The Bible is our most precious possesion. It is a gift to us from God ... quite literally.

Most people though when they hold a Bible in their hands get a sense of it being important somehow, but equally not sure why that might be or where to begin in reading it. To most people it just feels like some big unwieldy and impenetrable book.

This couldn't be further from the truth ... once you get down to basics with the good book!

For starters the Bible isn't ONE book but a whole library of 66 small books and letters. When you think of it like that it becomes much more manageable. No longer have you got one single massive book to get to grips with but a whole bunch of much smaller bitesized books, many of which can be read from beginning to end over a coffee (or in my case several coffees because I'm a very slow reader).

And like any good library of books you've got a whole range of different types of literature. The Bible contains a bit of everything - poetry (like the Psalms); history books (like Kings and Chronicles) with loads of battles, kings and politics; Romance (like Song of Songs); Letters written between the earliest Christian leaders and earliest churches (like Ephesians and James); and of course the Gospels which tell the story of Jesus (like Matthew and John). And that's just for starters.

These 66 books are split into the Old Testament (everything which was written before Jesus) and the New Testament (everything from Jesus onwards). The Old Testament is about the story of the Jewish people and their relationship with God who loves them and the whole world and who promises a Messiah who will save the world one day. After hundreds of years of waiting for this Messiah the New Testament tells the story of Jesus, the long awaited Messiah of the Jews and the whole world, and goes on to tell the story of His first followers.

In short the Bible is an AMAZING collection of writings.