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October 14 Daily Reading- Read the Bible in 1 Year
2 Plays3 minutes ago
Welcome! Today is the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles in 2025, also known as the Feast of Tents or Sukkot.
Before we get started with our daily reading I want us to remember to celebrate The Joy of the Torah day today! This is traditionally the day that Jewish people give thanks for God's Word as well as begin to read the entire Bible for the year! It is a common, communal goal to read the entire Bible every year, following the same schedule together! While I will not be reading the same schedule of the Bible I have a chronological study Bible from the New Living Translation that I am considering beginning reading on January 1 as a "Going Deeper" reading or "Second Helping" compared to the "Big Picture" we read this year with the Day By Day Kid's Bible, written by Karen Henley. Please be encouraged to comment wherever you listen or send me a private message on my website letting me know that you would be interested in following along for next year's more in-depth reading of the entire Bible in one year.
But for today, please join with me and let's give thanks to God for giving us the gift of His Word! John 1:1 tells us that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. THANK YOU GOD FOR THE GIFT OF YOUR PRECIOUS WORD AND THANK YOU JESUS FOR BEING THE WORD! Please help us spread the word about reading YOUR WORD. In Jesus' name we ask this, Amen.
If you would like to download my FREE calendar for keeping track of your commitment to read the Bible every day, you can find that on my site, here: https://www.inthefamilywaycoaching.com/pages/read-the-bible-in-1-year
Monthly memberships to support this event can be purchased on my site, here: https://www.inthefamilywaycoaching.com/offering_packages
Today's we will reading the Book of Acts Chapters 6-8:2. We will also look at the Book of John Chapter 16:1-4 where Jesus taught the disciples that there would be a day coming when whoever kills them will think he is offering a service to God for doing so.
In today's reading we will read about Stephen, the first martyr for Jesus. The leaders did not like Stephen telling them that they were repeating the same sins of their ancestors and were remaining stubborn, set in their ways, unwilling to accept the changes that God Himself was bringing about.
In our discussion for daily application we will be reminded that Jesus taught us that all who have sinned are slaves to their sin, but that He, the Son, came to set us free from that bondage and that if the Son has set us free, WE ARE FREE INDEED. Let us be sure that if the Holy Spirit is convicting us of disobedience that we do not choose to stay comfortable and stuck in our ways, having hard hearts. Instead, let us listen to and obey the Holy Spirit, allowing Him to transform us by the renewing of our minds. We do not have to stay stuck in our sin! The SON HAS SET US FREE! Let us throw off the yoke of slavery to our sin and accept the freedom that Jesus gives us!
If you enjoyed today's reading and feel like God has lit YOUR light please click the LIGHT button (it looks like a thumbs up or a heart) and consider subscribing to or following my channel, if you have not done so already.
If you know someone who might be interested in reading the Bi! ble with me this year please SHARE today's reading with them! It's never too late to join in! Let's help this event grow and together we can spread the word about reading God's Word!
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Transcript
Introduction and Theme: Joy of the Torah Day
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Speaker
Shalom Aleichem everybody! Peace be to you! Welcome to today's daily reading from the Day by Day Kids Bible written by Karen Henley. Today is October 14th and today is also the joy of the Torah Day.
00:00:18
Speaker
Today is the day that we are giving thanks to God for giving us His Word.
Reflection on a Year of Learning and Use of Commitment Calendar
00:00:24
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I am so thankful for God giving us His Word. It has just been an awesome year going through God's word and learning everything we can possibly learn. And though it's still not everything, but everything we can possibly learn at one time this year.
00:00:39
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i know this year the word has been big blessing to me, and I'm sure that you feel the same way. If you are following along on your daily commitment calendar, that's also your bookmarking calendar, go ahead and take that out and get your Bible or get your sticker ready because we are about to hear the Bible today.
00:00:58
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It is also eighth
Significance of the Eighth Day of the Feast of Tabernacles
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day. So this is the day following the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Tents or Sukkot, however you like to refer to it.
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And it is our day of having a Sabbath rest. We are to do no laborious work. yay I'm going to not do any laborious work today.
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Well, thank you for joining me for all of
Acts 6-8 and John 16: Jesus' Words and Stephen's Story
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today's reading. We are going to be reading a good section of Acts today, se chapter 6, 7, and a little bit of the beginning of chapter 8.
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And today we are going to be reminded of what Jesus taught us in John 16, verse 2, when he was getting ready to be taken into custody.
00:01:49
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By the guards. He was talking with the disciples in the garden. And this is one of the things that he left them with as imparting wisdom and things that they should be aware of.
00:02:00
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He says. i have spoken these things to you so that you may be kept from stumbling. This is John 16, starting in chapter in verse one. They will throw you out of the synagogues.
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Yes, an hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering a service to God. And they will do these things because they have never known the Father or me.
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But I have spoken these things to you so that when their hour comes, you may remember that I told you of them.
00:02:37
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So today we are going to be seeing that happening. Today we are going to be reading about Stephen, who is considered, I believe, the first martyr for ah for God after Jesus' new covenant.
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So let's open up today and begin
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with chapter 6.
Selection of Seven Men and Stephen's Wisdom
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It says, So twelve apostles got together with the other talk about it. and every day the apostles would bring these women some the women began to fuss and they said that they actually weren't getting any of the food they were being looked over so twelve apostles got together with the other followers to talk about it Our job is to teach God's word, they said.
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And instead, we have been taking time to put food on people's tables. Let's choose seven men to do that job. And they should be men full of God's spirit.
00:03:36
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They should be wise. And they can take care of the food. And then we can use our time to pray and teach. We will dedicate our time to the service of the word.
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That is how it says it in our big Bible. Service of the word, which is so appropriate considering we are ah being thankful today for God's word, who we know is Jesus also.
00:04:05
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Now this idea sounded good to everyone. So the people chose Stephen. He was full of faith and the Holy Spirit. And then they also chose Philip and five other men.
00:04:17
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And the apostles laid hands on these men and prayed for them. Then God's word was shared in more places and more people believed.
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And you know what? Many priests became followers of Jesus too. Now Stephen, as we said, was full of God's kind love and power.
00:04:40
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And he did great wonders. Now there were some leaders from the synagogue of freed men. And some of the Jews there got mad at Stephen. So they questioned him.
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But Stephen was very wise. And he talked with the Spirit's help. And the leaders could not win against him by talking. Who could win against the Holy Spirit in a debate?
00:05:04
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Nobody. So the leaders got together in secret and they told some men to lie and say that Stephen was against God. They told them to say that he was against Moses too.
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And so that's what these men said.
Stephen's Vision and Martyrdom
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And people got angry when they heard these rumors. So they took Stephen to the Jewish leaders and they brought in the men who had also lied.
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The men said, Stephen never stops talking a about against God's law. He says bad things about the worship house. He says Jesus will tear this place down.
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He says Jesus will change the way we live by changing the customs that Moses handed down to us. And so the leaders looked firmly at Stephen and they asked him, is this true?
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And Stephen said, listen, God went to Abraham long ago. He said to Abraham, leave your country and your people and go to the land I show you.
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So Abraham left his land, said Stephen, and God sent him to the land where we are now. Now remember what Abraham did. Remember Isaac and Jacob and Joseph.
00:06:21
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Remember Moses and Joshua, David and Solomon. And it was Solomon who built the worship house. But God does not live in houses that men make, said Stephen.
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After all, Isaiah wrote what God said. God said, heaven is where I rule and earth is where I rest my feet. What kind of house will you build for me?
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Where will I rest? My hand made all of these things. You people are set in your ways, said Stephen. You have hearts and ears like people who do not believe in God.
00:06:59
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And you're just like your families from long ago. You were always going against the Holy Spirit. Long ago, people from your families hurt God's prophets, said Stephen.
00:07:12
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They killed people who said that Jesus would come. And now you have killed Jesus. And you have the law that angels put in place, but you have not obeyed it.
00:07:24
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The leaders were so angry that they couldn't stand it. But Stephen was full of the Holy Spirit, and he looked up to heaven.
00:07:35
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And he said, there he saw God's shining greatness. Look, said Stephen, I see heaven. It's open and Jesus is standing at God's right side.
00:07:51
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Now the leaders covered their ears at this point and they began yelling as loudly as they could. They ran towards Stephen and they pulled him up out of the city and they started throwing rocks at him, which was the penalty for blasphemy.
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The rocks were hitting Stephen, but he prayed. Lord Jesus, he prayed, take my spirit.
Saul's Witness of Stephen's Death and Fulfillment of Jesus' Predictions
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And he bowed down and he called out, Lord, don't blame them for this sin.
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and after he said that, he died.
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There was a young man watching all of this. His name was Saul. And he said that killing Stephen was the right thing to do. Now, some of Jesus' followers put Stephen's body in a grave, and they were very sad about what had happened.
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And that is the end of our reading today.
00:08:51
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So we see here that that's exactly what Jesus said was going to happen. They think that they are doing God a service by killing Jesus' followers, starting with Stephen.
00:09:05
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And we'll read tomorrow how it starts to get worse for the believers from there. But Jesus told them that this would happen so that they would be aware of it. Jesus is so thoughtful of us.
00:09:16
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He even told the disciples what was going to happen so that when it would happen, they would know this is what was supposed to happen.
Openness to the Holy Spirit's Correction
00:09:24
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Jesus knew.
00:09:28
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ah so our daily application is to look at the what Stephen was telling the leaders. He says, you people are set in your ways. And you have hearts and ears like people who don't believe in God.
00:09:42
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And they're just like the families from long ago, always going against the Holy Spirit.
00:09:49
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So we want to make sure that we are not set in our ways. When the Holy Spirit comes to us and says that we need to be corrected, we need to be able to change that.
00:10:02
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We can become set in our ways. And we even have a saying that says, well, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But that's not true. It's actually not true at all. First of all, nothing is impossible for God.
00:10:15
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And second of all, Jesus freed us from the slavery of bondage, from sin. So these people who were coming against Stephen, they were from a synagogue called the Synagogue of Freedmen.
00:10:30
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But really, they were still stuck in their sin. And Jesus also taught us that anybody who sins is a slave to sin. But he who came to set us free,
00:10:43
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has set us free and if the son has set us free we are free indeed so brothers and sisters if we find that we are not following god's word that we are not upholding the ways that god wants things to be done we need to be sure that we are not being stiff-necked and heart-hardened and refusing to change our ways, being decidedly instead of changing with being renewed by the transformation of our mind, that we are instead preferring the comfort of the ways that we want to continue doing things.
The Synagogue of Freedmen's Irony and Rejection
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Now, technically, these accusations against Stephen were, there's always an element of truth. So he was teaching that, uh, Jesus would tear that place down, but he did not, he was not teaching that he would tear it down.
00:11:35
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He was saying that, ah actually, i think he he said that, but The temple itself would would not be where God lives because God lives inside of us now.
00:11:46
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God's Holy Spirit is within us. And yesterday, the angel told the disciples to go out and tell people about this new life that they can have. Remember when Jesus died, the veil was torn in the temple, separating God's holy presence from everybody else.
00:12:04
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And so now we have access to God all the time and God's Holy Spirit lives within us. We have become the dwelling place of the Lord.
00:12:16
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The kingdom is with us. So they were accusing him of saying that they were that ah that the customs of Moses handed down to us would be changing.
00:12:29
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They would not be changing. They were fulfilling. Jesus fulfilled the old covenant. And so they didn't like that change.
00:12:40
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They just wanted everything to stay the way it always had been. And therefore they were slaves to their sin. So it's very ironic that although they were from the synagogue of the ah freed men, they were actually choosing not to be free and instead wanted to stay in their bondage to sin under the old covenant.
00:12:58
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and now their sins would not be forgiven. And Jesus told us that when people would come against them, it would be because they didn't actually ever know God. And that because they did not know God, they also he did not know Jesus.
00:13:14
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We, however, have the gift of knowing Jesus and knowing God.
Gratitude for God's Word and Spiritual Freedom
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So let's be sure that we are also not trying to remain in bondage to our sin when the Holy Spirit gives us correction.
00:13:27
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And not we don't want to change. So I hope that you feel that God has lit your light today. I hope that you are and thankful for God's word that he has given us.
00:13:41
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I am looking at doing a more in-depth reading next year of using a chronological one-year big Bible.
Plans for Future Bible Reading Program
00:13:51
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version and in doing an event for one year, I was concerned that it would be too long of a reading.
00:13:57
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But according to the information in the one year Bible, it only takes about 15 minutes and our episodes tend to be around you know between the 18 to 35 minute range.
00:14:12
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So that might still be a right around where it's still doable for us to do. And I know that there are other ah podcasts that actually go on for you know about an hour or 45 minutes.
00:14:23
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So I try to keep this in in such a time that you can ah listen to most of it, potentially like while you're on your way to work or while you're on your way home from work. We tend to have a commute at least of around 20 minutes long, wherever we are going to work.
00:14:36
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Or if we're listening at home, I just try to keep it in manageable bits. So think God is placing it upon my heart. I've been wondering what I will do next year. And today, ah God showed me in the book of Ezra, where he said that um Ezra had debt was dedicating himself to learning God's word so that he could teach it.
00:15:00
Speaker
And I feel like that is what God is leading me to do ah for next year is do like a going deeper lesson. ah event where for those of us who have been following along with this, or if you've not been and you're looking for more of God's word and to start again fresh next year, but you don't necessarily want just the big picture, you want the whole picture.
00:15:22
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then that might be just the event for you. But as I mentioned, we will also still have this event that will always be available for you on on my site and on my channel here.
00:15:34
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And I will simply ah run a different program for the big Bible version next year. So I just wanted to start putting that in your heart on today's Joy of the Torah Day, as we are grateful for God's word that you might want to consider participating in that. And often starting at the brand new year, we are looking for an event to read the Bible in one year.
00:15:56
Speaker
And I think I would like to do this again. So what do you think? On the video version of this on YouTube, it does not permit commenting because it is set for made for kids.
00:16:08
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And so this is part of the Children's Online Protection Act.
Explanation of Disabled YouTube Comments
00:16:14
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And it really doesn't have anything to do with the content of what is being watched or listened to.
00:16:20
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It actually has to do with the collection of data by YouTube. It has absolutely nothing to do with how appropriate or inappropriate the content actually is for children. It only affects how YouTube collects data from those who are viewing it.
00:16:35
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Isn't that interesting? So ah you cannot comment on the video portion, but you can comment on the audio version. And if you would like to do that by clicking in the comment area and just giving me um some ah shout out there and just letting me know, yes, I would be interested in following you along for next year's big Bible reading.
00:16:57
Speaker
ah read the Bible in one year event. I would love to hear from you. If you are listening on a different avenue, such as Spotify or on Apple Music, I know on Spotify it allows for commenting.
00:17:08
Speaker
And I have not seen any commenting type things available on the Apple Music. I admit I don't actually listen to Apple Music. I don't have Apple products myself. I am Android based.
Invitation to Share and Engage with God's Word
00:17:19
Speaker
ah It is available, of course, on Apple Music. And we, of course, do have followers there. So thank you very much for following or subscribing there on the Apple Music. ah But I don't think there's any way for you to engage.
00:17:31
Speaker
Another way that you can comment is if you head over to my site at inthefamilywaycoaching.com. and clicking on the link for Read the Bible in One Year, and then clicking on the next tab below that for this month's either audio or video version, either one you like, because both of them has a purple box where it says, leave me a message, letting me know that you listened or watched today, depending on which one you're selected.
00:17:59
Speaker
And that will send me an email. So you are always welcome to engage with me in that way if you would like to post a comment that is more private and and not visually accessible to anybody and everybody out in social media land.
00:18:14
Speaker
Well, thank you for joining me today. i hope that you are also encouraged to click that light button so that we can help spread the word about reading God's word. That is my favorite goal this year and probably for next year too. I am so passionate about spreading the word, about reading God's word.
00:18:30
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And today, i can't believe we actually have a ah special holiday dedicated to the appreciation and gratitude for God's word. I just feel like that just... is perfect for me.
00:18:43
Speaker
I love that, that we have that on this eighth day the Feast of Tabernacles. So thank you for joining me. I hope that whatever day you get around to listening or watching this event for our October 14th daily reading, that you are having a very blessed season and that you are just overjoyed with God's word.
00:19:05
Speaker
And I will be here for everyone again tomorrow, wherever you are choosing to watch or listen. to So join me tomorrow for tomorrow's daily reading from the Day by Day Kids Bible written by Karen Henley.
00:19:16
Speaker
I'll see you then.