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Writing for Lent 2025 - The Book of Matthew

I recently stumbled across a fascinating Youtube channel called IMBeggar. From their website:

“IMbeggar is about finding new, different, creative, positive, entertaining, hard-hitting, and most importantly, accessible ways to talk about God”

What draw my attention to this channel was a video about Lent. Here is a link to it:


Lent is a 40 day fast leading up to Easter weekend traditionally practiced by the Catholic and Orthodox church. Starting 46 days before Easter (the fast often excludes Sunday’s), and is intended as a time of preparation and focus before celebrating the Passion week of Jesus.

Something that I’ve been doing each year during Lent is writing out one of the Gospel narratives by hand. I call this “Writing for Lent”.

This is an interesting exercise as I am forced to slow down and take in every word from the Scriptures. If the 30 Day Bible Shred is a sprint, Writing for Lent is a slow stroll through the park. I can take in every little details and peice of literature design that I may have overlooked in the past.

Here are some things I’ve gotten out of doing Writing for Lent in the past.

What I’ve gotten out from this

Literature Links

Authors of the Bible will repreat phrases and words across the book of the Bible to communicate themes and ideas. If I only read short sections of the Bible here and there, then I’ll miss these links. Writing out the Bible makes these phrases a lot more obvious.

Character formation

Each of the Gospel’s contains stories of various characters. Although we don’t get a complete overview of their story, the Gospel’s authors do offer little hints of someones journey and getting to know the reality of Jesus. By taking the time to explore each person in the Gospel’s you can start to see how God was changing them.

Identity of Jesus

Another fascinating part of the Gospel’s is how they present the identity of Jesus. For example, the book of Mark shows that only a very small handful of people identified Jesus as the Son of God. Whereas the book of Luke makes it clear that various individuals come to realise the significance of Jesus in their own journey. This invites me to ensure I submit my own expectation of Jesus to the Scriptures.

Tips to doing this

This isn’t a difficult excercise, but as for any long term projects consistency is the key the success. Here are some helpful guidelines.

  1. This takes me about 20-30 minutes of writing per day. I am a very slow writer, but I also want to take my time going through each word too.

  2. Follow a plan. Each year I’ve organised a writing plan attempting to organise each day into a set amount of even writing. For this year I’ll be writing out the Book of Matthew. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, click here for a link to the plan.

  3. Get a good pen. I don’t do a lot of writing in my day to day life. I’ve found that using a cheap, think pen tends to cause cramps and discomfort. But if I have a thicker and better quality pen, the writing experience is a lot nicer.

This is a very different approach to the Scriptures, but one I pray will help you in our own journey of mapping out the Bible. Feel free to jump in and have a go!

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