Red Letters

We're starting a new sermon series this morning, and it's called "Red Letters." Maybe you don't know what that's from. I want to do a little bit of teaching on that real quick. At the beginning of the year, we asked you to participate in a Bible reading plan, and some of you jumped into our Bible Recap, which is covering the entire Bible in one year. Maybe, you've tuned in to our "5X5," which gives you the opportunity to read 5 chapters from the New Testament a week, and by the end of the year, you will have read the entire New Testament. Maybe you've been reading the verse of the day through YouVersion. Regardless, whatever plan it is that you've started on, you've probably come across some red letters — some words that are not in black ink, but red ink. And if you're brand new to reading the Bible, then it may not make a whole lot of sense to you. Maybe it kind of caught you off guard. Maybe you don't know why the words are red. Maybe you do know why, but you don't know how it started. Red letters in the New Testament Bible are considered direct quotes attributed to Jesus by the gospel writers. It's the words that they claim He said. The idea of printing the words of Christ in red originated from this guy named Louis Klopsch around 1900. He was, at the time, the editor of a magazine called The Christian Herald. He was reading Jesus' words one day from Luke 22:20, which says: "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you." It gave him the idea to take this new covenant made through His blood, and to take words spoken by Jesus, and put them in red to signify this covenant that He made with us. It took off. The idea caught on immediately. In fact, by the time he printed his first edition, which was in 1901, there were already three other major publishers who were working to do the same. So nowadays, it's incredibly normal. Most copies have Jesus' words in red, whether that's in print or digital form. It can be a quick, helpful guide as you're flipping through your New Testament. If you want just the things that Jesus said, it's easy to find His words. Now, this series that we're doing, called Red Letters, is going to focus predominantly on the book of John. John was one of Jesus' disciples and would later write about his time with Jesus on this earth.