The Route 66 Journey

“And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” — Luke 24:27

One Book. One Author. One story. One Person on every page.

Some of you are old enough to remember when Route 66 was THE road — the Mother Road: one highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, eight states, three time zones, better than two thousand miles. Farms, deserts, mountains, small towns and big cities — the scenery changed every mile, but it was ONE ROAD, and every mile of it was going the same place.

Church — you hold Route 66 in your hands every service. Sixty-six books, written across fifteen hundred years, on three continents, in three languages, by some forty writers: kings and shepherds, a doctor and a tax collector, fishermen and a tentmaker. Genesis doesn’t look like Psalms, and Leviticus doesn’t read like Luke — but it is one road, and every mile of it is going the same place.

What this journey is

Beginning in October 2026, Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church is going to drive the whole highway:

• Sunday mornings build the overlooks — the great Landing sermons where we stop and see how far the road has come. Morning gives you the map.
• Sunday evenings drive it book by book — all sixty-six, one key verse at a time: the verse that unlocks each book like a key fits its own front door. Evening gives you the miles.

And here is a trip note that may surprise you: we will not drive this road in bookshelf order. We drive it in staircase order — each group of books following the Landing sermon that frames them. The first door we unlock is Proverbs: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10) — because before Genesis shows you where the world began, Proverbs shows you where wisdom begins.

The trip rules

• Every lesson stands on its own. Miss a Sunday evening and you are not lost — every book gets its own key, and each key turns by itself. But nobody ever regretted taking the whole trip.
• The mornings and evenings work together. The Landings are the overlooks; the evening lessons are the miles underneath them.
• Bring your Bible, not just your ears. Some nights we will be in Obadiah, Nahum, and Philemon — books some Christians have never read once. When this series is done, there will not be a book in this Book that this church has not opened together.

Why drive all sixty-six? Because of what we believe — Landmark #2 says the WHOLE Bible is verbally inspired and all-sufficient (Psalm 119:160; 2 Tim. 3:16, 17). A church that believes that ought to be able to say it has opened every book the Author wrote. And because Jesus Himself, on the road to Emmaus, taught that all the scriptures speak of HIM — He is the seed of the woman in Genesis, the Passover lamb in Exodus, the kinsman-redeemer in Ruth, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 — and then Matthew opens, and the shadow becomes flesh.

Sixty-six lessons — but not sixty-six subjects. One Person, seen from sixty-six angles. The goal is the Emmaus goal: “Did not our heart burn within us… while he opened to us the scriptures?”

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” — Isaiah 40:8

Lessons in this series will be posted here as the journey unfolds. The trip starts October 4, 2026. Pack light — come hungry.