Now that we are half way through the One Prayer series, I thought it might be finally time to write about it. Actually, I knew this series was coming a month before it did and I wanted to blog about it then, but teachiing and summer got a hold of me and I was unable to. It is incredible to participate in this with Palm Valley Church, along with so many other churches around the world. I can’t explain it as well as Craig Groeschel:

All of which leads me to this: In my Daily Read a couple of days ago, I came upon Acts 10 and 11, where Peter is summoned to Caesarea where the Holy Spirit comes upon the Gentiles, whom the Jews believe should not be a part of this new church. When Peter arrives back in Jerusalem, he’s getting the business from the Jewish believers and he responds with the best comeback ever:

“And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God’s way?” Acts 11:17 (NLT)

Yep, we’re all in this together folks. This series and movement is incredible. Building churches in other nations, uniting established churches around the world and learning from other great teachers from around the country. Now this is God-sized vision and it is fun to be along for it all. It is awesome to, as the One Prayer website explains it, “Refocus our understanding of the Church as a body of believers instead of a physical location.”

So, what’s your One Prayer? Good stuff…

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I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post it, but in the end, I thought that some of my family from out of town might want to see it. Now understand, I have a little pipsqueek video camera that was at the back of this room and I don’t think it was made for this type of thing. Perhaps if I had zoomed in more, you might be able to see my facial features, but I doubt it. So here you have it, my first lesson:

So there you have it. If you made it through at least one minute of it, I congratulate you. It is pretty hard to watch because of the quality, but I appreciate the effort. It has peaked my interest in video though. We need to get a better camera! Thanks for everybody’s support!

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Growing up in the Prielipp household, there are a couple of things that stand out. Working hard is first and foremost, but I also grew up watching NBC News. Whether it was local or national, we usually had it on Channel 4, which grew my other fascination to find a career in media, the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, because the TV stayed on that channel. There were no remote controls! The last time I put anything on the Internet about a media personality was at Johnny’s death, but today I am posting about any even bigger influence on my adult life, Tim Russert. Today, God took him home at age 58 and I realized the impact that he has had on my life, but not just because he was on television.

This past weekend, I had the privledge of teaching the students at Palm Valley Church about the gifts that God gives us and how we can use and share them with others. Sometimes when we are growing up, our gifts are not the same as our family’s and that can be challenging, yet rewarding. The calling to go into media is one of those. In the tributes that I have seen, Tim Russert seems to have followed this path. He got a law degree and he then went into media! What was he thinking! Yet, he became a person who worked really hard that we could trust and learn from on TV. It is rare and he will be missed.

But what I have gotten out of today’s tributes the most was his faith. Everybody that has been interviewed has mentioned his faith and love for his family. In fact, they have probably mentioned that more than anything. How great is that, that NEWS PEOPLE have been praising his faith! Let me tell you, this is a big step for people who for the most part need to see to believe. But he lived it and everybody saw it. In fact, I heard on FOX News that he had just gotten off a flight from Rome and the Vatican before he passed. He had been following his faith right before his was taken Home.

It’s God’s plan, not ours and we need to live it everyday, even if you are in the media! It is all about living the faith while we are here because we never know when we won’t have the chance to show it any more. Thank you Tim Russert for reminding me that I can live my faith and pass it on to others, even in the media. Rest in Peace my friend and thanks for teaching me a lot about this great place that we live in.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. Ephisians 2:8-9 (NKJV)

Thanks again for the reminder Tim.

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