Hi webmaster220.blogspot.com, 

Today I want to share with you Bruce's story...  

Because he's one of the MNTG members who has made quite a victory with his Greek learning.

Not the kind of victory that's all "crash, bang, fireworks", but a more subtle, quiet victory that's been the result of dedicated effort.  

You will have seen the subject line of this email, it reads that Bruce knew the "secret" to mastery,. 

I'm sure you actually know it too, even if you don't know that you know it.  

Read his story and see if you can guess what it is...  

So, Bruce is a vending machine service agent, which means he goes around the city he lives in looking after all the vending machines. He stocks them up, repairs them, makes sure they're behaving themselves... Puts them in the naughty corner if they're not... (I'm joking).  

Bruce has got family, commitments, and is an elder at his church. In other words, he's a busy man.  

Now when he came to me, he had no knowledge of biblical Greek at all. But he had a love for the Lord, and he understood that knowing the word of God was the key to knowing the Lord.  

He also wanted to improve his teaching and preaching, to serve his church better and be able to invest in his family and be a faithful father to his teenagers.  

Bruce joined the Beginner's Cohort, which is a regular LIVE teaching of the Beginning Greek course inside Master New Testament Greek. He took six months to go through the Beginning Greek. When he couldn't keep up with one of the live courses, he just jumped into the next one (Bruce, like many other members, took advantage of the fact that you can go at your own pace through the work). Bruce chipped away at his Greek learning every day.  

Over time, he graduated from Beginning Greek and moved on to our Intermediate Greek course, and I had to start giving him extra work so he could learn the words of each of the books of the New Testament and read them one by one! 

He worked his way through 1 John, then 2 John, then 2 Thessalonians, on and on he went, working away at it day by day.  

Now he's reading through 7 or 8 books in the New Testament, and in a couple of years he'll be mastering the whole New Testament.  

It took Bruce 2 years of consistent work to go from 0 to reading fluently.  

How much time did he put in? 

1 hour a day for Beginning Greek, which he split into ½ ab hour in the morning ½ an hour in the evening, and he would review his vocab over the day whenever he had a quiet minute.  

All Bruce did was take advantage of the tools available to him, and he built good habits to stay on track.  

The point is, he was taking consistent steps day by day.  

Nowadays, he wakes up, he gets his Greek New Testament and just reads. He can read devotionally in the morning, in Greek.  

He takes maybe 20/30 minutes a day for his Greek reading, time he would already be spending in the word of God anyway.  

So can you guess what Bruce's "secret" was? 

I'm sure you can.  

Time. Consistency. Taking small, daily steps towards his goal.  

Call it what you want, it's the same idea.  

Bruce was not an incredibly gifted guy with languages (I'm sure he won't mind me saying!), nor did he have any special skill or talent, and he certainly didn't have an abundance of spare time.  

But he made the best use of what he did have, and with that he made an amazing amount of progress.  

Now, you might be in a similar boat as Bruce was when he started out.  

I get it.

We're all "full time, all the time".

Family, our career, our responsibilities at church, our social lives, all fight for our time and attention. But if you can put the noise aside for just half an hour to an hour a day, you'll be celebrating a "quiet victory" of your own when you find yourself able to confidently read the books of the Greek New Testament.  

If you feel God's call on your heart to do just that, there's an opportunity opening up soon to become a Mastery Member and join the next LIVE Beginner's Cohort. 

Tomorrow I'll be sharing more about what this Cohort is, and you can think about whether you might like to be a part of it!

In Christ,  
Darryl