We take a break this week from the theme of plurality leadership to set the stage for our upcoming preaching series at OCF.

This fall we will shift our attention on Sundays from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Our messages—and sermon-based small groups—will focus on the Gospel of Luke for the rest of 2018 and the better part of 2019. Jesus! Yay!

Luke is a big book. It is not only the longest Gospel. Luke is the longest book in the New Testament. A Bible book of this size can be quite intimidating—even for those of us who have read through Luke before.

Fortunately, there are almost innumerable resources on the internet that dig into the Gospel of Luke.

AND

Unfortunately, there are almost innumerable resources on the internet that dig into the Gospel of Luke.

BUT

Fortunately, there is a top-rate, historically and theological sound resource on the internet that digs into the Gospel of Luke.

In today’s post I will direct you to this resource and give you some pointers on how to take advantage of it. Here’s the webpage:

https://bible.org/seriespage/3-luke-introduction-outline-and-argument#_ftn54

The author is Dan Wallace, Ph.D., a Biola graduate who is Professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary. (We use his Greek grammar book as a text in the second-year Greek courses I teach at Talbot).

The first section of the article (I. Introduction) may or may not interest you. It summarizes currently scholarly thinking about background issues such as the authorship, date, and composition of the Gospel of Luke. Whether it floats your boat or not, this nerdy stuff is absolutely essential for defending the historical veracity and integrity of Luke. We should be thankful to scholars like Wallace who take the time to summarize current thinking in a brief overview like this.

More helpful to us, as we prepare to study Luke in the Fall, are the next two sections of the article (II. Argument and III. Outline). Use this material as follows, as a helpful way to get familiar with the Gospel:

Do these activities before late September (when we begin our sermon series):

FIRST: Read through II. Argument to get familiar with the overall flow of Luke.

SECOND: Read through Luke passage-by-passage following along with III. Outline, so you can see how each passage fits into to the Gospel as a whole. A chapter-a-day will get you through all 24 chapters of Luke right before we begin our sermon series late next month.

Then, week-by-week, as we go through Luke:

Read and reflect upon each week’s text with III. Outline in hand (maybe briefly reviewing how the passage fits into the II. Argument).

This game plan is beginning to bear wonderful fruit in my own devotional life, as I am currently preparing for our time in Luke.

Let me know how it works for you!

Finally, for those of you who want a good running commentary on each passage, we recommend: Robert Stein, Luke. NAC (Broadman and Holman, 1993).