Gospel of Matthew

I have been studying the Gospel of Matthew for almost a year now. Actually a little longer--because I had been teaching and re-teaching the Sermon on the Mount off and on for the year before that.

When I came to Fowler, I started teaching the Gospel of Matthew to our small group on Wednesday nights. We started with the Sermon on the Mount, and then kept plodding through the book from there. We are now on Chapter 25 of Matthew. I am hoping to finish Matthew around the beginning of June. We will be going back to the Sermon on the Mount to study the Lord's Prayer for the season of Lent.

I remember when I lived in Belgrade, several of the folks in the church I served complained about the Senior Pastor spending too long in their Thursday Morning Bible Study working their way through the Gospel of Matthew. One woman, an elderly woman who was very dear to me named Liz Forney, remarked that she would be dead before they got through studying the Gospel of Matthew. She died the next year. The small group had not finished the Gospel of Matthew yet.

I wonder if people feel the same here in Fowler. We have done the Wednesday Night Bible Study on the Gospel of Matthew. Our Sunday School curriculum sent to us from David C. Cook is in the Gospel of Matthew until the end of the month, and then I am preaching from the Gospel of Matthew as well.

Those of you who know me would think I would be bored to tears. I usually have a hard time teaching on any one thing for longer than about six weeks. The truth is, I love doing teaching like this. I feel like I am getting to really know a book of the Bible better than I have ever known a part of Scripture before. And I feel like as I preach through Matthew, I preach with the passion and the knowledge of someone who is very familiar with a particular part of Scripture, and loves what they have learned. There are times, as I dig deeper and deeper into the same Bible book, that I have a hard time figuring out exactly what to say about it, because it has become so familiar. I think, though, that the benefits of depth and breadth of knowledge for me and the congregation outweigh the cautions of familiarity and overthinking.