Personal Journal- Week 1

We are suppose to keep a personal journal for our class. It is suppose to remain between the teacher and us, but I feel that I would like to post mine to this blog for others to read. I am not a perfect person, and everyday I am striving to make better decisions in my life, and understand the scriptures more and more each day. Here is mine for week 1. 

January 18, 2013 – Friday

            One thing that finally hit me this week as I've been reading is the word “disciples”. I have known forever that disciples means follower, or learner, of Christ. However, for some reason whenever I read the New Testament, I always associated the world “disciples” with the apostles. This week It finally hit me that when they mentioned disciples, they meant anyone who was following Christ at the time. I feel a little silly for not recognizing it earlier. The only reason it hit me now was because I was getting confused as to which disciples they were talking about all the time.

            Something that I simple love about this half of the New Testament that I've been noticing in my reading is how similar the church back then is the church’s organization now. I also feel that maybe they were even a little better.  In Last week’s reading I noticed in Acts 2:45 what seems to be the saints practicing the Law of Consecration. So not only were they living a righteous lifestyle and teaching the gospel despite so much persecution they were also practicing something that we have not perfected yet in our time now. I thought that was really fantastic. Another example of similarities was in Acts chapter 15 is the revelation concerning circumcision. The order in which it was done was extremely similar to the way we receive revelation now. Something I also found interesting was that in the bible dictionaries definition of circumcision that the issue wasn't just circumcision itself, but mostly the concern was whether the gentiles were required to live the Law of Moses altogether.

 I have felt that these past two weeks I have read and seen new things in the New Testament that I have never noticed before, and it opens up a new understanding of the gospel to me. I love seeing the similarities between the church now and the church back then.