Hi everyone, welcome to Bible study. If we can make our way to our seats and just take a minute or two to pray to prepare for worship. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just thank you for bringing us here tonight. We thank you for the privilege that we have to worship you, to sing songs to you, and to study your word together.

I pray Lord God, as we go into just studying the book of 1 Peter, that it would just be a blessed time of just diving into your word and learning new truths, God, and rediscovering old truths as well. I pray Lord that as we come here tonight, you give us strength and focus to sing these songs to you, that it would be coming from a place of worship in our hearts, and that we'd be honored by this time.

So we thank you again. In your name we pray, amen. We all stand for worship. >> All right. Good evening. Before we get started, I'm actually going to ask Pastor Mark to come up to just share with you some housekeeping, logistical things. So if you guys can turn your attention to Pastor Mark, that'd be great.

>> All right. Good evening, everybody. We had a good short break with Christmas and New Year's and then off to a new study. I actually have a good amount to say to you guys in terms of things just so that everything is organized. So first and foremost, as a heads up to everyone, the room may actually look a little bit less crowded.

And part of that is because we have nine to ten tables worshiping with us over in the cafe side. That means for their benefit, some of you guys I know love to come together and have some fellowship prior to the Bible study. You guys use the cafe area, et cetera, which is totally fine.

But it just means that, A, you can't be moving around the tables too much. And if you do eat food, make it clean as if you were never, ever there. OK, so that's the request. Please know, again, that those groups are actually going to be starting off their night there and then finishing there, too.

So the entirety of the time, they'll be there on the other side, which also means if you finish early over here, it doesn't mean that we can go over there to just start doing the fellowship, that kind of stuff. Our conversations and visiting with each other will have to take place here, et cetera.

OK, an important thing is, as you know, our church, we're so thankful because so many of you lend a hand to make sure everything runs. Likewise, for this Bible study, we need your helping hands with various things. So tonight there was a reminder of a schedule link sent to you.

On that schedule link, on the second tab, it says Wednesday Volunteer Schedule. Please hit that tab, and what you'll see is, number one, child care volunteering. Now, you will have to sacrifice one evening to watch the children. We do ask that you have to be a member of the church, and so you'd have to have gone through the whole course, meeting with the pastor, all that kind of stuff, to be a member, and that you do the safety training.

If the only thing you haven't done so far is the safety training, we're going to be holding a special safety training next week on Wednesday prior to Bible study at 5.30. And so look out for announcements on that in terms of safety training for all the volunteers for that.

But you can put your name down so that you can volunteer. Likewise, you'll see volunteer opportunities for parking. Kind of self-explanatory, so I'm not going to go through too much, but you just show up early and spend the first beginning, about 15 minutes or so, helping out, directing traffic and things like that.

And again, so if we all bear the load of having all those things filled in, then we'll all just take a rotation, like one of the weeks, and we'll be able to get all that done. The last thing is this sanctuary will be used again for our college Bible study on Friday, and they're going to be going over the same passage and stuff like that, so it's real sweet.

But in order to just help them out, when the Bible study is all done, we're going to ask the last row, just across from the left to the right, to go ahead and put your tables away at the end of the Bible study, including the last two tables on the far left.

So that would be Anthony's group and Peter Lee's group. Your chairs you can leave there because we're going to use it for the sanctuary on Sunday, but you'll be putting away your tables after the Bible study is done. All right, so recap real fast. Café is being used. Make sure you just make it nice and tidy after you use it, and then make sure you sign up for the volunteer opportunities via the link that's been sent to you.

Okay, everyone? All right, thank you so much. All right, so this is our first Peter Bible study, and so especially for those of you who are doing Bible study with us for the first time, I do want to review a couple of things. So for each week's Bible study, I will be posting up either Wednesday night or Thursday morning, the following day, with some very similar preparatory questions for the following week.

And by Wednesday, all the slides and the notes and things are already sent to the AV team and the media team. And so there's sometimes there's going to be a lot of text on the slide, and you're thinking like, "I don't have time to copy it all down. The print is too small." You can go back and reference that and just download it.

Okay, so the slides will be made available to you. So can I have the next slide? The structure of each week, it looks like this. So 7.05, we begin praise. Some of you guys enjoy walking in like 7.15 and stuff like that, but that can be disruptive. And one thing that we do encourage you guys to do is get here early, help set up, talk to people, pray.

And then so we can just begin right at 7.05. And then after about like a 10-minute time of praise, we will pray. We will usually just go right into like about an hour as worth of small group discussion time. And then after that, I'll be coming up to doing like a 20- to 30-minute like a wrap-up, things that you might not have covered, perhaps some things that are a little bit of a challenge.

How do we tackle a passage like this? Like how do we begin to think through the passage? So I'll do a little bit of a teaching, and then after that is done, we redismiss into the small groups. A lot of that is applicational and small group time and a prayer time, and then you finish when you finish.

So for you guys who've been with us, you guys know how the structure of the Wednesday is run. It's pretty lengthy, just in terms of the totality of the number of minutes you're sitting there. But that's pretty much--we don't have too many programs and things at our church. Bible study is what we do.

And so hopefully that's something that does serve as an encouragement to you. You're not coming to the Wednesday to learn. The primary purpose of you coming on Wednesday is to share what you've learned at home, and that you guys know, right? So the more you invest into your own preparation, the more you'll get out of it.

And my encouragement is never touch a commentary unless you really, really are stuck at like a certain question. For the most part, if you look at all the different translations, and you ask good questions, and you make good observations, and you look at other parts of Scripture, it really--you'll be surprised at how accurate your conclusion may be.

And so try to stay away from a commentary. I'm not going to point you to commentaries when we're doing the teaching part, but just how through the passage, through the context of the text, we're landing on a conclusion. And so we ask you guys to spend a lot of time just preparing for that, okay?

And I'll walk with you through the preliminaries tonight. Before we break off into our groups, I'm going to just do a little bit of a geography study, because if you guys have noticed, the first verse talks about like five regions, right? So--now the next slide. So if you look here, you're going to see pretty much the New Testament world.

Can you guys see it? That's the New Testament world. On your far right, it's cut off, but that's Israel, right? Right on the western coast of the Mediterranean Sea, or the--is that the--that's the east, you have like--you see Samaria, Judea, Jerusalem, Nazareth. Do you guys see that on the side?

That's the land of Jesus, okay? And then the rest of it is--are names that should be familiar. Colossae, Galatia, Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica. Do you guys see that? And where was Titus? Or--yeah, where was Titus situated? In Crete, right in the middle, okay? So Israel happens all over there, but then the gospel gets spread throughout just the Mediterranean world, okay?

So if you look at the very top left-hand corner, it says Rome. Not sure if you guys see that, okay? Presumably, Peter's there, okay? That's the capital of the empire. So Peter's there, but he's writing to the exiles scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. So if you're like, "I don't know where those are," okay?

So can you click? So that's there, okay? So Peter's writing from Rome, and the five regions that we're looking at are in that circle, and that--about the 11 o'clock mark of the circle. Do you guys see kind of where the two little--is that an isthmus? Where they touch? So I want you to kind of mentally make a note of that little touching point, all right?

Can I have the next slide? And do you see where that touching point is? Did you relocate that? So Bithynia and Pontus are at that top, okay? Bithynia is mentioned very last, right? Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia. So the port is at Bithynia. So presumably the letter gets circulated.

It comes into Bithynia, but it makes its rounds first, and Bithynia is the last point, okay? So if you're going clockwise, you go Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Ephesus is in Asia. And when we think Asia, and when the Bible times think Asia, they're different Asia, okay? So we're not thinking like Korea, China, Vietnam, all right?

So this is--that's their Asia, okay? So--and then it makes a big circle, all right? So remember, Rome is at the very far corner, and then the letter is being circulated here, okay? And if you didn't prep the 105 verses, the five chapters, you're going to have a little bit of a hard time doing the discussion tonight, but you can follow along in your group.

So if you guys came in and you weren't able to prepare, here's just text, okay? And so until about 820, what I want you guys to do in your small groups--next slide-- is to kind of just share with your small group members how you broke down the first epistle.

And when I like to start, I actually just like to do it without--because the Bible makes it easy to cheat, right? It gives you, like, the divisions and stuff, but how would you break it down? What are the organizations of thought that you find? Some repeated themes. There's about five or six.

Two or three very central ones, but there's about five or six repeated themes. What did you notice, okay? And then I did ask you guys to come up with, like, a one-sentence summary of the epistle. Please do share that. And nine out of ten times you do this, at the end of the study, your sentence is going to change because you'll pick up different things as you go more and more in depth for the 17 weeks that we're doing this together.

But the bulk of your time should be spent on question number four, especially verse two, because that is a very theologically meaty one verse, right? So all your small group leaders should know how to ask inductive questions. And so because today's the first time, just share what you've observed, the questions that you have.

And then if you do have time, is there a tangible application you can make out of the first two verses, okay? So let me pray for us, and at 820 we'll get back together, and then I'll walk you through how I would chart through 1 Peter. And, oh, Emily, can you hold up that worksheet that I provided?

Okay, do you guys see that worksheet with the highlights and stuff? You're not allowed to use that until 820, okay? That's cheating, okay? So small group leaders aren't even allowed to use it, all right? I just didn't want to disrupt you in the middle and just say, "Here, come get it," so I gave it to you early.

So don't look at it. Flip it over, and then you can look at that when I present that. And all of that will also be available tonight for download, okay? And it's a rough draft, so don't put any credibility in what I printed there. But either way, you're not supposed to use it, all right?

See you guys at 820.