So with that, I want to introduce how to read the Bible.
So that's what we're going to talk about today.
We're not going to have a a typical sermon.
Normally we have a a text and we expose God's word verse by
verse. Today we're going to bounce
around a little bit, but in asking you to read the
Scriptures together, I want to give you some handles on how to
do that. So have maybe you've started
reading the Bible and you get from Genesis into a list of
names and you think, man, I'm toast now I'm good.
I don't, I don't know where to go.
I don't know what to do. You get lost in the laws and the
sacrifices and you're like, I really don't understand what's
happening. Or even in the New Testament
that the Bible's not a chronological book.
Maybe you find yourself just not understanding what is going on.
Who wrote this? Where am I?
I was meeting with someone recently and I said, turn to the
gospel of Luke. And he said, who's Luke?
So if that's you, that's OK. You don't have to be intimidated
by the Bible. You just have to start reading
it. That's how you learn.
Anything else. You just have to pursue it and
you can do that. It's not as scary as it sounds.
So today I want to give you some handles on how to do that for
yourself. If you have the notes, there may
be some cross references that I don't hit, so you can take those
home, maybe stuff it in your Bible.
If you ever do get stuck, bring that back out and it might help
you. My plan is Lord willing next
week to do this same thing, but to do how to study the Bible,
because that's a different thing than how to read the Bible.
So in our Bible studies, we'll be exercising some of those
principles. Here's how we come to terms with
what God said and what we do with it in our life.
But first, we just begin with reading.
So you don't have to know what it all means.
If your first question is what does the Bible mean, you're
asking the wrong question. The first question, as we'll see
in a moment, is what does it say?
And in order to discover that, you just have to read it first.
So let me take a moment and pray.
I know we've already prayed, but I want to settle our hearts
because we will be in the Scriptures.
I want to give you just one minute, maybe 60 seconds of
silence and on your own, would you just settle your heart and
ask the Lord to speak to you? And then I'll lead us in a
prayer. So let's pray.
God, as we come before Your Word, we need Your help to
understand it. I pray that you'd open our
hearts even for myself, knowing what I'm going to say.
Your Word has this uncanny ability to speak to me even
while I'm talking about it. I pray God for open hearts and
not just for this moment, but that the rest of this year would
be impacted by how we learn to read and study your word.
I pray in Christ's name, Amen. All right, we'll have a 5 fold
plan for you, a process, if you will, for how to read the Bible.
And so before you even read it, there's something you need to
do. This is this is not some
legalistic thing, by the way. These are all just rigged.
I think good principles for you. The best thing that you can do
before you ever read the Bible is not Google it.
It's the prey. If we truly want to understand
what it says, if we we truly want to hear from the author of
the book, then we need to consider him because this book
is claimed to be authored by God.
What do you believe that or not? That's what the Bible claims.
Second Timothy chapter 3 and verse 16.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God.
That word inspiration is to breathe life into something.
God inspired the scriptures. It's profitable for doctrine,
reproof, etcetera. Peter says it this way, knowing
this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private
interpretation, meaning you don't just get to make it say
whatever you want it to say, but in verse 21.
For the prophecy came not an old time by the will of man, but
holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
This is what the Bible claims. The men that wrote the Bible
were moved by the Spirit of God to write it down.
So we ought to consider the author of the book before we
even read it. The book of James tells us that
God resists the proud. There's a few things that God
hates. Did you know that?
The book of Proverbs tells us there's several things that God
hates, uses the word hate and he hates pride to be
self-righteous, to say I have it all figured out.
I don't need you. I'm better than you God.
I have my own way. He says I hate that.
That's gross. I resist like face palm.
I resist pride. So if you approach this book
already thinking it's wrong, already thinking that God
doesn't exist, you're likely not really to get anything out of
it. The Bible is likened unto a
mirror. The book of James tells tells it
this way. He says for if any be a I'm
sorry I'm I'm missing messing up on my notes.
Having an open heart will protect you from confirmation
bias. I'll explain that in a minute.
I was going to say that out of order.
I did some of this on an airplane on the way here.
I don't know what time zone I was in, so hopefully it's all in
there somewhere, but maybe. Do you know what confirmation
bias is? When you already have an idea
and you go to an experiment or to a thing and you just come to
the same conclusion you already have, You don't allow any
outside information. Sometimes it's called an echo
chamber. All of your friends and all of
your sources and all of your things all say the same thing
and you're not able to actually get any clarity or any truth
because you already have a preconceived idea.
This is true. I had AI work in an office
environment in the city and I had a, an honest liberal just
say, hey, I'm I'm very liberal and I only consider liberal
things. And I do think it's dangerous,
he admitted. I think it's dangerous.
We only listen to ourselves. That's many of us.
This is how cults are formed and all kinds of things are formed.
We don't have an open heart and an honest assessment of what is
true. The book of James tells us, if
any be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a
man beholding his natural face in a glass.
I'm sorry I got the wrong verse up there.
My goodness, I don't know what I'm doing.
Well, James 123 to 24, those references are probably in your
notes, but he says the person that looks into this glass in
verse 24, he beholdeth himself and goeth his way.
And that's many people. We look into the book and we
say, wow, I'm ugly, I'm messed up, I'm a Sinner, I need Jesus,
but I don't really want to do that.
I want to go do something else. And that is sad.
It would be like you looking in the mirror and realizing you're
a mess but still going out and to do some public kind of thing.
You'd have to have no self esteem to be able to do that.
Or maybe you're just from Portland.
There's several people you could play.
I work in the city, you could play the game in the city
homeless or from Portland. And I mean that with all due
respect because it is a fashion, but it's kind of edgy.
You just kind of quite can never tell.
But this confirmation bias is spoken of by the prophet
Jeremiah. Jeremiah chapter 6.
Israel was a people that did not want to hear from God and the
nation was going to be destroyed because they rejected God and
this is how they were described. He says, To whom shall I speak
and give warning that they may hear?
Behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot
hearken. Behold, the word of the Lord is
unto them a reproach. They have no delight in it.
For the ear to be uncircumcised, that means it can't hear.
It's not sensitive. And that can be many of us as we
approach the Bible without considering the author, We're
not able to hear. Jeremiah says in chapter 5,
there were these false prophets in Israel.
Jeremiah's job was to tell Israel, hey, judgment is coming,
you need to repent. But there was another group of
prophets and and the Bible says they prophecy falsely.
And even the priests bear rule by their means.
And my people love to have it. So this is what's really sad is
that when we hear false teaching, when we have a
preconceived idea, we really love it because it doesn't
correct us. It doesn't tell us we're
sinners, it doesn't tell us that God is holy, it doesn't tell us
there's another way. We just want to hear what we
want to hear. So today that's why I had us
pray, and I think that's the best way to approach the
scriptures. I gave you a couple of examples
of prayers. I put them in your notes because
they don't have to be complicated prayers.
Prayers aren't magic words. OK, God is not trying to trick
you all. You didn't say it just right.
I didn't hear it, so I put it 2 prayers, an example of a prayer
from an unbeliever. If you're a skeptic and you
would say I'm not really sure, I don't know if God is real.
Begin with that, the honesty of your heart that says OK God, if
you're real, I want to hear show me.
But for many Christians, my regular prayer is God, show me
what I need to see. Help me to put everything else
aside. Speak to me.
I regularly tell the Lord, correct me.
I I want to be right. I want to be right with you.
I'm terrified of my own pride, my own decisions.
But God's not trying to trip you up.
In John chapter 1, the Bible says that he lights every man
that comes into the world. You see, it's God's desire that
all the world would be saved. Every person would be drawn to
Christ and born again through faith in the gospel.
God is trying to reach every person.
So when you open the Scriptures, if you do it with an honest
heart, you will hear from the Lord.
So the the first one is to pray. That's the way we start.
The second one, it's to read. That should make a lot of sense,
right? But many times, and now today in
the age of AI, we don't actually read anything anymore.
It's TLDR, right? Maybe just Sheila, give me the
summary Or not. Sheila, Alexa, Siri, somebody.
Yeah. Tell me, what does the Bible
say? Can you summarize it?
Summarize it even make it shorter?
Make it give me one sentence. OK.
That was my devotions. Or maybe you're the the random
Bible verse person. I used to be a youth pastor and
kids would have these random Bible verse generators on their
phone and they would just hit it and they would get a random one
and be like, all right, that was it for today.
Like, man, how sad that we're that shallow that we're
satisfied with just playing the lottery of the Bible.
If we're going to read the Bible, we actually have to spend
time reading it. There's no short cutting,
learning things. You don't have to understand
everything. We'll get there in a moment, but
you just have to start reading. This is why we have a plan and
we do it as a church. There's some camaraderie around,
hey man, would you read this week or how's it going or let's
get caught up or something like that.
So I have a few helpful things for you in your notes.
First is set a time to read. If you're going to actually set
out a goal and say, I want to read the New Testament, I want
to read the Bible, I've never done it before, I want to
complete it, or maybe you just want to spend the rest of your
life reading it over and over again.
You've got to find a time where you can get undistracted and
truly engage with what it says. Now, I think maybe there are a
limited number of people on the planet that can do two things at
once. There are a lot of studies that
show that we really don't multitask very well like we
think we do. So we've got an earbud in and
we're watching ATV show and we're trying to do this.
And it's you really cannot get what you need out of it without
quieting yourself before it undistracted.
And for this length of time is not as important as time at
attention. So you this doesn't mean you
have to read for two hours a day if you can give 15 or 20 minutes
solid, open heart, undistracted. God teach me what do I need
today? That'll be like infinitely
better than your multitasking attempt to think you're pleasing
God in some way by doing everything else at the same
time. But if it's if it's not on your
calendar, it may not happen. This doesn't mean you need to
put it in Google Calendar, but you say that it's important.
Or if you would say that it's important, it needs to have a
space in your life somewhere in the morning and the evening.
On your lunch break, you need to have a place.
Carve it off. And next is to read it again.
So you set time to read, but maybe you're like me, you read
in the morning, your coffee still kicking in and your eyes
sometimes go cross eyed and you you're starting to think about
other things that need to happen later in the day.
And then you're like, I don't know what did I just read?
I don't, I don't know that anything worked.
I don't remember what happened. That's when you need to read it
again. It's OK.
Let your coffee kick in. Let your mind settle down.
Sometimes we just have to fight the flesh that wants to be
distracted, that wants to think about other things and take time
and focus. OK, no, God is important.
I I just want to focus. Maybe I just need to try again.
Let me let me back up to where I I got, I know I was here.
I got that and I'll start from there and keep going.
But don't don't get discouraged if you need to go back and read
something again. Just looking at words doesn't
really help you if you're not understanding what you're
reading. So we're not doing this just to
be religious. Make sure you understand it, but
there will be things that you won't understand.
So there is a time that you need to move on.
Instead of getting stuck trying to figure out what some word
means or who a person is or what's going on in the context
and not actually getting much of anything or just feeling
confused. There is a time to say, you know
what? Maybe, maybe that's for later.
I need to keep going. Maybe if I keep reading, I'll
get the answer to that question. Frequently, just like reading
books, we learn the context of things by continuing to read,
right? You can do that with a word.
You can discern the context of a word and what it means just by
reading it around the other words.
So you may just need to continue.
But since the Bible is a spiritual book, it's not written
by a computer. And the Bible tells us to the
the Holy Spirit is the one that instructs us in the word of God.
There are some things that the Holy Spirit just doesn't want
you to know yet. So Jesus told his disciples of
all people, Jesus and his disciples, Jesus told his
disciples him getting ready to go be crucified.
And I got some stuff that I want to tell you, but right now I
can't share that with you. You need to.
You're going to need to catch that later in John chapter 16.
I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear
them now. Even the disciples did not learn
everything all at once. You're not going to learn the
Bible all at once. And it may take several times
through the Scriptures for you to start to connect the dots
again. It's not in chronological order.
They're different authors. There's a lot of things going
on, so just keep reading and let the Lord teach you over time.
It is, by the way, the Holy Spirit's job to teach you.
Jesus, says the Comforter, when He comes, He'll teach you all
things and bring all things to remembrance.
So if you're a Christian, you need to be attentive to what the
Holy Spirit is teaching you while you're engaging with the
Scriptures, not trying to force your own version of whatever you
want to see. And when you reach a place to
where you really don't understand something, and you
will, you just need to trust it. You've got to trust it anyway.
The Bible is the most credible book on the planet.
There are more. There is more manuscript
evidence for the Bible than any other book on the planet.
There's more archaeological evidence and historical evidence
and eyewitness accounts. It would be kind of ridiculous,
honestly, to say that it's not true if you if you really
investigate it. So I put it to you this way, the
Bible is true whether you understand it or not.
You see, sometimes we in our pride, that thing that God
hates, in our pride, we say something can't be true unless I
understand it. And that's just not possible,
right? Do you?
Do you understand how whenever you send messages and watch
videos on your phone that packets of data transmit back
and forth between cell phone towers and somehow it ends up
being some show that you're watching on your phone?
Do you know how Wi-Fi works? I mean, I read about it.
I still don't understand it. I have, I have a degree in
computer engineering. Things.
I still don't get it. How about electricity?
There's so many things that we don't fully understand and yet
we're like, Yep, it's there. It's a thing.
I don't know. It's a thing.
But yet when we come to the scriptures and we reach a thing
where we say, I don't know, that doesn't make sense.
We, we, we have some different standard for God to where if I
don't get it ain't right. And that's just called pride.
It really is. I'm not saying you can't do your
homework. You're allowed to do the math on
the Bible. Go go do the math It's fine.
It's it's been around for a long time.
You go ahead and try to shoot holes in it.
But Psalm 119 says thy word is true from the beginning.
And if you will come to the place where you just say God, I
don't understand it, but I believe it's true.
And I just want you to teach me. And you're going to have a great
quiet time when you open the book.
You're going to hear your shepherd's voice.
And the shepherd, by the way, Jesus, this is what he said.
Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth.
The word of God is truth. That's a word that our our
culture doesn't really like. We try to make truth into some
relative concept, but truth is right and wrong and black and
white and absolute. And Jesus would say the word of
God is true. That's the kind of heart that
when you read it, you will hear. Thirdly is to write it down.
So we started first with prayer. Then we actually got to just sit
down and read. And let's say you read and you
think, ma'am, well, that was pretty cool.
Or that's interesting. Or I feel like God is speaking
to me in some way. I this is where I want to
encourage you to find a journal. And as a man, this feels kind of
weird. I feel like I've got some Dear
Diary, Polly Pocket Pink kind of book where I'm writing all my
feelings down, but that's not exactly what we're talking
about, OK? I've been keeping a journal, not
necessarily even on purpose, just trying to record things
that God is showing me for many years now.
I want to encourage you to do the same.
There's a sense in which digital journaling is helpful.
I do both. I have, I write note cards.
I have physical books that I sometimes lose that I write
things in, but I also have a Bible app that I take notes in
and a notes app that I put Bible copy and paste things in.
So whatever your approach is is fine.
Also, I have like programs on the computer that are searchable
when I put stuff in. So do whatever works for you.
OK? There is no standard that the
Bible says thou shalt use Apple or Android.
Like just write it down. Whatever you whatever you learn.
And the digital, I think the digital is helpful.
There's a time stamp, there's a search.
And in this last year, I, I just preached at this missions
conference lessons that we learned as a church over the
last year. And I literally just went to my
journal and said, God, what have you been showing me?
Some of the things immediately come to the surface.
Oh, OK. I remember when I saw that.
Yeah. OK.
And I just started throwing some of those into a document to
share with the churches that we visited.
But you can only do that if you write it down.
Now this is where I would suggest that digital's good.
But there's something about physically writing the words of
God. I don't fully understand it
other than I got a scripture for you that I want to share and a
reason why. But Deuteronomy chapter 17, it's
really small on the screen, but God told the King of Israel,
this is what he was supposed to do whenever Israel would get a
king. It says, And it shall be when he
sitteth on the throne of his Kingdom, that he shall write him
a copy of this law in a book, and out of that which is before
the priests, the Levites, And it shall be with him, and he shall
read therein all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear
the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and the
statutes to do them, that his heart be not lifted up above his
brethren. See, even the King of Israel
needed God's grace and mercy, and that he turned not aside
from the commandment to the right-handed to the left, to the
end that he may prolong his days and his Kingdom, He and his
children in the midst of Israel. It seems like Jesus is John. 17
words. Sanctify them through thy truth
would be true for the king if he would write it down and read
from it every day. It would sanctify and it would
protect him from going to the left or going to the right from
turning aside from being lifted up in pride to say I'm better
because I'm the king. So I want to encourage you write
scripture. I do this for almost every when
I have a main text, almost every sermon that I have, I write out
by hand slowly the main text and it helps me see patterns and
words and circle and scribble on stuff.
I I write verses and put them in my pocket.
So I think that's super helpful. All right, next is apply.
So, so far we have begin with prayer.
Then you got to just read. When you find something
interesting, write it down, document it, and then you need
to apply. There's something you need to do
lest you be like the person that James mentioned that looks into
the mirror and then walks away unchanged.
That is a temptation for us because sometimes we don't love
the things that we read. The Scriptures reveal our heart,
right? That's what Hebrews 4 says, that
the Word of God. It's alive, it's quick, it
pierces to the dividing asunder all the way down to be a
discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
And This is why I think it's important to have quiet,
undistracted time before the book because it's going to
penetrate further into you than just your brain.
It's going to get into the intentions of your heart.
Like what is my motivation for doing something?
What do I really want to do? Am I doing this for the Lord?
Am I doing this for myself? So you should expect to have
some thoughts that as you expose your heart to the Word of God,
you will be thinking things that you were not thinking before.
We we could call this enlightenment in a biblical
sense that God's word is shining light on my thoughts, on my
heart and I'm, I'm exposed and I'm now processing my thoughts
with God. That's the privilege of the
Christian with the Holy Spirit, with the heart in tune to the
word of God. The only way to really tune your
heart is to get with God's word. Isaiah 55 My thoughts.
This is God speaking. My thoughts are not your
thoughts. You're talking about an
omnipotent, timeless, all powerful, all knowing being a
perfectly holy God. Of course, our thoughts are not
His thoughts. I don't know what it's like to
know what every person on the planet is thinking all at once.
I don't know what it's like to see all time in history, however
I want to see it. God is so far beyond the human
mind, and the human mind is wonderful and powerful, but He
is so far beyond it. And then we also have our sinful
condition that our natural inclination is not holiness and
worship. We need salvation to be redeemed
and walk with God. And even after we're saved, we
continue in the the sinful nature that needs to be
constantly renewed in the Word of God.
But as you're looking for application, there's a reason
why this isn't first. Many times we're looking for an
answer and we go to the book and we go, aha, I see, now I can
marry that person. Now I can get that job.
Look, now I can do whatever I want.
I've done this before. Have you ever done this?
I mean, maybe I'm just, I'm speaking so I'll be honest for
you in the moment. When I got saved, I brought a
lot of baggage into my Christian life.
I brought substance abuse and all kinds of other things.
And I had this thing called marijuana that I really enjoyed.
I thought it was just great. It was.
I was going to take it to the rest of my life like, hey man,
it's all good. It's all natural and stuff.
I was getting discipled and I had someone leading me in the
Bible. We were meeting every week and
he would always ask, hey, what are you reading and what's God
teaching you? And we had lessons that we would
go through. And I remember starting to get a
handle on this book and saying, OK, I believe it's true.
And since it's true, and since marijuana feels so good, I'm
sure there's a place in here that God said it's totally fine
to smoke weed. I'm telling you, I did this.
So I went back to Genesis one. Look, every herb bearing seed
shall be for your meat. Aha.
But I honestly in the honesty of my heart with the Holy Spirit
could not say that's what the Bible teaches.
Adam and Eve, they only ate vegetables, they didn't eat
flesh. We go to a pre sin fall place
and try to take a something out of context and apply it to
another place. By the way, the New Testament
says be sober, be vigilant for your adversary, the devil,
etcetera. So we we can easily go to this
book and find something and distort it and try to accomplish
our will. But if you have the right heart
and you want to apply the word of God, you're asking for
direction. Lord, show me that is the right
part. I want to show you now three
applications of the Bible and the way that you can protect
yourself from doing what I was foolishly trying to do.
There are three applications to the Scriptures.
The first is historical. This is why I said an
introduction. You just the first question is
what does it say? Not what does it mean.
What is the Bible saying? Because most of the Bible is not
written to you. All of the Old Testament is not
written to any person in the church, to any Christian that
believed in the resurrection. It's all written to national
Israel or even people before Israel was a nation.
Now we'll get there. There's room to apply all the
Bible to your life. But first we must look at what
does it say? For example, Jesus says in
Matthew 5 that he came to fulfill the law.
So when we look at the Old Testament, the first five books
of the Bible, we call that the law.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, write the
books of Moses. Jesus said that he fulfilled
them. Those are the books where we get
things about garments and fringes and dietary restrictions
and Sabbath and animal sacrifice and washings and leprosy and all
kinds of interesting stuff where you get stuck right in your
reading. We're not going to apply that
because that was not written to us.
The book of Galatians says that we're not justified by the works
of the law. Praise God, we're justified by
the faith of Christ. The thing that makes us
Christians is not adherence to a standard.
It's faith in the standard, faith in the death, burial and
resurrection of someone else that died in our place.
That's the thing that saves us. But the whole Bible is still
there. So let's look next at the
doctrinal, these three applications.
First is history. What does it say?
Second is doctrine. And this is what the Bible is
teaching. What is it teaching us?
And this is where many people get messed up.
They take their doctrine for how a church should function out of
a place that wasn't built for the church.
There is no priesthood. There is no Pope OK there there
is no there are so many things that get whacked by pulling
scriptures out of the wrong places.
So second Timothy chapter 2 tells us to rightly divide the
word of truth. We're called to study it.
We'll see that next week and divide it.
There are divisions in the book. There are divisions in time and
history and how God worked with man and and one of the
preeminent things about the scriptures is that it's
profitable for doctrine. Now doctrine, the word just
means teach teaching. What does this tell me about who
God is? What does this tell me about
creation? What does this tell me about the
future? That's doctrine.
How should a church function, etcetera.
And lastly is the personal, this is the one you really want,
right? It's it's good to learn like
some information about God and some history, but you're going
to the book looking for direction, a lamp to your feet,
a light to your path so you can read the whole Bible and hear
from God as long as you let the first two win.
OK, you cannot violate what it's historically saying this is
written to me. No, it's not.
You cannot violate the doctrinal teaching.
What does the Bible say? So as long as you do those
things, God can direct you with all kinds of places in the
Scriptures. Romans chapter 15, the apostle
Paul writes whatsoever things were written a four time were
written for our learning. Now this, he's talking about the
Old Testament that we through the patience and comfort of the
Scriptures, might have hope. So 1st century Christianity did
not have a completed Bible. It took some time for the
apostles to write scriptures and combine them, collect them, and
they still had the Old Testament law.
And he said that those things are written for our learning.
He says in another place in 1st Corinthians 10 that these things
were our examples, and you can go look at 1st Corinthians 10,
you can see some of the examples that he's talking about.
He says here to the intent that we should not lust after evil
things as they also lusted. And he looks back to Israel
making a poor decision in the Old Testament and says it's
probably good, you know, just don't do that, right?
You're not national Israel. But definitely don't seek after
the things God says not to seek after.
That's really what's going down. Don't murmur and complain in the
wilderness. So as long as you keep those
three things safe or in line, you'll be just fine.
And you can read anywhere. You can be inspired by King
David, and Samson somehow sometimes makes good decisions,
right? You can read all kinds of things
and get some direction for your life.
And the last thing for you today is to meditate.
So we're going to read the Bible work.
We're going to pray First we got to just spend some time reading
it. I'm going to write down some
things that I thought were interesting.
I'm going to look for something to apply to be directed in my
life in some way. And then you need to spend some
time in meditation. If the God of the Bible is
infinitely more complex than human beings, it might take us
some time to catch up to what God's got going on.
You may not get everything you need from the plain reading of
the Bible. And I don't mean you need to
like Da Vinci Code. Try to do some math and
calculate some weirdness. But meditation is often thought
of in in this Eastern yoga kind of sense, as an emptying.
But biblical meditation is actually quite the opposite.
It is a filling. It is to take the Word of God
and place it into your heart and mind and Mull it around and
process it and think about it. And you'll really never do that
on accident. You probably meditate on other
things on accident, like and how much you love somebody or what
you want to do when you get off of work or what you were like.
Always think we're using our brains in a power down back of
the mind kind of sense, right? And we need to engage that mode
with what we read. Bring it back to memory later.
While you're doing the dishes, while you're sweeping the floor
or working out, while you're driving, turn the radio off.
Maybe before you're driving, get out your journal and say, God,
what did you show me this morning?
And then get on the road and process that.
Pray about that for a little bit.
This is biblical meditation. I'm going to give you a few
verses and we'll be done. Joshua 18.
Actually, does anyone have Joshua 18 memorized?
It's the summer camp verse, This Book of the Law.
No, this was AK at verse. Jay.
I put Jay on display. I'm sorry.
I just put Jay on the spot right now.
My bad. All right.
Jay did great. You did it.
I know you know it. This book of the law shall not
depart out of thy mouth. But thou shalt meditate therein
day and night that thou mayest observe to do according to all
that is written therein. For then shalt thou make thy way
prosperous, and then shalt thou have good success.
This book of the law, sometimes it doesn't even need to come out
of your mouth. It needs to stay within meditate
therein day and night and check this out the very last word in
this verse, the King James Bible.
It's the only time it uses the word success in English is to
meditate and observe, to do what you read.
Maybe you know Psalm chapter one, verse one.
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the
ungodly, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and in his
law doth he meditate day and night.
Psalm one is real short. You can go home and read that.
You'll see he's like a tree planted by the river.
His leaf won't wither. He's going to be fruitful even
when the heat comes because he has this meditation, this walk
with God that says, I'm always just think.
I'm just so amazed at how wow. According to Psalm 19,
meditation can be in your hearts.
According to Psalm 63, meditation can be upon your bed
in the night. The psalmist says it is my
meditation all the day. So as you read, if you truly
want to hear, you've got to write it down and process it.
Think about it, bring it back to mind.
Don't leave unchanged. Take your thoughts with you.
How about you? Maybe you're already reading the
Bible and there's one of those things that sticks out to you
more. Maybe you're inconsistent with
the time you spent. Maybe you haven't been recording
what God's been teaching you. Maybe you read it and you walk
away just like totally forgot what you read later.
This isn't like let's all get super self-righteous and how
much we do Bible things. But I think if we're just
looking to teach people how to read the Scriptures, these five
things are going to be really helpful to give them some
boundaries to be able to hear from God and to be changed.
Perhaps most importantly, the Bible will only take you so far
if you aren't saved. First Corinthians chapter 2
tells us that the natural man cannot discern the things of the
Spirit of God. We need God's Holy Spirit in us.
So instead of trying to figure the whole book out, the most
important question to ask is what about Jesus?
What about the cross and the resurrection?
What about my sin? Have I reconciled with this God
based on his Son? And if you have the Holy Spirit
man, God will teach you incredible things.
There's a couple other ways that yeah, there's just the process.
Summarize, pray, read, write, apply, meditate.
There's a couple other ways that you can read and understand the
Bible. Right as you're reading, you can
come to Bible study and engage with other Christians.
Hey, look, I'm, I'm talking about Bible things over here.
And then you go home and you read Bible things over there.
We also have the plan. Go to our website,
portlandgospel.org. It's laid out for you.
It should be on the pieces of paper that you have today.
We would love to help you. We exist to help you live the
word of God. So we want to help you do that.
Yeah, that's it. Let me pray for us.
And then we have another song, right?
Sweet. Let's pray, Lord, as we set out
for this year. Got to pray for the people in
this room, myself included. If we'll spend the time with
you, You're going to teach us new things this year.
You're going to open our eyes to behold wondrous things out of
your law. Got to pray as a church that You
would always keep us focused in the book, that we'd hear your
voice even in our mind's eye, that we'd see your face.
God, that we use our time and our day to process and pray.
Would you direct our path? Would you sanctify us from sin?
Be pleased in us, be pleased in our church.
God, would you bring people our way, People that want to open
the book, that want to study, that want to grow, that want to
know. You bring them to us.
We want to be a blessing to them.
I pray in Jesus name, Amen.