Hi, my name is Father Mike Smith and this is Ascension Presents.

Now I've got this Bible.

This is a Bible that I've had for a number of years now and I just was reflecting on the

different ways that I've read the Bible over the years and I think that almost every person

who is introduced to the scriptures, the Old Testament, New Testament, the Hebrew scriptures

and the Christian scriptures from a young age, kind of go through these things you might

call the ages of Bible reading.

The first age, typically this is just people I know and myself, is like the story age.

Basically it's a book filled with a bunch of interesting stories.

There's Adam and Eve, there's Noah, there's the story of Samson, there's the story of

like here's the Virgin birth, here's when Angel Gabriel came to Mary, here's the Shepherds

in the field, all those kinds of things.

Bible stories.

Basically we get Bible stories and we think the crazy thing is this, as kids because those

stories are read to us as kids, we think then we get older that those were children's

stories.

But when you actually read the Bible, you're like, wait a second, wow those are, that's

the children's story that they told me where there's some like serious stuff going on

in there.

One of the things we realize is okay it's not just the book of children's stories, we

have to go through that phase to the next phase.

The next phase I went through was I thought the Bible was a book of inspirational quotes.

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