Greetings everyone and welcome to this last extra podcast this year. Merry Christmas and may you have a very blessed new year. If you are one who started around January 1 listening to the DBRP and are about to finish the plan on December 31, congratulations to you! I hope you celebrate that achievement! As always, I invite you to come back some year in the future and listen again, but suggest that after a full year with me, it is time to find another Bible reader to listen to in the new year. Don’t forget your own voice. Reading Scripture out loud is tremendously helpful, even if the audience is just you alone. If you have listened to the NLT this year, for some future year remember that I have also recorded the GNT. One of my projects during 2022 was to critically listen to the NLT series and fix poor recording quality and mistakes. I re-recorded a few episodes entirely, and made smaller improvements to others. I am continuing to do the same thing now in the GNT series. For those not on our email list, Gale and I recently shared pictures from my recent trip to Indonesia. If you would like to see that letter and a few extra pictures, please click the link here in the episode notes. Before January 1st, I will revise the dailybiblereading.info website and the Read This First pages, which contain all my advice about Bible reading and listening to the DBRP. (The link to the Read This First pages is found in the banner of dailybiblerading.info.) If you have any question you would like me to answer in those pages, please use the Contact button at dailybiblereading.info. I would like to update the information I shared about podcast players. If you have a favorite podcast app that works well for managing your podcast listening, please tell me about it. I will need the app’s name, what platform it runs on, and why you recommend it. In my October extra podcast, I gave the second lesson in the series I call Buckling the Belt of Truth. That lesson gives my advice about how to understand spiritual realities found in the Bible, which are spiritual things about you that cannot be seen with human eyes. In particular, I dealt with the biblical teaching that you have been united with Christ in his death (being crucified with Him), you died and were buried, and now have been raised with Him to new life. Since you and I never actually experienced death, the Holy Spirit has been so kind as to give us multiple metaphors to help us grasp the reality of our spiritual resurrection. I think a key to grasping this concept is understanding our being one with Christ. At first I thought of giving you an allegorical treasure map, to walk you through the different ways Scripture repeats the same powerful idea. But in the end I had to recognize that I don’t have the literary gifts of John Bunyan. (But don’t miss reading his book, Pilgrim’s Progress.) I started that Buckling the Belt series by saying how I struggled to find the promises that Peter mentioned in 2nd Peter 1, the promises needed for ‘living a godly life’, the ones “that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.” I am thinking now that not all God’s promises need to be expressed in the future with statements like, “He who started a good work in you WILL …” (I’m referring there to a beautiful promise found in Phl. 1:6.) Promises can also be stated in the present, such as when Jesus utters 7-8 ‘I am’ statements in John, and when He proclaims ‘you are’. One of those ‘I am’ statements is found in John 15, where Jesus said, “I am the true grapevine, and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more. You have already been pruned and purified by the message I have given you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed fr