Looking at our world from a theological perspective, this is the Theology Central Podcast, making theology central. Good afternoon, everyone. It is Saturday, December the 21st, 2024. It is currently 4.56 p.m. Central Time, and I am coming to you live from the Theology Central studio located right here in Abilene, Texas. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, those are the opening words to the book of Genesis. They are also the opening words to the Theology Central Study Bible. Now, you may be, what is the Theology Central Study Bible? Well, we're gonna try to figure out together because I don't know for sure if I understand everything that it does, but I do know this, as of right now, the Theology Central Study Bible is available to you, it is available to me, and it is available for a very short time because we're doing kind of a trial run here. We're going to see how well this works, if people think it's a good idea, bad idea. It may be a great idea, it may not be worth the money that we'll be required to have our own Theology Central Study Bible, but I think it's a very interesting concept, and anyone who has ever listened to this podcast knows I'm always—look, if a new thing becomes available, if we can utilize it, I will, right? I mean, at one point we used to offer digital curriculum to everyone, right, when we did our Bible study exercises. I thought it was a great idea. I think it was very easy for people to be able to gain access to it and utilize it. It also costs a lot of money, right? So sometimes money gives you what you can or can't do. But if I can afford it and I can make it work, then, well, we use every tool that is available to us. That is why we are, you know, we, the podcast is available on every podcasting platform on earth. And any, the second I find a new one, we do everything in our power to make it available. So we always use all the technology available to us. Every church should do that, right? Every Christian podcast should do that. Every ministry should do that. If you're taking the time to preach, to teach, to discuss theology, whatever you're attempting to do, whether you see yourself as a minister, whether you see yourself just as a podcaster talking about theology, you just want to use everything available to you, right? because if you're taking the time to put together a sermon, a lesson, a message, a discussion, and you spend that time uploading it, recording it, and all of that, then you want it to make it available to as many people as possible. So what has happened is we have this new opportunity to make available to, well, depending on how much money we want to spend, right? We have the ability for $100 to make available to 99 people the Theology Central Study Bible. Now, if we want to make it available to more people, then it goes up to, I think, $250. I would have to look at the way the pricing works, but as of right now, 99 people can access the Theology Central Study Bible. And I will tell you how in a minute, tell you how this all came about. And the reason I know what you're saying, well, if it's your study Bible, you should have a better idea of what's going on. I really don't right now. Because this all kind of happened just within the last, what, four hours, five hours, six hours, I've sent out a, anyone using the Church One app received a message about it, but I wanted to at least record this because there's a lot of people who don't use the Church One platform, they're not using the Sermons 2.0 app platform, they're listening to us on 100 other different platforms. So I wanna let at least everyone know that this is available to you right now, and I would really ask you I know it's the holiday weekend and I know the holidays are coming up and I know you're busy. Some of you, this will be great, right? Because you may not have family and you're going to be spending a lot of time in an empty house or an empty room by yourself. Well, then this is something you can, you know, you can look into and you can, you can try out and you can give me good feedback to, you know, what you liked it. Well, I don't really think it's worth it. I wouldn't use it that much. You can just be blunt and honest. All right. So here's the situation. If you go to sermonaudio.com right now, sermonaudio.com, let me see if I can get here. If you go to sermonaudio.com and you click on the News tab, sermonaudio.com, click on the News tab, you will see the following headline, Bible Arc, that's B-I-B-L-E-A-R-C, Bible Arc, Study Bible, integrates with Sermon Audio. So BibleArk, didn't even know this thing existed, whatever the BibleArk Study Bible is, again, I've never even heard of it, it now integrates with Sermon Audio. So I looked at them like, oh, that looks interesting. Okay, I wonder how this works. I wonder what it can or cannot do. Okay, I'm interested. So, if you go there and you find this article and you scroll down, there is a video that you can watch. And I would challenge you to go watch the video. Again, go to sermonaudio.com, click on the News tab. The very first story, this was published December the 20th, 2024. The headline reads, Bible Arc Study Bible Integrates with Sermon Audio. Now again, I could play the audio of the video for you, but it would have, you need to see it. All right, so go watch the video. Here is the story. Attention, everyone. All right, that's you, that's me, everyone, we need to pay attention. Sermon Audio is excited to announce our newest Bible software integration with BibleArk, an online tool designed to help users study the Bible deeply and systematically. Oh, wow. Now that, that is speaking my language. That is speaking my language. I mean, if there's one thing we try to do on this podcast is I constantly yell and scream about people, about pastors literally leading people into deep Bible study. and doing it systematically. Okay, great, great. So that's speaking my language. Next paragraph. Arcing, that's how they have it written here, is an interesting new and creative method of analyzing the logical flow of thought in biblical text by visually breaking down and organizing propositions or clauses. You can learn more about this method of Bible study by clicking here. So there's this new method, new and creative method of analyzing the logical flow and thought in biblical text, and it is called arcing. Arching. I want to see this work. I want to see how we analyze the logical flow of thought in biblical text. And you visually break down and organize the propositions or clauses. I mean, that sounds fascinating to me, right? So I need to look more into it. There are videos. When you click right there, again, you have to go to sermonaudio.com. You have to go to the News tab. You need to look into all of this, because no matter what we do with the Theology Central Study Bible, right, it doesn't matter what we do, you still may be able to utilize the, what is it referred to as the Bible Arc Study Bible, and take advantage of this new creative method to help you analyze the logical flow of a text. I think that sounds, I mean, you're speaking my language here. Now, the next paragraph. It's a win for any broadcaster on Sermon Audio, as it will now give them, that is me, a broadcaster, a powerful tool in which to equip their own church family in serious Bible study. Now, of course, Sermon Audio always uses the terminology church, church, church, church. I understand they're really kind of there to serve the church, but they also have kind of opened things up to be kind of a podcast hosting site as well. So I'm a podcaster. So I'm gonna read this again in podcast language. It is a win-win for any podcaster on Sermon Audio, as it will give them a powerful tool in which to equip their own podcast listeners in serious Bible study. If you've been listening for any length of time to the Theology Central podcast, you know I've done everything in my power to try to get people engaged in serious Bible study. That's why we did the Bible study exercises. That's why we were offering digital curriculum. That's why, depending, again, it always comes down to the availability of money, that's why we were buying people Bible dictionaries. We were buying people Bible handbooks. We were doing our very best to try to equip people in that very thing. All right? So, this is right up, you know, something I would want everyone to have access to. Now, here's what happens, okay? Only, so if you have this Bible Ark Study Bible, which when you follow the link I'm gonna give you, it becomes the Theology Central Study Bible. Here's what happens. Only the sermons, only the podcast episodes, Only the theological discussions associated with this podcast, Theology Central, are integrated with their particular Bible study tool. So, in other words, if you have the Theology Central Study Bible, then what you're going to have is you're going to have a Bible, and anywhere—now, this is fascinating—and you looking at the text, any podcast episode that addresses that particular text, it will be listed right there with the text. Let's say you're in Genesis, right there next to Genesis 1.1 or Genesis 1.2 or 3 or 4, wherever, there will be, guess what? Are you ready? there will be the sermon right there in the Study Bible, and you click on it and it will play. There will be the podcast episode integrated into the Study Bible. When a new sermon is uploaded, it will automatically appear in the Theology Central Study Bible. So let's say, right now, I'm going to label this as Genesis 1-1, because we started with, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, right? And that's the first verse, obviously, in the Bible, in the Theology Central Study Bible. So at some point, it may take up to 24 to 48 hours. This episode will appear when you look in the Theology Central Study Bible and you see Genesis 1-1. Guess what's going to be over there to the far right? This episode. Now, if I want to remove it, I think I can just go in and change the scripture reference, but I want it to be right there because this will be the introduction to the entire study Bible itself. All right? So what they did is, if you read this news article, Stephen Lee from Sermon Audio, he sat down with the lead developer of BibleArk recently and enjoyed seeing a demonstration of the elegant integration this tool has with sermons found on Sermon Audio. It's much easier to understand the concept when you see it in action. So you really need to go watch the video. You need to go to sermonaudio.com. Click on the News tab and go watch the video. It's BibleARC and SA integration demo. You need to see it. If you see it, it will make more sense. Some of you are more tech savvy, so you'll have no problem. Others of you won't have a clue what's going on, and that's perfectly OK. your how much time you use technology, age, a lot of it has some things to do with it. But how do you get to the Theology Central Study Bible? Well, here's what you need to do, all right? The Theology Central Study Bible. Are you ready? Type in this address in your browser. BibleArc, that's B-I-B-L-E-A-R-C, BibleArc.com. forward slash church forward slash theology central biblearch.com forward slash church forward slash theology central no spaces in anything biblearch.com forward slash church forward slash theology central and what should happen when you do that i'm going to copy the link here and go open it way over here I'm going to go paste it. You're going to see the Theology Central Study Bible. And guess what you're going to see? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, you'll notice when you see this, over to the far left, you're going to see the number one for the first verse. If you tap on that, Guess what you're going to get? You're going to get Bible versions. You're going to get a Hebrew chart, and you're going to get the Hebrew. Is it the interlinear? Well, it's kind of like the interlinear, right? So you're going to have a Hebrew chart. You can go through. There is created. There is created. And click on it. All right, bara, to shape, to create, strong's definition, to create, and it'll give you the definition, everything right there. Now, so there, and then after in the, there's a little dot. You click on the little dot. Oh, and it's cross-references. There's cross-references. Job 38, all the cross-references, so you have a cross-referencing tool. Also, look over podcasts from Theology Central. Origins of Water on Earth, there it is, and it's right there, and it says view four more, all from Genesis 1-1. And when it says install the app, it's not an actual app found in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. What you'll do is you'll hit the little arrow, the thing that points up, and you'll say add to your home screen, and you'll have an app on your home screen for the Theology Central Study Bible, but it's not downloaded from the app stores. Why is that important? Because if the app stores get ticked off and don't like a the Christian message or something you preach, and they decide to delete you from the App Store, this circumvents that, and so there's no gatekeeper in that particular sense. So please go check it out. The Theology Central Study Bible. Now, here's the situation. We have a, I think, like a 13-day free trial, and I am very grateful they're giving us, I think, 13 days, between 7 and 13 days. Now, I need everyone to use it as much as possible. Look around, see all that's available. I need you to spend time with it. Do you like it? Do you not like it? You may hate it. You may think it's a waste of time and that's perfectly okay. If you're like, well, the reality is I'm not gonna use it. Let me know that because here's the situation. If we want it to be available, for people. In fact, I may be able to go here. If I go to pay, yes, here's how it works. You ready? So if I want this to be available up to 99 people, it will cost me $100. If I wanna make this available for 100 people to 399 people, it will cost me $250. If I wanna make this available for 400 to 499 people, from 400 to 999 people, it will cost me $400. And if I wanna make it available for a thousand plus people, it will cost me $750. So, now, I don't think we would ever have 1,000 plus people who would want to use it. I don't know. Now, this is what typically happens. We saw this also We saw this when we made a digital curriculum available. A lot of people came in and asked for access to the digital curriculum. All kinds of people did. But I had the analytics and how many of those people who wanted it actually were using it. And what you would find is more people signed up for it because it was free to them. They just signed up, not realizing that if 50 people use the curriculum, it costs me this much money. If 100 people use it, it costs me. And so people would sign up and they would barely use it. They wouldn't come back and say, hey, remove my name. No, they took that spot. So then if someone else came, well, then in many cases I had to pay more money and it wasn't being used. Same thing will probably happen here. You let everyone know what's available. People will be like, yeah, great. They may look at it three times and never use it again. Well, unless there's a way to remove them, I don't know if there's even a possibility to remove them. You see what happens, all right? But for now, it's a free trial, so it doesn't matter. It's a free-for-all. Let's get 1,000 people trying it right now, because it's a free-for-all. That's good. And we'll see. But what people see, sometimes people will just, when they see, it's the same thing with a podcast, same thing with sermons online. It's with anything. People just see content. They don't ever consider the money involved to get you that content, right? Like, if you open up the Sermons 2.0 app, right, or if you download the Church One app, well, guess what? It's costing $60 a month for you to get this content. Nobody thinks about it. It's just another sermon to click on. They don't realize that broadcaster is paying $60 a month for you to have that. And of course, if you hear me on any of the podcasting apps, it's costing me per month. I think it's $20 right now per month for you to have access to me on the other podcasting apps. It takes money. People don't realize that. But that's neither here nor there. The thing is you want to make it available to as many people as possible. So if everyone loves this idea, Well, then we're gonna need my, and I don't know if that's a 100, if that's a one-time fee. It just says $100. It doesn't say $100 per month. If it's $100 per month, then ladies and gentlemen, it wouldn't even matter. Okay, it says, so it looks like it's per year. Hang on. Okay. No, no. Okay. Maybe it's permanent. Maybe it's permanent. I think it's a permanent thing. Let's say we paid $250. If we paid $250, then we could have up to 399 people using it. So, if we paid 400, we could have almost up to a thousand people. So, again, it's money, it's money, it's money. I know. So, we will cross that bridge later on, but I wanted to just let everyone know that the Theology Central Study Bible is currently live. It is available, and you can access it right now. Now, how do you access it? Let me go back to the information here. All right, here we go. You ready? Currently there's 2,049 sermons. There are six active users right now. The study Bible has already been viewed 58 times. It's been viewed 58 times since we started this. There are six active people using it right now as we speak. All right, nobody's bookmarked any sermons and nobody's left any comments. All right, that's what I see right now. All right, so how do you access it if you're tuning in? BibleArch, that's Bible, A-R-C, BibleArch.com forward slash church forward slash theology central. All right, so please check it out. I'm going to do a refresh here. Yeah, OK, still six active users. So there you have it. All right, there you have it. Now, what I wanted to do is do kind of an overview of the Book of Genesis. But we will save that for a later time, because I wanted to go ahead and get something right there for Genesis 1.1, like an overview of the entire Book of Genesis. I already have all my notes and everything ready to go. I have it all ready. I have it all ready to go right here. The book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible and lays the foundational framework to understand God's relationship with humanity, his plan of redemption, and the origin of key biblical themes. Here's a detailed overview, summary, and the major lessons from the book. Overview of Genesis. Authorship and Purpose. Traditionally, it's attributed to Moses. It provides the purpose, the purpose is to provide the history of creation, humanity's beginning, and God's covenant with, well, his people or with the beginning of Israel. Yeah, a lot of different ways I could phrase it. So, I wanted to break it all down. I wanted to break it all down, but yeah, that would distract from what I'm attempting to do here. So, the Theology Central Study Bible is currently available. Now, let me go back to the screen. Let me go back here. All right. And yeah, I'm just looking. So if you're using it, I don't know how you bookmark a sermon, but you can bookmark one. I don't know exactly how that works. And I don't know where you leave a comment, but if you leave a comment, you could just put test. right? Just put test and I don't know if I get a notification. I don't know what happens. And if you turn on your notifications, it will be interesting to see, will you get a notification when a new sermon is uploaded? Now, I hear there's like a 48 hour delay, which would be, that would be, uh, from a modern technological standpoint, I don't, I'm not a fan of that. I think it should be pretty instantaneous, but of course, you know, and a technological age, we've come accustomed to things being instantaneous, right? But there we go. So there you have it. Yes, we have 13 days left on the trial. 13 days left. I know this is the... I kind of kicked myself, right? Because I was like, man, I probably should wait till like January. January the 5th, January the 6th, January the 7th. I should really... Wait, instead of trying this now, but I was here in the studio, just a little over to my right, I was sitting in a chair, I was listening to music, and I was trying to focus on the music, focus on the music, and I kept thinking, there's this new thing right there to my left. All I have to do is just open it up and figure out how to get this set up. OK, listen to music. Oh, no, I want to try this. Oh, listen to music. Listen to me. No, I want to try it. And then I realized, you know what? I'm not going to be listening to music. OK, let's go do this. So, here we are. We've done it. Try it out. BibleArch.com. That's Bible, A-R-C, BibleArch.com forward slash church. I don't know how many churches are already integrated. I think there's a number that are already, that have their own Bible art, Bibles already set up. Some of them, I think, obviously did this relatively quick. I'm very impressed with how many did so. I'm mad that I'm like, you know, 24 hours late here. That happens. I'm gonna blame all of you because all of you should have been checking out the sermonaudio.com website on a daily basis, saw the news article and should have immediately sent it to me, right? Okay, all right. I'm gonna do a refresh here. Yeah, it's hard to know. Yeah, I don't really know how quickly those stats update, but that's okay. We will do more at a later time. But there it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Theology Central Study Bible is live. Utilize it. There's a lot of tools that you can integrate with all of this. There's different things available to you. And don't even worry about the Theology Study Bible. Just look at the Bible Ark Study Bible itself, right? Because even if the Theology Central one, even if we decide not to keep it, the Bible Ark Study Bible still may be very much worth your time as a Bible app that is available to you because it looks like it has some very good tools that could be very valuable to you, all right? So please explore it, look at all the videos about it, and draw your own conclusions about whether you think it's worth it or not. Look, here's the thing. You got a million things available to you. You have so many resources. You have so many tools. Some of them work for you. Some of them don't work for you. Some of them are very valuable, but you don't, you just, because you've got so much, you don't really take advantage of what's available to you. That's why we spent all of 2024 trying to get people to use the Sermons 2.0 app. It's right there. It's free for you. Millions of sermons utilize that thing, right? So, that's one of the things we attempt to do. Well, here, forget Theology Central, just the Bible Ark Study Bible. It looks like it's got this whole idea of arcing, this new kind of method to logically see how a text flows. That sounds fascinating. So maybe we need to learn how to do that and become very knowledgeable of that entire method and how we can better utilize that method, whether you're using the app or we're not using the app. So I'm going to definitely make it a priority to try to learn that method. and see how I can find a way to make it, you know, I can integrate it into things we do here. So there you have it. Hopefully that's beneficial. Hopefully that's helpful. I'm going to go here, look really quick. I'm looking at a couple of, I've got so many things open here. I'm going to go here. All right. So make use of it and you can let me know your thoughts. All right, thanks for listening. Everyone have a great day. Have a great rest of your holiday weekend. And listen, listen, listen, listen. I've been saying this in every podcast. Look, you got the Christmas holiday, right? I mean, it's right around the corner. It's right around the corner and it's gonna be over. It's gonna be gone. It's gonna be here and it's gonna be gone. If you have a good situation in your life, family, friends, I mean, you drink in all that you have, every bit of it. Don't waste one second of it, all right? Because there's plenty of people who don't have anything. For those who may not have much, or alone, or depressed, discouraged, trauma, whatever the case may be, grab on to, whatever you do have. And don't worry about what everyone else has. Don't compare your situation, if you compare your situation to anybody else, you become bitter. It's miserable. You can't worry about it. Do something for you, all right? And find a way to distract you from everything else, all right? Thanks for listening. Everyone have a great holiday weekend, a great Christmas, Christmas Eve, just a great week, all right? God bless.