What is The Bible Recap? Why should we read the Bible every day? - Podcast Episode 37

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Your questions, biblical answers. On today's episode, we have a special guest with us.

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I'm Tara Lee Cobble, the author of the Bible Recap. Tara, welcome to the show.

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Thank you so much for having me. Grateful to be here. And we also have Gwen, one of the associate editors at Got Questions, and she's the administrator of CompellingTruths .org.

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Happy to be here. All right. So, Tara Lee, for our visitors who may not be familiar, what is the

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Bible Recap? Oh, the Bible Recap helps you read, understand, and love the

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Bible. I grew up in the church, and I tried so many times to read the

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Bible in a year. That was the plan that was always suggested to us at the beginning of the year, and I would always get bogged down around Leviticus.

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And the first time I ever finished was when a pastor friend came alongside me and answered my questions as I encountered them, which kept me going.

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So I decided that I wanted to create a podcast to do that for other people. So we created this eight -minute daily podcast to walk you through the one -year chronological plan or the three -month

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New Testament plan, and then we turned that into a book for people who prefer the book experience over an auditory experience.

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So there's a book, there's a podcast, there's Old Testament and New Testament, there's just New Testament. Choose your adventure, essentially.

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But we just want to help people get over whatever obstacles keep them from reading, understanding, and loving

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Scripture. So actually, I was introduced to the Bible Recap just recently, and I actually ordered the book.

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You might want to advertise how heavy this thing is. There is a lot of really good content, and I'm looking forward to maybe doing that with my morning devotionals next year.

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Yeah, great. The good news is, even though it is a very large book, it's 760 pages, but it's just two pages per day.

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So you read your three -ish chapters of the Bible, and then it's two pages of the book or eight minutes of the podcast. So it's a lot, but it comes in bite -sized chunks.

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Well, and I actually started following the Bible Recap last year with the three -month

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New Testament plan. My church did that together. And what you said that, what did you say?

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Reading, understanding, and loving the Bible. And that's definitely what it's done for me. I've been overwhelmed by the one -year chronological idea, and especially for me, it's the

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Old Testament prophets. It's, what if I don't know the history? So I'm not sure if this has been fulfilled or not yet fulfilled, and what am

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I supposed to do with the poetry that I don't understand? But knowing that, okay, I can just read it and then listen to the podcast, and Tara Lee helps me understand what was going on, has been super helpful.

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Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, a lot of people find that the New Testament is an easier on -ramp for them.

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And once they gain just the pattern of being in the Word, and once they sort of start to get how we work with the

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Bible Recap, they have the confidence to enter into the New, to the Old Testament after they finish the New.

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And we have people who are now doing it with us for their third year in a row. So they just keep coming back. And I love that.

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We want people to not only read the whole Bible, but I want Christians to read the Bible every day for the rest of their lives.

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Yes, and I definitely plan to start again in January. And so that's one thing

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I'm, I guess a question for you is what makes you so passionate about Bible literacy?

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And like, why is it so important for Christians to daily be in the Word? You know, okay,

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I'm going to draw an analogy. I've had two open heart surgeries and I used to, I started running before I had my open heart surgery.

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And it was a challenge. It was really hard, but I did it. And I would be so happy when

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I finished it. And then I had the open heart surgeries and my heart got fixed. And the first race that I ran after my heart got fixed was my fastest race, even though I hadn't trained for it at all.

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And it was so much easier. I was like, this is what it's like to run with a heart that works.

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This is amazing. And so that's, that's the same journey I went through in my relationship with the

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Lord. I grew up in a Christian home, church three times a week, private Christian school. My first job was at my family's

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Christian bookstore selling Bibles. So I was saturated in the

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Word and I had never read the whole Bible or understood it until I was in full -time ministry.

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And it changed everything. It was like I was working with a new heart to see and behold who

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God really says He is instead of just learning about Him secondhand. Everything came alive. Like my heart,

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I didn't know I had the capacity to love God as much as I have come to love Him. And I, again,

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I was in full -time ministry. And so the dramatic shift that made in me to read, understand, and love the

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Bible is what I want for every Christian out there and every non -Christian too, but especially the people who really think that it's beyond them to read the

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Bible or to understand it or to love it, to drop down in a genealogy and expect to learn something about God there.

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That seems unattainable to most people. And we showed them that it's not, that He's there in those pages.

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His character is even in the Old Testament laws, even in the genealogies, even in the dry parts, even in those

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Old Testament prophets. I didn't really like that much either. Those were the hardest spot for me always, still are.

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And that's one thing that I love too, is you end each podcast with the Godshot. So you're really focusing people in on, it's about what can we learn about God, not necessarily, do

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I know the exact order and the precise history? Yeah, we call it the

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Godshot because it's a snapshot of God and His character that we saw in the reading that day. And what

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I want people to see is that you can find God and His character on every page of Scripture. And surprisingly, you'll even see

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Jesus show up in the Old Testament. Like a lot of people get surprised by that. They think, you know, we'll have people who are reading in the

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Old Testament and they'll say like, oh, I can't wait to get to the New Testament. I just need Jesus. And I'm like, well, Jesus said that the whole

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Old Testament is about Him. So let's see where He is. If He said that, let's find Him. And so we look for Him there and we look for what we learn about God and His character instead of, because what

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I found is, you know, growing up in church, doing tons of Bible studies, leading a

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Bible study network myself, a lot of things end with application points. What's your takeaway?

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How are you going to go and change what you're doing? And what I found was that for a lot of people, especially if they haven't fallen in love with God yet, it's very cumbersome to try to, you know, pull themselves up by their bootstraps to make those changes in their own lives and in their own hearts.

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And even if they manage to do it short term, they can't sustain it long term. And then they get really discouraged and they don't want to go back to the

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Word and they feel like God's disappointed in them. And so what I wanted to do with the God Shot is not leave people with an application point that bogs them down.

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I want to show them who God is so that they are buoyed through life's trials and hardships and joys and everything by the character and the person of God.

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And then as our hearts fall in love with Him, we will want to obey Him. We will delight to do what

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His Word says. That's why I wanted to end with the God Shot. Every day we end with that snapshot of God and His character.

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And then I end with the phrase, He's where the joy is. Yes. Psalm 1611 says, in your presence, there is fullness of joy.

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At your right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. Fullness of joy forevermore. That's who

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He is. That's what I want in all that my day holds. So I want to leave people with that reminder every day.

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So I'm very thankful for the youth pastor who discipled me after I came to faith in Christ as a teenager.

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And one of the things he really instilled in me is daily Bible reading. So I've been doing either like a one -year

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Bible or a one -year chronological Bible for approaching 30 years now.

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I've gone through one every year. But several years ago, I really noticed

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I'd read through Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, Proverbs. And if you asked me five minutes afterwards, so what was today's reading about?

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I mean, I'd draw a blank because my mind's focused on what to do in that day.

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But so I started adding it like an additional, some sort of devotional, or like there's a one -year

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Bible companion that's asked different questions about the passage. It helps you to think deeply. So having something in addition to the

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Bible reading to me is super helpful in actually making you think a little more deeply about it, about what's probably the most important thing we can learn in the passage today.

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But then also remembering what you studied and then thinking about it as your day goes on.

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And I'm looking forward to the Bible recap, as the couple I've done so far have been similarly helpful. Yeah, I think that is so helpful.

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It also forces you to process through. And I think one of the distinctions that we've had to make for people is that maybe they'll hit a part where they really want to dig in and they'll say like, oh,

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I wish you had a Bible recap that slowed down in this section. And so we articulate the difference to them between reading

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Scripture and studying Scripture. And so we created a study that goes along with it, where it asks like five different questions a day, and we'll have them jump into the text and comparing other texts, and maybe looking up the word in Hebrew and things like that, where they are having to sort of latch in and study this text instead of just read it and move on.

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I think both are really important. It's important to read it all, and it's also important to drill down on some of it.

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And so we've tried to use this opportunity to get people into both of those lanes of engaging with God's Word.

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And so I know that one of the ways that you also encourage deeper study is through dGroups. So tell us more about that.

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Yeah, so dGroup stands for Discipleship Group, and a lot of churches have things called dGroups. So it's kind of a more generic name, but we call it dGroup

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International, and we meet in homes and churches around the world. And so we do have church partners that we partner with to help them build out their home group options, because there is a lot of work involved in building out a

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Bible study. They're not just getting together and talking about their week. They're not just getting together and rediscussing the sermon.

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They're getting together and diving into a book of the Bible or a theme from Scripture. And so we meet for two hours a week, and they're, like I said, in homes or in churches, or we also have online dGroups.

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And we study the Word. We memorize chunks of Scripture. And so we're memorizing, like we just finished, not long ago, we finished memorizing,

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I think, the fruit of the Spirit section is what we will be covering by the time this comes out. And so we try to drill down on more than just one verse at a time.

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And then we also pray together, confess sin with each other, and we just try to stack in as many spiritual disciplines as we can so that we're learning and growing in those spiritual processes.

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And, you know, we're studying anything from Acts to the Trinity to the fruit of the

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Spirit, and we just try to drill down on those things. So it's not like how to become a woman of grace or things like that.

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It's not a how -to. It's a who is God, what does Scripture say? So we're really drilling down on those.

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And we have about, I think we have about 300 groups. We've been on six continents in English and Spanish, and I'm really grateful for that opportunity to help other people study the

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Word. Yeah, that's great. So you mentioned six continents. I was wondering, why are you so neglectful of Antarctica?

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I know, you know, I just, I feel really burdened for the scientists who live there, and the penguins, and maybe someday we'll have that happen.

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Knock out all seven of them. All right. One thing I really enjoy about the

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Bible Recap is the fact that it's chronological. So just briefly, why did you decide to go the chronological route rather than like a standard one -year

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Bible reading plan? Well, you know, I didn't even know for a long time that the

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Bible, even growing up, reading the Bible in church, working in a Christian bookstore,

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I didn't know that the You hear people say, I want to read it front to back. And so,

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I mean, and it's called old and new. So it seems chronological. I didn't know that it was laid out more like a library.

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Like you mentioned the poetry books, and the prophets, and the gospels, and the epistles, and it's laid out somewhat in order, but a lot of it is not.

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And so the first time that a pastor encouraged me to read through scripture, he suggested that I read through chronologically because I told him

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I just didn't understand how, like, I don't understand how it all fits together. And so we are people of story.

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Our hearts love story. And so the narrative of scripture is best understood in the timeline that it happened.

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And you really appreciate the New Testament so much more when you come through all the

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Old Testament. And so I found that reading it that way helps my brain piece it together. I also really love, you know, you mentioned when you would read poetry, you'd be like, what did

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I just read? And so what I love about the chronological plan is that, for instance, you'll read about David's sin against Bathsheba and Uriah.

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You'll read about that in Chronicles. And then you go over to the Psalms of Repentance that he wrote. Read that as it lines up with the story.

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And you see, oh, this is what that Psalm was born out of. It has so much more weight and meaning now. So I love the way it pieces things together.

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And Blue Letter Bible, they're the people who came up with the plan that we use. And it's the one that I've done 15 times in a row now.

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And I just, I think I'll probably read it till I die. That's, I love that plan.

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So another thing that I think is interesting is how you do intentionally partner with churches.

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So and us also as a parachurch organization. So I guess what do you view as how can parachurch organizations come and support the local church and not, you know, nobody's here to replace the local church?

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Oh, right. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I love about D -Group, we have these groups that often were built out.

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Pastors' Wives would often be the people who would lead them a lot of times. They would come in and they would really want something that was already built out and they didn't have to figure anything out.

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Like we even train the leaders. We have a six -step leader training program online. We walk the leaders through it.

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We partner with their churches. We'll ask them for a referral from their pastors just to make sure, you know, we don't know these people.

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And so we want to make sure that they are vetted somehow by someone who is in their lives. And so we really want to come along and serve these churches well by giving them for free this prepackaged content.

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And then we say, we built this out. We'll partner with your church. We want to serve your members well and your staff well, because what it does is that when those staff members don't have to write curriculum, come up with a plan, come up with a system, train their leaders, we don't have to do all those things.

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They are freed up to do the face -to -face ministry that they probably are way more passionate about and gifted at.

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And most of them don't get into it to do spreadsheets. That's my guess. You know, most of them want to do face -to -face ministry and love people and shepherd their people well.

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So we sort of take the burden of curriculum and content creation off of their shoulders and free them up to do face -to -face ministry at no charge to them.

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And then with the Bible Recap, sort of the same thing. We've built out this program and churches will come alongside us and they'll walk their people.

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They'll say, we're going to do the Bible Recap next year. And they give them everything that they need. And everything is available for free.

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Now there are paid options, like they can buy the book if they want to, they can buy the audio book if they want to, but there's also the podcast.

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We also have a journal, a daily study guide, a weekly discussion guide that leaders can lead their groups through.

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And those things are all, we offer all those in order to serve churches. We've built those out with a dream to serve churches so that they can just love their people.

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So we noticed that you released another book just recently. So tell us a little about He's Where the

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Joy Is. Well, you know, I wrote my first Bible study and I decided to start with an easy topic like the

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Trinity. And that was my first foray into writing a Bible study for Lifeway.

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And, you know, we sat in the meeting with all these ideas. Lifeway brought their ideas of what we should do.

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And I brought my ideas of things I was interested in and we discussed them all. And afterward, I was talking to my agent who was on the call with us, the video call.

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And she said, Tara Lee, if you don't know that you should write this study on the Trinity, like let me inform you, you did not light up talking about anything the way you lit up talking about the

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Trinity. She's like, you are passionate about that. And I was like, you're right. But I'm nervous because it's such a big topic.

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So I found that a lot of people shy away from the Trinity because,

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A, they think they can't understand it. B, they think they don't need to understand it. They think it's just for theologians.

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It's not important. Like, I just want to love God. I just want to like sing worship songs and not really think about who he says he is.

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But to me, that would be like if I had a husband and he was like, let me tell you who I am. And I'm like, no, thanks.

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Why don't you just massage my shoulders? You know, like, no, like I want to know him.

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And so God has told us so much about who he is, father, son and spirit. It's in scripture.

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So in this study, I've taken all those pieces of scripture throughout the Bible and compiled them into these six chapters, these seven sessions and six chapters where we uncover what

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God says about who he is. It is understandable and it's vital to our relationship with the

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Lord and for it to be rich and flourishing and thriving. We can't ignore him when he's telling us who he is in his word.

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That's why I'm super passionate about it. And that's why we called it. He's where the joy is, because when you tell somebody they're studying the

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Trinity, they got to be reminded that there's joy on the other side of that study, that it's not just heady and theological, that it transforms your whole life, the way you view the world, the way you interact with people, the way you view your past and your present and your future.

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And so I want to remind people there is joy for you in this because in his presence, there is fullness of joy.

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That's why we called it. He's where the joy is. I love how you explain that. I mean, as you can imagine, we receive a lot of questions about the

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Trinity and most of the time it's from people who want to argue about it, who don't believe in it or take a slightly different stance or can't understand it.

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And they, all they focus on is the theology of it rather than focusing on the joy of it, the benefits it has for us for there to be three persons in the triune

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Godhead. And we did a podcast episode recently on this very topic. And it's just, it's fascinating to study in an academic sense, but it's also very meaningful for us personally, because each of the members of the

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Trinity has an impact in every aspect of our Christian life, whether it's how we are saved or how we live the

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Christian life, all three of the members are very much involved and that's important to remember. And it should give us, as you said, joy rather than just seeing it as something to argue about or something to study in an academic sense.

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Yeah. So seeing your face and hearing your passion,

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I mean, I can tell that like you really do mean it, that he's where the joy is. So how do you personally continue that?

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I mean, I'm sure, you know, when it's Bible studies all day, or, you know, it's your 15th time through the Bible, how does it not become dry?

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You know, I think there's always something new to learn about the Lord. I love that.

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I love that there's always something new. I come alive when I'm in a passage that I feel like I know front and back, like I know inside and out.

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And all of a sudden something new about the Lord jumps off the page at me. It makes me so excited because I don't like to be bored, frankly,

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I don't like to be bored. And you would think maybe it's boring reading the same text over and over again every year. But first of all, like that means

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I've maybe some of these passages I've only read 15 times, like that's not a lot over the years.

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And so like think if you'd only heard a song 15 times over the years, like that's not a lot. So when

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I am able to read these passages and learn something new, knowledge feeds my love.

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You know, Jen Wilkins says, the heart cannot love what the mind does not know. And so the more I know about God and His character, the more it ignites my love for Him.

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When I discover something new about Him or just, and every day before I read, I ask

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Him to give me wisdom, knowledge, and understanding to show me something new in the pages of His word that I've never seen before.

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And it's stunning because when I was writing and recording the

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Bible Recap, I was spending 100 hours a week for 15 months doing this project.

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That's how much it took me. Like I lived in my pajamas at my dining room table working, surrounded by commentaries and study

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Bibles for 15 months. And I would spend, on average,

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I think it was like five or six hours researching the three chapters and writing the eight -minute episode and recording it.

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Some of them took like up to 10 or 11 hours, but on average, it was about six hours, I think. And then a couple of weeks later, when that episode would air and I was reading through the text with the people doing the

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Bible Recap, I would find new things and I would be like, are you kidding me? I just spent six hours in that text and I just learned something totally new.

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Like now I've got to go back and edit that episode and put this new in. I love learning about God.

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It fuels my love for Him. That just keeps me going, lights my fire.

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Well, and I think that's so true. I've done several Jen Wilkin studies also. And so I love that you brought in her quote of, yeah, it is so true.

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The more we know God, the more we love Him. And when we're reading the Bible as a book about who God is, we find that out and yeah, and want to keep going back and learning more.

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Absolutely. So Terrily, before we started, you mentioned that you're a fan and frequent user of God Questions.

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And I'm just curious, how did you first find God Questions and how has it been beneficial to you in your ministry?

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First of all, yeah. So for those of you who are listening or watching this interview right now,

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I did tell them beforehand that I was going to have a hard time just not gushing the whole interview, just talking about how great

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I think they are. We use a lot of the God Questions answers in our show notes with The Bible Recap, and they have been supremely helpful.

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I think I first heard about you guys probably maybe five or six years ago, and it was just incredible.

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The amount of research, the amount links, the amount of linking to Scripture that you guys have put into these things.

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And I was kind of skeptical at first because occasionally I would be like, huh,

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I didn't know that. I need to do some research. And I would look further and I would find like, oh, this is a great way to explain this. And I think you're very diplomatic in the way you handle a lot of things that are open -handed issues.

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And I've tried to do the same with The Bible Recap. If it's a closed -handed issue, I'm going to close my hand around it. I'm not going to be like, here's why some people believe

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Jesus is the Son of God, and here's why others say He's not. I'm not going to do that. But I will do that with things that are open -handed.

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Here's what some people say. Here's what others say. And I've always appreciated how diplomatic you guys are with those open -handed issues.

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And a friend of mine, he told me he lived in New York City. His name is Jonathan Dixon.

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And when he was waiting for the train or whatever, he would just open up and just start reading questions and answers on your site just to inform his knowledge.

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Even when he didn't have a question, he was taking that opportunity to just click through and learn all that he could. And so you guys, you guys are doing a great work.

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And I, you know, I literally have no idea how I heard about you the first time, whether it was through him or whether it was just a

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Google search with a question that I had. But thank you, I did. I'm just big fan, big fan.

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Keep up the good work. So I think what's beautiful about the body of Christ is that,

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I mean, the Bible Recap in your ministry has been beneficial to us. Our questions have been beneficial to you as well.

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And I think that's how things are supposed to work. So thank you for sharing that. And I know it sounded a little self -serving when

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I was asking. Let me talk about it. Thank you. Yeah. So just let everyone know, we'll have links to the

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Bible Recap where you can purchase the book, where you can subscribe to the podcast and et cetera, just to learn more about Tara Lee and her ministry, both on podcast .questions

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.org and also on the description field on our YouTube channel when the video is posted.

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So Tara Lee, thank you for coming on the show. Please keep doing what you're doing because God is using it in amazing and powerful ways.

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Thanks. Likewise. You guys keep up the good work, truly. With God's help you will.

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And Gwen, thank you also for joining me on the show today. Thank you for including me. Yeah. So this has been the

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Got Questions podcast. Got questions? The Bible has answers. We'll help you find them.