BONUS: If You Feel Like Giving Up (with Jeff Cavins) - 2026

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast. In fact, you might even be watching the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. The Bible in a Year podcast is brought to you by Ascension.

Using the Great Adventure Bible Timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds and how we fit into that story today. This is our first time where we're not only having the audio, obviously, here, but we're also doing a video of Jeff and myself having an opportunity to sit down and just take one

moment to address all of the community, the Bible in a Year community who have been journeying with us for so long. In fact, the journey might feel like the Israelites in the wilderness. The journey might feel like those prophets who got beat up. The journey might feel like those in exile. And so we just wanted to take a moment and just offer some words, words of encouragement to help us do

that none other than Jeff Cavins is joining us to give us that word, that word of wisdom, that word of encouragement, that word of hope. Welcome, Jeff. Good to be with you. Nice to see you. Good to see you too. I love the fact that your camera is so much better than mine. And I say, I love the fact. I love it. But Jeff, I know that I've been saying ever since the

beginning that people think that Leviticus was going to be the hardest. Deuteronomy, Numbers, that was going to be the most difficult. And I was like, I think it's going to be the prophets. I think it's going to be the fact that we are going to stay for months. We're going to walk for months with the prophets and their words of conviction, their words

of telling people to repent, telling people to brace for what's coming. And I think it might have affected some of our hearts in some ways. Yeah. Well, it certainly is a difficult time to read in the Bible, you know, when you're talking

about the things that Israel's doing wrong and the prophets are speaking to them and giving a warning. and there's so much of it. If you take your Bible and you hold it up on the side,

a good portion of the Old Testament are the prophets. And of course, reading the Bible in chronological order as we're doing, we're not really called to read those just one after another, but it's more important to know

when that prophet speaks and who, to whom the prophet is speaking. And that's what you're doing. So first, I'd love to say, hey, congratulations.

to everyone for getting this far. You have already done something that very few people have done. I mean, there's a lot of people

who have read the Bible straight through and they don't understand it that well, but you've taken the time to actually go through it in chronological form.

And at first it was like, oh, this is so cool. This is amazing. And then you can fall into that confusion

with the prophets where you have to back up and say, okay, I'm going to embrace the narrative and I'm going to have other times in my life where I can go back and read these prophets in their proper place and go deeper with it. But I would encourage you not to be discouraged when you are deep in the prophets.

Well, that's, and that's too one of the things I was speaking with a student just the other day of mine who said that the prophets have been so heavy. and not only that, but they experienced a word of conviction that turned into a word of condemnation. And it was one of those situations where they were just thinking, okay, in their prayer that they just,

in their words, they said they seemed like the evil one was trying to distort God's words of conviction towards repentance and oriented towards, okay, turn back to me and turn it into something where feeling condemned. And it was so good because we're able to identify that fact that, I mean, we have found out that even Satan can quote scripture, right? So that sense of being able

to say, can I misapply God's word to my life? And the answer of course is yes. Can I misapply God's word to anything in life? The answer is yes, because it seems to me that as we went through or are going through the prophets that there is a word of, I mean, think of the book of the prophet Isaiah that has the book of woe and book of consolation. And, and yet even in that, the

woe times, there are so many moments where God's word of hope breaks through and God's word of comfort breaks through and God's word of, of like, but this isn't, this isn't because I want to destroy you. This is because I want to save you. And that, that, that always keeps coming back to me to, to remind me of this is, this is why God is allowing this to happen. Right. Well, I look

at the prophets like Isaiah as, I better understand them when I take a look at my life growing up, okay? So in the summertime, I was out every day. We would put our shorts on and we'd ride bikes and we'd be playing all day long and one thing after another. And that's kind of like the historical narrative books. Things are moving along. But every night I'd have to come home for dinner

and listen to the prophets. You know, my dad telling me what you're doing wrong. And if you do this again, this is going to happen. I say, oh, I can't wait to get out of here and go back to the narrative and play with my friends, you know, and build this and do that. But, you know, I look back now, my father loved me, you know, and he was, he wanted things to work out for me.

He wanted me to fly right. And he was a part of my life that I naturally preferred to be with my friends, but I needed my dad. And I love reading those narrative books, but I need the prophets too. Yeah. And I just, I got the sense that I learned the three major prophets, their voice, because a lot of times when we read the prophets in mass or in the lectionary throughout the course

of the year, or even in liturgy of the hours, they're little snippets. I mean, they could be