About 'A Year with Jesus'

I have no idea how many times I've had people tell me this. To be honest, I can't count how many times I've thought this: "If only I knew what Jesus really wanted me to do. If Jesus could really be here and tell me directly, His presence would make a world of difference for me!"

For many of us, life can get stressful and church become routine and before we know it, Jesus feels distant. The Lord who gave Himself for us becomes a subject we study instead of a living Friend who walks with us each day. The Jesus who walked the Galilean hills feels as distant as the first century and as relevant to our daily struggles as the mode of transportation in the first century.

We don't want our walk with the Lord to feel this way. We don't want the words and actions of Jesus and the teachings of His apostles to feel distant and disconnected from our daily lives...but this happens for nearly all of us at one time or another.

Over the years, my passion for ministry has been to try to help people find Jesus—not as a subject or someone from long ago and far away, but someone as close as our next breath and as real as our heartbeat.

After writing nine years of daily devotionals, I've felt the pull of the Lord the last few years to invite people into a closer walk with Jesus. I've prayed, debated, inquired of my mentors and friends, and have finally felt convicted to share a new, year-long devotional called, "A Year with Jesus." It will start on November 30 with an invitation and end on November 29 of the next year with the end of the New Testament.

Each day, we will receive an invitation from the Lord to walk with Him through his story in the four gospels and progressing on through the book of Acts and through the rest of the New Testament. The Lord will call us close, point us to His truth, and challenge us to live out the principles we've seen in our daily lives. We will finish with our prayer response to Jesus.

The style is a little different for me, so I've asked some trusted and older friends to proof my work – not just for grammatical and spelling errors, but also for presumptuous statements, wrong-headed observations, and distortions of biblical truth.

The key point I hope you remember is this: Jesus wants us to walk with Him, to follow Him, to be His disciple and friend who knows His voice and responds to His call. My prayer is that this one year journey will bless us all as we make this important journey together.

By God's grace and for God's glory,
Phil Ware

Why is First-person Narrative Used?

Phil, why begin these devotionals with a "note from Jesus"? After all, they are messages that you have written and put in the mouth of Jesus? Isn't this presumptuous? Doesn't this border tantalizingly close to blasphemy? Why do this?

First, please know that I have wrestled with these same concerns for the last three years as I have prayed and sought spiritual counsel from people I respect about launching this project. Having focused my undergraduate and graduate education on the Gospels, having preached for nearly 40 years, and having written daily devotionals for heartlight.org and verseoftheday.com for over 15 years, I've come to a deep conviction: most people don't know the Jesus of Scripture.

Second, I want people to know Jesus. Not just know about Him, but to truly know Him. To trust that He longs to speak with them through the Scriptures and to be close to them in their triumphs to cheer them on and to be near them in their sorrows to help them through life's difficulties. Most of all, I want people to trust the Holy Spirit's work of making Jesus' will expressed in the Scriptures come alive in them.

So I approach the whole devotional series we're calling A Year with Jesus — aYearwithJesus.com — as an extremely important challenge with huge consequences — huge consequences if I misrepresent the truth about Jesus and His will, as well as huge consequences if I ignore this call from God to reach people and to help them know Jesus more intimately and to live for Him more fully. Please allow me to explain this passion in a little more detail.

Frankly, some of our not knowing Jesus is our fault. As people claiming to be disciples of Jesus, many don't read the stories of Jesus in our Bibles regularly. We are hungry for grace and we talk about relationship with Jesus, yet we don't listen to the words of Jesus daily and can name only a handful of events from His life. This is our neglect and our great loss. With four gospels that tell the story of Jesus, I am not sure why it is so hard for so many to spend some time with Him each day in the Scriptures given to us to reveal Him.

I can still remember at thirty years of age speaking to a room of three hundred or so preachers — most of them older and wiser than myself. Yet, when I asked them to turn to the most worn part of their Bibles, NONE of them in that room that night found themselves in one of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Not one had a Bible most worn in the pages that told the good news of Jesus' life and teachings. I was shocked and saddened. One of the university students from the church where I preached said the shock on their faces was convicting to him and to many of them.

Nearly thirty years later, I do think the response would be different. Unfortunately, as I have visited with followers of Jesus across the U.S. and around the world, most folks still don't know much about what Jesus did or why He did it. They know even less of what He taught or what He asks of us as His followers. Saddest of all, many can talk about a personal relationship with Jesus, but what most mean is a warm fuzzy feeling about the Jesus they imagine and not a Jesus they know. In other words, preaching more on Jesus and about Jesus hasn't gained enough traction to make a huge dent in the issue over the last three decades.

Some of this is partially the fault of academia. Christian scholarship is essential and important. However, Christian academics, whether believers or semi-believers, must not be allowed to create an aristocracy of scholarship so that only the academic elite can approach Bible study with confidence. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to us to help us all know the truth about Him — John chapters 14-16 and 1 John 2 surely help us know this. Godly people who have shared the message of the Scriptures while living and modeling the truth are the people most crucial to our faith. Notice how Paul points Timothy first to the lives of those he knows who lived the truth of Scripture and then afterwards talks about the inspiration of Scripture (2 Timothy 3:14-17).

In the devil's brew of our ignorance about what Jesus lived and taught and of our leaving the study of Jesus to academics and trained seminarians, many have had the Jesus of the Bible stolen from them and they don't even know it. In the process, Jesus has been "churchified" and made to be religiously tame rather than available to the seeker and challenging to the religious status quo. Our "religious Jesus" would have never gotten himself crucified — He wouldn't have been a threat. The real Jesus, on the other hand, was put to death because He was feared and hated by the religious and political establishments. (For more on this, I encourage you to read John Eldredge's book, Beautful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus.)

So how do we help seekers begin with a more accurate view of Jesus before they even begin to read His story so they don't "churchify" and "homogenize" away the Jesus of the four gospels?

This has been the burning question in my heart as I have wrestled with how best to frame these devotionals at aYearwithJesus.com. I've already written four daily devotional books, one for each of the four gospels that is more traditional in style. Yet, I do not believe they have been able to penetrate past the veneer of our "churchified" understanding of Jesus. Too many seekers never engage the real Jesus of Scripture. They miss the real Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee and "scared the stuffing" out of the religious elite of his day. He touched lepers, He called sinners to turn their lives around and live for God, He challenged religious leaders about their hypocrisy, and He called His followers to bring the character and compassion of God's Kingdom into their world. It rips out my heart out to think so many people don't know this Jesus! Helping people know Jesus has been the passion of my life's calling. For years, I've felt burdened to share Jesus with them. So for three years, this project has poked, prodded, and pursued me.

The final tipping point for me on writing A Year with Jesus in its current format has been my work with unbelieving seekers from around the world. What Christianity has to offer that is unique and distinct from all other religions is Jesus — the grace Jesus brings as God in human flesh and the Holy Spirit Jesus sends to all who truly follow Him. Yet helping folks wade through the muck and mire of religious preconceptions, the sloganeering of commercial Christianity, and the junk well-meaning believers have said about Jesus has proven to be a barrier for many of the seekers I have met.

With A Year with Jesus, I wanted to give people an overview in a year of the story of the New Testament from the perspective of the Lord. After all, we either believe that Jesus was involved in the collection of the documents we call the New Testament or He was not. And if Jesus was involved in this — and I believe that He was — then He worked providentially, through the influence of the Holy Spirit, through the meetings and discussions of righteous people, and through the prayers of those committed to give God's people accurate and true resources to know Jesus. There is a reason God wants us to have the Scriptures that we have. There is a reason God wants us to search the Scriptures to understand why they are important, what they say, and why they say it. So aYearwithJesus.com is formatted with a daily note from Jesus to help us place the focus of that day's message in the context of why this message is important to us — i.e., why Jesus would include it in Scripture and what He wants us to know from it as Scripture.

Yeah, it's presumptuous to enter this work. But, that's also every true preacher's call, every spiritual mentor's charge, every parent's divine job, every true Bible teacher's true task, and the ever-present burden on my heart — to help make the Bible real to those who seek so that they can know Jesus!

The request of the non-Jewish seekers who approached Philip and Andrew at the Passover feast right before Jesus' crucifixion burns in my heart. It burns, because I've heard the same request from people all over the world seeking to know about Jesus who have never met Him: "Sir, we are hoping to meet Jesus (John 12:20-23, especially verse 22). That's what I'm hoping A Year with Jesus will begin to do for you — to help you meet Jesus and know Him more completely. No, it won't do it by itself. Hopefully it will encourage you to go back and read the four gospels regularly. Hopefully it will help you read all of the Bible asking to hear what God wants you to hear and to listen to Scripture with the help of the Holy Spirit for heaven's answers to your seeking heart.

Please know that I don't approach this arrogantly because I think that I am someone more special than others. Instead, please know that I do this work under reverential trepidation for the task. Yet the burning in my bones and the conviction in my heart will not let me walk away from this challenge.

I request your prayers. I am open to your questions. At the same time, I have deeply spiritual friends and mentors who are reading these devotionals to correct them, to hold me accountable, and to challenge me when they think I've overstepped what the Scriptures reveal. The warning that James, the half-brother of Jesus, gave to all Bible teachers is very sobering, and certainly not far from my conscious thoughts as I work with the words I try to share:

Dear brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers in the church, for we who teach will be judged more strictly. Indeed, we all make many mistakes. For if we could control our tongues, we would be perfect and could also control ourselves in every other way (James 3:1-2 NLT).

I know that my work with aYearwithJesus.com will not be perfect — far from it. However, if I help you and other seekers catch a clearer glimpse of the Jesus of Scripture — His heart, His teaching, the reasons behind His coming, and His work in history — then I have at least begun the work I feel so called to complete. I want you to know Jesus… the real Jesus… the Jesus of the Bible, not the Jesus that is "churchified," distant, and inapproachable and certainly not the Jesus that is our buddy who doesn't care how we live or the choices we make, but simply rubber stamps what we think about things and how we choose to live.

Please be patient as you join me on this journey. Try it for several weeks. See if speaks to your heart and reflects what you see in the Scriptures. Pray for me as I work on this and as I pray for you and how you receive it. Hopefully, the Holy Spirit will make this better than me and use it to reach those who are seeking to know Jesus.

By God's grace and for God's glory,
Phil Ware

Why Use The Voice Translation?

Why are you using The Voice translation? Wouldn't a better known and more reliable version be better for what you are doing? Can I trust the words you share in The Voice translation?

Those are good questions and I appreciate the desire to be true to God's message as it was given to us in the Scriptures. My answer to these three questions is really pretty simple.

First, I will do my best to make sure the translation we use reflects the message of our best Greek manuscripts — Greek was the language in which the New Testament was originally written. I will occasionally choose The New Living Translation over The Voice when I feel like it more fully or more carefully reflects the intent of the original.

Second, every translation we have is flawed. I could point you to several books that are reliable about the translations, but that's not really the point here. The flaws most translations have are minor and very rare. We are blessed to have so many translations to choose from. You will notice that in each of our devotionals, all the scripture references are linked so that the NIV pops up for you to compare with The Voice or the New Living Translation. In addition, if you use another translation for your own study (I often use ESV or NASB), that gives you an additional translation to compare for reliability.

Third, I chose The Voice because I feel like it captures the essence of what it is said that is often lost because of our familiarity with the passages or we don't really understand the insider language that creeps into our Bibles — insider language that season believers understand and outsiders and seekers don't understand. The different language and style will help you hear the message of Jesus in fresh ways if you allow it to do so.

Fourth, the New Testament was written in common Greek that anyone with a junior high or high school education could easily understand. I believe that in many places, The Voice does that a little better than some of our standard versions. If we are going to meet Jesus and know Him, then we need to be able to understand what He says and visualize what He does.

I hope you will keep your own study Bible handy as you read these devotional messages. In fact, I hope you read the Four Gospels that tell the story of Jesus — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament — several times during the course of the year as we journey with Jesus. A Year with Jesus is an invitation to you to get to know Jesus through the Scriptures. So please use the translation you most trust, most love, or find yourself most familiar as we take this journey together. Most of all, pray for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth to do what Jesus promised the Spirit would do: guide you into all truth about Jesus (John 14:17; John 15:26; John 16:13).

By God's grace and for God's glory,
Phil Ware