The controlling premise of Follow Me Daily is simple: we must know what a text meant to the original hearers before we can know what it means to us today. The Bible was written for us, but it was not originally written to us. God chose real authors, real languages, real peoples, real cities, real conflicts, and real historical moments through which to reveal Himself.
So we resist the temptation to begin with ourselves. We pay attention to grammar, literary context, authorial purpose, geography, family structures, political realities, honor and shame, religious assumptions, economic conditions, and the things an ancient hearer would have supplied automatically but a modern reader may not know at all.
Only after doing that work do we cross the bridge to application. The goal is not antiquarian knowledge. It is obedience. Historical particularity disciplines us so that we are obeying what God actually said rather than using biblical words to baptize whatever our own culture already believes.
- Start with the text.
- Establish literary and historical context.
- Ask what the author intended and the first hearers understood.
- Compare relevant Scripture.
- Then move from original meaning to faithful application.