Well, praise the Lord, thanks for being with us.
My name is Thomas. I'm the pastor here at Portland
Gospel, and I'm so thankful for those songs, man, I just love
our music every week. So thankful for that.
Thankful for the truth in those songs as well.
We're going to continue in something that we kind of
started last week. So last week you can go back on
our YouTube or Spotify or Apple, wherever you want to find
things. And we did how to Read the Bible
and we started a new Bible reading plan together.
And as a church, it's our goal to just be a part of reading the
scriptures and to have accountability and discussions
around God's word. So there's 2 tracks.
There's a New Testament only plan.
If you want to read the New Testament in one year, it's
about 5 chapters a week, less than 1 chapter a day.
You can totally do that. If you want to be a big boy or
big girl, you can also attach the Old Testament to that.
We have both of those on our website, portlandgospel.org.
And I think it's also in your bulletin thing that's now one
page for you. You're welcome for that and
trying to get everything onto one page for you.
So we did how to read the Bible and I gave you some steps just
for how you can approach the Word of God and how you can hear
from it for yourself. Today we want to continue in
that same vein and look at how to study the Bible now, as David
already gave us some handles on our Bible studies.
There's a lot of things that we could say and do in this time.
The the Bible's a big book and there are some principles for
understanding it that we would teach and what we would call
like a homiletics class. Homiletics would be, I'm sorry,
hermeneutics. These two words are very
similar. How to interpret the Bible
essentially today. We won't be getting deep into
that. I just want to give us a basic
substance and really this is going to help us kick off our
Bible studies this week. We're going to begin in the book
of Colossians. So I want to encourage you to be
with us. But, but let's maybe ask this
question first. Why?
Why do we study the Bible? You don't have to have an answer
for that. It's OK, I'll, I'll say it for
you if you're not ready for that.
By the way, we have notes if you want to follow along.
There's some papers in the back of the room.
If you didn't get one of those, they'll be helpful for you to
have cross references and that sort of thing.
But let's talk about why we studied the Bible in the first
place. Well, I'm going to give us 2
reasons. There are many more.
Certainly I could talk a lot right now, but to keep them
simple, I would say let's start first with the lost.
For the lost to be saved. We just sang those songs about
being saved to sin no more. And I what a friend we have in
Jesus. But that's not true for
everybody. Not all of the world are saved
Christian people. And oh, by the way, I'm sorry I
forgot to dismiss the kids. Thank you.
My bad. Why?
They get to have pizza tonight. So they're like, ready.
I know Watson was ready to go. But it might be easy to look on
America or other places. Doesn't say there.
There's a lot of Christian people or Christian things, but
as far as God is concerned, man is essentially lost until
they're saved. The Bible says something like
this. All have sinned and fallen short
of the glory of God there. There is no man that sinneth
not. We've all done things that are
wrong. The Bible says the wages of sin
is death, and what we inherit because of our sin is eternal
damnation and separation from God.
But the Bible says that God commended his love toward us,
and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
And what Jesus did on the cross was paid for the sins of the
world, so that whosoever believes in him would be saved.
To be saved, to sin no more, to have their sins washed away and
being made new and have a home in heaven, to have a
relationship with God. And that comes at a time that we
choose to put our faith and trust and what this book has to
say. This is the only place that
you'll find what I just shared with you, that Jesus saves, that
he rose from the dead, that he paid for the sins of the world,
that you're a Sinner and that God wants to save you.
You won't find this and anywhere else outside of this book and
this book is going to have a lot to do with you being saved.
This might sound crazy, but it's not possible to be saved without
the book. Peter says being born again.
That's what happens at the moment we choose to trust on
Christ, ask him to save us and forgive us.
It says by the word of God, which liveth and abideth
forever. So born again is what happens,
like I said, when we choose to believe that Jesus died on the
cross and make him our Lord, and that happens when we receive the
word of God. So the Scriptures are incredibly
important for anyone coming to faith in Jesus.
Jesus says it this way. He says in this parable of the
soils, he says the seed is the word of God.
And if you're familiar with this parable, the the seed was sown
on different kinds of hearts, the different soils, and the
seed, the Bible frequently interprets itself.
The seed is the word of God, which is sown upon the heart.
Paul says it this way. He says that faith comes by
hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
So if we want the people in our lives to have faith, they have
to hear from the word of God first.
Paul also says to Timothy that of Timothy's childhood, he said
from a child thou has known the Holy Scriptures which are able
to make the wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ
Jesus. Now not everybody is going to be
raised in church. Praise God for those of us that
were that even whenever we weren't like willingly learning
the Bible, Maybe there is something that happens that
we're able to become wise unto salvation because of our
exposure to the Word of God. I remember being in a church
basement and Rush Township and people teaching a punk kid who
just want to kick back up on the chair and play with my friends.
I don't remember what I learned in those moments, but I know
that there was some transmission.
I was gaining some kind of knowledge and it was much later
that I decided to choose to believe that for myself.
But Paul says to Timothy from a child thou hast known the Holy
Scriptures. So I read to my kids almost
every night. The Bible has many, sometimes
harrowing stories of death and that's the I boys.
So that's the stuff that they like some pretty wild and crazy
stuff. And I'm just trying to get as
much in there as I can so that they can become wise to
salvation. So I put it to you this way,
opening the Bible with the lost allows them to hear from God.
Because like I said a moment ago, it's not possible to be
born again without exposure to the Word of God.
Now, you might let your mind drift, and we can't get too far
off with this, but what about the guy on a mountaintop?
What about the guy in North Korea or the gal in another
country? Well, God is good.
He's not trying to trick anyone. He knows all things.
He sees all things, but they have to have a messenger, they
have to have the words of God to be able to be saved.
You can't get saved from nature. You need a revelation.
The Scriptures. David quoted this earlier in
Romans 10. It says how shall they call on
Him and whom they have not believed.
You cannot look at a tree or a mountain or a river and come to
understand that God put on human flesh and took your sin on on
the cross and was buried and rose again.
You just cannot have that kind of revelation from being in
nature or from any other book. You need to have someone come
and share with you. It says, how shall they believe
in whom they have not heard? How shall they hear without a
preacher? So here at this church, as
Tucker said, we want to equip you to believe, live and share
the good news. We want you to be a messenger of
the gospel that you're our Bible studies would be places that
people can come and learn from the Scriptures, hear from God
and choose to follow Christ. But that's just one application.
That's to the lost. The second one is for the saved
to be edified. For the saved to be edified.
There are just so many things in the Bible that the lost man will
never understand. The lost man can probably learn
about as much as that he needs to be saved.
Beyond that, there is a spiritual comprehension required
to learn all of the Bible. So don't expect in your Bible
studies that lost people are really going to be hanging in
there. They're going to get something
hopefully, and you just need to get them to the gospel whenever
you can. First Corinthians chapter 2
tells us that the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him.
You know people like this this week, Nathan, who we were with,
we had a group of guys from our Bible study this week passing
out Flyers in the city to say, hey, we're starting a Bible
study. Come and join us.
And I had some guy say, well, you really think there's
something up there like I do you want to come to Bible study?
And you know, he kept walking. But the natural man, the the
person that's not born again, they haven't trusted Christ.
They don't have the Holy Spirit. He thinks it's foolishness.
You mean you believe in the a book, you believe God became a
man. You believe that there's
something up there. It goes on to say neither can he
know them because they are spiritually discerned.
So Christian, there is truth in this book for you that the rest
of the world does not get. Isn't that amazing?
You can think about just so many wonderful truths that the lost
world cannot process. But unfortunately for many
Christians, most Christians end their Christian life at the born
again experience and they never grow beyond what the Bible calls
a babe. When we're born into God's
family, we're born a spiritual baby.
Paul writing to this church in Corinth described this whole
church in this way. He said, y'all are so immature.
He said, an I brethren, could not speak unto you as unto
spiritual like, hey, I have things I want to tell you, but
as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ, I have fed you
with milk and not with me. For hitherto you were not able
to bear it neither yet now are you able.
So you'll find that many things in this book are only going to
be exposed to you as you grow. At first you just need a bottle,
you need to be nursed, you need someone to spoon feed you.
What does the Bible say and help grow you up?
But you don't want to stay in that state.
So in God's Kingdom, time in the Kingdom does not equal maturity.
Doesn't matter how long you've known Christ, that doesn't make
you any more mature if you're not in God's Word and walking
with him. And Peter says the antidote is
to, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word that
you may grow thereby. You need to have a desire for
the word of God. You need to be nursing on the
words of truth, to grow up and understand what does it say and
what does God want me to do? Paul says to Timothy to be
nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, So
you, you have to be in God's word.
The author of Hebrews compares these two different types of
people the the spiritual babe and the mature and he uses these
two types of food to describe the word of God, milk and meat.
It says for when for the time you ought to be teachers.
So this group of Hebrews Paul says you all should know this
stuff by now. He says you have need that one
teach you again the 1st principles of the oracles of God
and are become such as has have need of milk and not of strong
meat. Now, if I were like a a better
illustration pastor, I would have someone come up here and be
drinking a gallon of milk during the entire sermon and you know,
see how things go by the end of the sermon.
As you're probably aware, you can't drink a gallon of milk in
under an hour and keep it down right As an adult, you, you
can't be nursed in a bottle all day long.
It's actually not it's not going to be good for you right.
You you need to move on from that, he says for everyone that
uses milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness for he is
a babe. So just like you would not trust
a child to to develop a real skill and learn how to do
something. The same is true for Christians.
There is a skill in Bible study and understanding it, he says,
but strong meat belonging to them that are of full age.
Now that's that's not just old, It's developed, brought to
maturity in Christ. Even those who by reason of
their use have their senses exercised to discern both good
and evil. See what a comprehension of this
book does is it enables you to have a sense about you, a
discernment for good and evil. You know what's right, you know
what's wrong. You hear God's voice and you can
say that ain't right and I'm I'll tell you why that ain't
right. But if you're a babe, you you
just need someone else to spoon feed you.
You do not know on your own. So I put it to you this way in
your notes, you will grow in direct proportion to your time
spent in God's word. Not everybody's spiritual growth
is the same. Some people seem to have
accelerated growth and for those, that's usually the people
that are giving themselves to this book, to understand it, to
hear from it, to let it reprove and correct them and direct
them. How about you?
Have you been acting like a spiritual baby?
I mean, maybe you are. If you are, praise the Lord,
there's a place for babies and families, right?
We love them. They're cute, they're wonderful.
When you get past the baby age, you're like, oh, could we maybe
have another one? We're we can't, we're not, we're
not going to, we can't. There's so much work.
But they're cute, right? We love babies.
There's a place for that. If you just got saved, man,
there's no judgement. We're not mad at you.
Just like I'm not mad at my now 6 year old child for being six
man. We're thankful.
We just want to help him grow to the next thing in his life.
Do you know the scriptures? I mean, I think of it like this.
Could you take the Bible and lead another person to Christ?
If you can't do that, don't tell me you're spiritually mature.
If you can't lead a Bible study, I'm not mad at anybody.
We're not upset. We're talking about the
difference in grown and not grown.
So we have a couple Bible studies coming up.
Monday nights the ladies meet in Southwest PSU, man, Praise God
meets on Tuesdays at 4:00 and then in my office in the city we
meet at 6:00 on Thursdays. Man, we would love to have you
join us for Bible study. It's a goal of mine that our our
whole chart church starts to get plugged into these Bible studies
and they become a midweek kind of fellowship for us.
So those are two reasons why to study the Bible.
So the loss can be saved, so the saved can be edified.
But now let's look at more specifically how we looked at
why. Let's look at how.
And again, I'm not going to give you all of the Bible study
principles. We have a class after personal
discipleship that will teach you all kinds of things like
context, the rule of first mention, comparing Scripture
with scripture, all kinds of wonderful things.
And you'll learn some of that as you attend a Bible study.
But for now, I think if we're using the word study, let's go
to where the Scriptures use the word as well.
So if you have a Bible, turn it to Second Timothy 2:15.
The word study shows up three times in the King James Bible.
Only three. Today in Second Timothy 2:15
we'll look at man a verse that you ought to memorize.
It says study to show thyself approved unto God, a Workman
that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of
truth. This is an absolutely critical
verse for us and our understanding of the Bible and
what Christian people should be doing.
There are so many things that churches could and should be
doing, but we definitely should be a people that are studying
the book. So I broke this down and just to
just a few points for you and how to study.
First is that we've got to do the work.
Do the work. That's your blank and point A is
do the work. You see it.
The Bible uses this word study in this other word, it says a
Workman and that that means to us that we're going to need to
apply some kind of effort. You've probably never
accidentally studied for anything in your life, right?
Like when I went to college, I had to learn that you really
actually had to study things. I didn't really want to do that.
But if you don't study, you don't pass and you have to
actually apply yourself to learn some things.
Merriam Webster uses this is his definition for study.
He says to apply the mind to. To read and examine for the
purpose of learning and understanding.
This is the kind of effort that takes work, a Workman kind of
work. This doesn't mean that we're
going to beat our beat each other up in Bible study and make
it super intense, but it's not going to be casual either.
This kind of effort is lacking today in applying your oneself
in a trade or a skill learning the guitar.
We often quit. We're becoming weak.
We don't want to do anything difficult because now we just
have. You'd probably know what this
is, right? We have these prompts that just
say the Bible is TLDR ChatGPT. Just tell me what it says,
right? Maybe if you're over 30 you're
not doing that, but everyone under 30 is Definitely.
This is the prompt. I don't want to read it.
I just want to have this much information to be able to make a
decision on. And you'll just never learn the
Bible that way. It'll never happen.
You'll learn a few facts about the Bible, and ChatGPT is never
going to give you objective truth because it's designed not
to tell you that Christianity is the only way.
The Bible says in Isaiah 28, whom shall he teach knowledge
and whom shall he make to understand doctrine?
Them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts.
Knowledge and doctrine. That's something that we have to
apply ourselves to. And maybe you've never weaned a
child, but the weaning process isn't super simple.
It takes a little bit of effort. We kind of want to go back to
those things that make us feel comfortable and safe, but we
have to grow. So I put it to you this way, if
you want to study the Bible, you'll have to actually apply
yourself. Have you ever woken up one day
and got to the end of the day and realized I accidentally
studied the Bible today? That's never going to happen.
It's going to need to be intentional.
So let me ask you, where is it on your calendar?
Maybe it's personal study at home.
Maybe it's a group that you want to come to.
We would love to help you get started.
We would love to help you understand.
So please come to Bible study. All right, Next is you need to
have God in mind. So if you're going to study the
Bible, you need to do some work. You're going to apply yourself
and you're going to make sure to have the author of the
Scriptures in mind. This was critical if you can
remember from last week. If you just want to read the
Bible and get anything out of it, the first thing you do is
pray. I need to have an open heart.
OK, God, what do I need to see? Teach me, show me.
Because all scripture is given by inspiration of God.
This book claims to be given life from God himself.
It's not just an ordinary book. So we need to consult the
author. We can't just neglect him and
look at it scientifically or look at it historically.
We need to look at it as if it was written by God.
The Bible tells us also that the Holy Spirit called by Jesus in
John 14, the Holy Ghost is the one who will teach you all
things. So you're never just going to
learn this book like a robot. You need to spend time with God.
Consider the author and he will teach you and it says here
there's a relationship that God has with the person that studies
his word first. It says that God trusts approved
ministers, approved ministers. The Bible says study to show
thyself approved unto God. Now, this type of approval, this
is not salvation. OK.
The songs that we sang, the blood of Christ covers our sin
belief. Faith in the gospel saves us
from our sins. So it's not that we studied the
Bible to go to heaven, but we have a relationship with God and
we don't want to be infants the rest of our life.
Many people though, they think that time in the Kingdom equals
maturity and they end up unapproved, unequipped 2nd
Corinthians 10, the Bible says not he that commendeth himself
is approved, but whom the Lord commendeth.
So if we're just looking at that word approved study to show
thyself approved unto God, it this isn't something that we get
to do to say look, I'm approved, I'm wonderful.
Look how good I am, look how smart I am.
We know also that studying the Bible, as we'll see in a moment,
it's going to protect us from false teaching.
It says of these that were approved in the Corinthian
church, it says there must also be heresies among you, that they
which are approved may be made manifest among you.
There are heresies among us as well.
I just last night ended up on a Portland church's website.
I don't even know how I found it on accident and was reading
their doctrinal statement and you're just like, what is wrong?
How do people come to how do you believe this?
That's not every church. And I'm not better than anybody
else. But heresy is a deviation from
the true understanding of the Bible, the actual truth of it.
But if you study it, you can be approved and it says here you'll
be made manifest or made known. You'll stick out when you have a
full understanding and mature understanding of the Bible.
You're going to be sticking out around you.
So I put it to you this way in your notes, If we cannot handle
the Scriptures, why would God trust us with anything else?
Many people want to be leaders. They want to be on the worship
team. They want to make disciples.
They want to be promoted. I've been here long enough.
I got my dues. I've been paying my tithes.
I deserve to be wherever. But at least in this church, if
you don't have a decent comprehension of the Bible, you
can't be a leader. I don't know what I would have
you lead or do almost everything that we do.
I would need to entrust you with rightly dividing the word of
truth. So the requirements for leading
a Bible study in this church, we have people leading our Bible
studies. I think I put these on the
screen for you. These, these leaders are
approved. They're trusted, OK?
They are members in good standing of our church.
They have completed a one-on-one personal discipleship
relationship, being mentored by somebody else in the Scriptures.
That doesn't mean they're a Bible scholar, but they know the
Bible a little bit. After that we have a class.
It's a 16 week class that we call How to Study the Bible that
will teach you principles for how to interpret it and
understand it for yourself. And then lastly there we have to
give the thumbs up. So just taking a class doesn't
mean you can lead a Bible study. So I want you to trust whoever
it is that's leading the Bible study, that you're a part of
you. You can trust them.
They may not have all the answers.
They can go home and study and bring them back and answer your
questions later. But you can trust these people.
And in some ways, leadership needs to be approved.
Paul wrote to the church in Rome.
He said salute apeles approved in Christ, salute them which are
of Aristobulus household, etcetera.
So he gives a a long list of names and he calls this man the
the word approved is used many times, but he says this man is
approved in Christ. So your leadership needs to say,
yeah, you you should be leading a Bible study.
That would be good. But let's look next.
That study produces boldness. So our verse and Second Timothy
215 study to show thyself approved unto God a Workman that
needeth not to be ashamed. The opposite of ashamed is
shame, right? That's what the enemy of God
does to make us feel bad, to expose us, to make us guilty and
miserable. But if we study the Scriptures,
we needeth not to be ashamed. We'll find an interesting
result. The psalmist said in Psalm 119,
Let my heart be sound in thy statutes, that I may that I be
not ashamed. Psalm 119 uses different words
for the Scripture, like statutes, judgments, precepts,
etcetera, but all applying to the Word of God.
And so if our heart is sound in the Word of God, it's going to
produce in us a lack of shame. A couple other examples.
Paul says to the church at Rome, I am not ashamed of the gospel
of Christ. He says in Romans 5 that hope
maketh not ashamed. So I put it to you this way.
Confidence in God's Word causes us to share it boldly.
Have you ever found this to be true, that when you're ignorant
on a subject and someone asks you a question, you're not very
bold or you shouldn't be? You don't want to be a fool.
Well, I am not really sure. I'm going to have to go check
that one out. And that's, that's an OK.
If someone asks you a hard Bible question, that's an OK response.
Don't, don't make things up. But when you've been in God's
word and someone has a question about it and you're like, yeah,
I'm in. Let me show you.
There's some kind of boldness that we have.
We're not ashamed. And some of that only comes from
study time in the Scriptures. Roman says that whosoever
believeth on him shall not be ashamed.
God wants you to be bold. The righteous are bold as a
lion. But that only comes with knowing
what you're talking about. Let's look next at rightly
dividing. So when we're studying the
Bible, we're going to apply ourself.
We're going to keep the author in mind and let him approve of
us and grow in our boldness and our confidence.
But then we've got to make some divisions.
This verse says rightly dividing the word of truth.
So if you do it right, if you apply yourself, you seek the
Lord, you find your proper divisions in the Scripture.
What you'll walk away with the Bible says, and I quote, is the
word of truth. And that's what we want.
We want the truth. Jesus said the truth is the
thing that makes you free. Thy word is truth.
Jesus says in John 17, we need the truth.
Solomon said that we can know the certainty of the words of
truth. So if we rightly divide, meaning
that there are divisions in this book, we said this last week,
not everything in the Bible applies to you today.
You're not under the ceremonial law, you're not in the Book of
Revelation. There's a place and time in
history, and there's a way in which this applies to you, and
you've got to make right divisions.
You need to understand it. Isaiah says that precept must be
upon precept. So the Bible builds upon itself.
You need to understand line upon line.
Here a little, there a little. We compare Scripture with
Scripture. Paul says that the result of
good teaching would be this, that we be no more children
tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of
doctrine by the slight and cunning craftiness whereby they
lie and wait to deceive. Ephesians chapter 4.
It right before this, it gives you pastors and teachers and
then there's a church and a place for you to belong and
there's a protection that you get spiritually when you expose
yourself regularly to teaching of God's Word.
But there is every wind of doctrine.
This world blows with a lot of weird and strange stuff.
I mean, there's just some wild things.
I started to make a list and I thought that's probably not very
helpful for me to just call out a bunch of false teaching.
But whenever you're scrolling, you got TikTok theology.
Yeah, that sounds good. Oh, yeah, that one's good.
Oh, yeah.
That. And I'm just going to tell you,
a lot of these podcasts, YouTube people, they're not approved in
the sense that they don't, they're not a pastor.
They've not been trained. There's not a person that laid
hands on them and said, we ordain you to this ministry.
They just got a camera and started talking.
Have they studied? Do they?
Are they rightly dividing? Every wind of doctrine blows and
you better believe it's all around the Internet.
So be careful who you listen to. But your last blank for this
section is that rightly dividing will protect you from false
teaching. By the way, our Bible studies
being led by our Bible study leaders that are trained, our
Bible studies are all going to operate under our doctrinal
statement. You can go to our website and
look at our beliefs and see what we believe about God, Jesus, the
Bible and all that sort of thing.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about that
stuff. We'd love to talk about it.
But our Bible studies are not going to deviate from our
doctrinal statement. So they're just some things that
we're not going to come to the same conclusion on for other
people. And again, I'd love to help you
if you have any questions with that.
But let's look next at our process of Bible study.
So this is going to be brief. This part I don't have any
verses for. I just want to share with you
what we're going to be doing in Bible study.
So earlier in the the end of last year, we did Bible study a
certain in a certain kind of way with some columns and that is
fine and good. But we're going to move on to
something a little different for this year.
So I just want to go over that with you.
I also wrote this and put it on our website.
If you go to our Bible study page, you can go and read
everything that I'm sharing with you right now.
So our process is going to look pretty simple that I put this in
your notes. OK, so we want to first start
with the time of greeting. It might sound weird, but you
know, just hey, how are you doing?
How's your family? Haven't seen you in a week.
How's that thing we prayed for? OK, cool.
Now let's let's jump in and let's move on.
But we need to get to know each other.
If there are any guests, we want everyone to feel welcome to say
hi. Maybe we can explain how we do
what we do, tell them, hey, we're a part of a church, come
and hang out with us on Sunday, etcetera.
The next is that we want to read.
And I know last week this was a point as well, like at some
point we just have to do the work and read it several times.
So you're going to probably read it at least three times before
you study it because you need to have it in your mind and in your
heart to know what you're even thinking about before you start
dissecting it. So you'll read it independently
and silently to yourself. Then we'll go around in a circle
and read it. Then we'll read it again.
Because especially if you've never read it before, you just
got to get it in there. By the way, this is a good time
to just say that the the version of the Bible that we use is
important. You're welcome to bring any
Bible that you want to Bible study.
We're going to ask that you use the King James Bible if you're
willing, because the way we do cross references, like maybe if
you have a different version of the Bible, that verse in second
Timothy 215, the King James says study.
Almost every English version of the Bible does not use the word
study right there. So when we're cross reference
referencing and we're saying, where else does the word study
show up in the Bible, We're going to come up to different
conclusions. If we're not singing from the
same sheet of music, you can bring whatever Bible you want,
but as a church that's we use the King James next is the
theme. So we say hi, we read and then
we want to just say, what, what are we reading?
Like if I was ChatGPT and I said, hey, what did that?
Just tell me? Like say it to me in a sentence,
right? Maybe you've got 5 or 10 verses.
OK, what'd you just read? Let's just summarize it.
OK? Yeah, that's a good summary.
The summary has to come from the contents, right?
OK, yeah, that's a good summary. And what that's going to do is
help you stay focused for the rest of your study.
You're not getting wild and crazy over here with did Adam
have a belly button? You're you're focusing on the
theme of where you are in the moment.
So you can for the theme, look for repetitive words.
Ask simply what is it saying, or try to summarize it into one
sentence. After you do that, you'll get
into dissection. This is the part that we often
want to jump to. What does it all mean?
But before you can do that, the Bible says that God is not the
author of confusion and that believing in the Scriptures and
having the Holy Spirit, you can have a sound mind.
So that means that God's word is intuitive, it can be broken up
and it's organized into intelligent chunks.
So what you're going to do in dissection is try to discover
the the thoughts. What, what is, what are these
few verses saying? And then we move to the next
few, what are these few verses saying?
And we can take those logical breaks in the sentences.
Sometimes punctuation helps us to discover OK a period.
Ends of thought and now we have the beginning of a new thought.
Or we have a word like therefore that says what is this referring
back to? So we just dissect and break it
into a few sections and then spend the rest of the time
looking at the words and understanding what the sections
say. So dissection will probably be
the biggest use of your time to just study out the words and see
what it says. But #5 is after that, we want
some application. We don't want to just study it
like you would study for a test, get it in your brain, and then
dump it later. The Bible's a lamp to your feet,
a light to your path. This is how you hear your
shepherd's voice. You want to know what God's
voice sounds like. It sounds like your Bible.
This is how when you read another religious text like the
Quran or even the Apocrypha, you just say that ain't right, that
isn't alive, that's not Jesus. He's here in your Bible.
So we need, when we show up to the scriptures, we need to apply
it to our life. We're glad to help you with
that. We can maybe ask some questions
like, is there anything you read that that was interesting to you
or maybe has an impact on your personal life?
Do you maybe feel weird about something like, ah, man, maybe I
shouldn't be doing this and I need to start doing that.
That you can share at your own discretion as your group grows.
So maybe your vulnerability can grow over time.
So we'll let you. We're not going to expose you or
make people feel bad right away. We want people to come and
participate as much as they want to.
But then lastly, we want to end with prayer.
Prayer will help unite our group back together into a fellowship
setting. If anybody had application, we
can say, well, let's just pray for that right now.
We'll just take some time and pray together and then conclude.
So this is what our Bible study process is going to look like
for this semester. We'll begin this week in the
Book of Colossians. I hope you'll join us.
And we're just going to be figuring it out together.
So I'm super excited for that. But now that we reach the end of
our preaching time, let me ask you a few questions.
In the beginning, we said our very first point was that the
Bible helps the lost be saved. If you're here today and you
haven't had a time in your life that you chose to believe Jesus
as the Lord, that you're a Sinner and his death, burial,
and resurrection paid for your sin, if you haven't made him
your Lord, that's the place to start.
That's how you unlock your Bible.
But if you're here and you're saved, have you put any effort
into the Bible to study? Have you ever applied yourself
to figure it out? Are you a part of a community of
people studying it together? Today we can choose to invest in
our own spiritual growth by applying ourselves.
Just show up and we'll help. We'll help you with
accountability to do the work. But now, as we conclude, then,
before the kids come in, I'd like us to break out into
groups. This isn't common for us on a
Sunday, by the way. This is a good time to say our
Bible studies are going to break one time a month.
This is the plan for now. We'll meet whenever you meet.
But the first week of the month, I have it wrong in your notes.
It should be February 4th. I think the first week of the
month, we won't have Bible study.
We're going to come into this room instead, and we'll have
music. We'll have a little bit of
teaching, and then we're going to have times of prayer
together. We're calling it a prayer
service. So as we're reading, as we're
studying, we'll just come together, take a break.
We can share, we can pray. So be the first Wednesday of the
month. We're coming here.
If you need rides, we'll get you rides, but come here and now
we're going to practice what we'll do then, which is to break
out into groups. If you're not comfortable
praying out loud, somebody else to pray for you, no big deal.
But I'm going to ask you to get into groups of two or three and
pray for our upcoming Bible studies.
One of the things David said in Psalm 127 is the Lord builds the
house. If we want to reach people or if
you want to grow, we need God's help to do that.
So I want us together tonight to seek the Lord as we begin this
week and pray for those things. Will give us about 7 minutes or
so. And then after that we will
conclude with a song. Right sweet.
All right, let's pray.