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May 9/2026 | Breakout session C-2 | Panel and presentation by Ryan Case, Shayne Poirier, and Dr. Joel Arnold.
This recording is from our Grace Fellowship Church conference, Behold Our God, 2026. Please visit our website at gfcedmonton .ca. You can also find us on Instagram at GraceChurchYag, all one word, or on Facebook at Grace Fellowship Church.
You can also find us on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you listen to your favorite podcasts. Please enjoy the following.
Recording. And I'll be the facilitator. We discussed this about a month ago, six weeks ago, give or take, some of the questions that we would go over together that we think would be helpful to you. And if you have a burning question, hold on to it at the end.
We're going to keep 10 minutes at the end to discuss those questions. And if it's something that takes a really long time, we won't hold everybody up, but we'll talk to you after the session. So feel free to just come up here and ask us.
So we're going to begin. I've broken it up into two different categories. The first is Bible reading, and the second is theology or Bible study, and then secondly, theology. And as we look at Bible study, I think even as we approach the topic, I recognize that a lot of people are challenged even when it comes to Bible reading, consistently reading the Bible, right?
We live in an information age. We live in a distracted age. We live in a busy age with work and school and all kinds of demands upon our time. And so I'll ask the question, and then we can tackle it, brothers.
And it's not scripted, so we'll see where we go. But what encouragements would you give to someone who is seeking to read their Bible consistently and maybe is struggling.
To do that? Try this out. So one of the things you may have noticed by now that I'm not much of a bodybuilder type. And why has that not happened? It's not happened because every time I've tried it, I've not gotten much of a result.
Should I have the red circle or not? Yeah, that should be good. Give it a tap there. Great. Hey, magic. So every time I've tried it, I haven't really seen many results, and that's because my technique's bad.
I don't have a good routine. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not good with diet. So basically, I have a bad structure, bad format, bad method. Therefore, every time I try it, I don't see results. Therefore, I'm like, tried it for two months, and never mind.
And I stopped lifting. Then maybe this is just a plea for help from some of you guys that know what you're doing. So I'm asking for free training. What I do enjoy is biking. And so I get on the bike. When I get done, I'm like, man, that was a blast.
I love that. I did that. And I'm looking forward to doing it again. So what do you think when I'm having an opportunity to exercise, what do you think I go for? I go for the thing I enjoy. And it probably has a lot to do with method.
My suspicion is that we struggle with consistency in our Bible reading because we don't really know how to do it well. And hence, we don't really enjoy it when we're doing it. And I'll just say biographically and experientially, the corner on that consistency question turned for me when I found ways to study the Bible where it was actually consistently fruitful.
So at this point in my life, every time I open up my Bible in the morning and read, I just love it. I'm like, nuts. I got to go. I have a job in life because I'd love to sit there for four hours and do it.
So my proposal would be if you're wanting to see better consistency, prayerfully seek out better methods of studying scripture. It is a beautiful book. It is a phenomenal book. And the appetite grows as you study it.
But probably we're struggling because we don't know how to study it.
Ryan, what would you add, if anything, brother? Very similar.
We do what we want to do. And so I have friends who will say things, well, you're a pastor, or you can memorize, I'm just an electrician, etc., etc. And yet, if I were to ask them, who's won the last three Stanley Cups?
How fast is Evan Bouchard's slap shot? How many assists did he have last year? They know all those things. I see even habits that we can have after the sermons on people right on their phone. We're quick to do certain things.
And it's because we always do what we want. We always do what we'll love. And so I'm not saying go to the prayer one right now, but ask that God would give you a great hunger for his word. I know it's like a very simplistic answer, but God did give us a will.
And us who are reformed can say that. And we do what we want. We do what we love. And so we need to have cultivated a greater love. And of course, this is where holy habits come in. Discipline is necessary.
But probably the reason why we don't read the Bible as much as we ought or as we should is because actually our heart's.
Not in it. Yeah. A thought that I have, if anyone's read Preaching and Preachers by Martin Lloyd Jones, I imagine most of you haven't, but some have, he speaks there, there's a little phrase that he uses that I've always kind of hung on to, which is, know thyself, right?
Know who you are, know your own constitution, know what helps you. I know for, I mean, my wife and my children are acquainted with this. I don't think the best always when I'm just sitting at a table with my Bible open in front of me.
But I can think very clearly if I've got the Bible open in front of me and I'm walking laps through my living room. Or I know some people think I'm funny. I once walked into a Canadian goose, but I like to read while I'm walking.
I'll have my Kindle or other stuff and I will simply do laps around the house or I'll do laps in the neighborhood with my Bible. And my legs are busy and it keeps my mind clear. And some people are probably trying to diagnose me right now, but it's been very helpful for me.
And so I think that learning to figure out how to study the Bible well, to learn to love the Bible, to put away the things that keep us from the Bible and to know ourselves is a great place to start. And as we talk about Bible study, I think that that will create more of an appetite because, I mean, how do we know what works best if we don't know what to try, right?
So the next question I want to answer or ask then is this. As a pastor in a church, a refrain that I often hear, and maybe some of you guys have thought the very same thing, is some will say, okay, I know how to read my Bible.
I always hear about studying my Bible, but how does one study their Bible? Do I open the Bible and do I just look at the same word 20 times and write down what comes to mind? What does that look like?
And I'll put it to you guys. Ryan, I'll start with you this time, brother. You're not off the hook. And I'll ask you, what counsel would you give that member of your church who, maybe they've been a Christian for six months, and they're saying, I hear about studying the Bible.
What should I do? Where do I start?
So if I recall the conversation that we had previously, I think the answer that I gave you, I still hold to it. This is the importance of discipleship and being in a good local church. I wasn't privileged to have that when I became a Christian.
I was saved in a large charismatic church. And so I don't want to say the first two years of my life were completely wasted, but I had no idea what I was doing. And then by God's good grace, someone pointed me to a Bible teacher named John MacArthur, and he discipled me, because I didn't have anyone else to.
And so if there were to be someone, a newer believer, someone who's like, yeah, I'm really getting into this. Again, I would say that the local church is the greenhouse by which God seeks to grow his plants.
And it starts, I would say, from the exemplary, how the pastor himself does it on the Lord's day and in all the other meetings. But talk to your pastor, and maybe he, great pastor, can also be an overseer, and he knows the flock.
The best way to pray, the best way to learn to evangelize, the best way to learn the Bible is actually to be around others. And think about that in the early church. They all didn't have a Bible, but they would get together and they would read it together, they would pray together, they would live it out together, sort of like you see in Acts 2 .42, right?
There's this constant one-anothering, holding tenaciously, devotedly, it's an interesting Greek word, you know, to the apostles' teaching. But it wasn't, okay, I'm going to do my devotional by myself at six in the morning, which is good.
But pray and seek out a Titus 2 kind of mentor relationship, like we heard about this morning.
Amen. So I'll ask a follow-up question on that. When you're preparing your sermons and you're preaching, are you seeking to model to some degree what good Bible study looks like?
Yes. Yes. I don't know if I'm carrying it out, but I'm seeking to. You're seeking to. And that's why, you know, I'll be sneaky here, but expositional preaching, I think, is the safest and it's the best model because you're actually teaching the people that they don't need to know the Bible inside and out, right?
Like, I don't know 13 ,000 verses that come to mind when I hear one word, but if the pastor's just working line by line through the Word of God, not skipping over, that's actually modeling how we should be reading and applying the Bible to our own lives, not just on Sunday.
And so, you know, expositional preaching is something you should look for if you're looking for a church or you're trying to point someone to a good local church. Make sure one of the priorities you have is, are they preaching expositionally as their main diet?
Yeah.
And to define terms by expositional preaching, you're meaning they're going through the text. I mean, there are different definitions, but you're going through the text and you're seeking to discern the meaning and the point that the text is making.
So you're looking at the words. It's not, okay, we're going to look at John 1 .1. I read the text and then I go into a million different anecdotes or I use it as a launching pad to go somewhere else. If we're in John 1 .1, it's, in the beginning was the Word.
Well, what's the beginning? What is Word? The Word was with God. The Word was God and breaking that down. I agree. And I think for those who are members of a church where you have expository preaching, your pastors, the elders, the men who are preaching are seeking to model that for you.
I think that's one of the best ways to learn is just by looking at this guy. And I think of one brother who's not in this session, but he came to me one day and he said, I would just love to go ride shotgun with you and see what it looks like to prepare your sermons.
And I'm sure if you asked your elders in your church, can I just watch you over your shoulder for a little bit, you might find it remarkably helpful. And I think that they would find it interesting just to have company.
We know the study can be a lonely place. And so just to have someone to watch your pastor as he's working, and not all of it will be applicable, but some of it will. I've given you lots of time to frame your answer, Joel.
Can I quickly sneak one thing in? So we heard from Titus 2, and it's actually one of my favorite verses where Titus is just sort of direct how the older men are to be honored and to sort of work into the lives of others and the older women towards the younger women.
And then in 2 .7, the ESV says, show yourself to be a model of good works, but it's actually not a good translation. It's a participle. It means showing yourself. So how does Titus disciple the young men?
By showing them. And so what I'm doing is I just had a synapse two minutes after the answer. So we want people to show us what does it look like? How do they model for us disciplined Bible study and reading?
I wish it would drop from heaven, but this is, again, that's why we need to disciple one another in the local church. So sorry to jump in for that, Joel, but it came to mind.
Taking notes on things you guys say. I mean, I love the notion, the emphasis in there. I've long contended that what happens when any of us open up our Bibles and we're like, what do I do now? Basically, it's the amalgam or the average, the median of all of the preaching that we've heard or the theology we've consumed.
You just end up by not just instinctively doing what you hear from the pulpit. So it does put on a really strong onus mandate. You better be listening to good preaching because that's probably what you're going to turn around and do when you open your Bible.
Okay. The question, what do we actually do to grow in our Bible reading? I remember as a young teen asking, I wanted to study the Bible. I would read a passage, read down through the paragraph, and I'd be like, now what?
What do I do after this? I wanted to go deeper. So it's tempting now because you can do all this double-click on the words and it pops up strong numbers and stuff like that. It's tempting. That gives you something to do.
And I'm not exactly opposed to it, though I find it's probably more misleading than it is helpful. I think generally the results get weird if we just start doing stuff. I'll just tell you what turned the corner for me was starting to get really active with annotating, writing, marking.
So I mean, I do it electronically. I've got like a PDF of every book of the Bible and I mark it. And it's been, I don't know, it's built up for more than a decade. So you can go to passages and you'd be like, okay, apparently he listened to a sermon on that passage and it was very expositional because there's a ton of notes on it.
Okay. Apparently he did a paper on that. There's a ton of notes in there. There's sections that are more studied, other sections that are less. Well, it is, I mean, it's a delight to get up in the morning, go to a section that is less studied.
And what I'm doing is I'm underlining in blue all of the places. I think today it was holiness. Went down through a passage and holiness was like, oh yeah. Okay. Just lit up. So bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
We underlined it in blue. And then you can go through and see, okay, here's sovereignty of God. You go through and underline that in another color. Okay, here's the Holy Spirit. You're under, you're just seeing these themes and you mark them.
So you could do that electronically. You can do that in paper, but doing something, writing. And then a second stage would be going through and summarizing the passage. Like you can look at, okay, this section is about, this section is about, this section is about.
And then every day I try to give myself a one to two sentence. Here's what I practically ought to take away. And I have my kids doing that too. They each have a little note card. Each kid has a different color and they pick the pink card and they write on there.
They're less than for the day. And then every couple of weeks I'll pull up their cards and we'll just talk through it. And I can see what's going on in their life right now. Like, oh, you learned this.
What about this? What are your thoughts there? Why did you think that? But for me, it's giving me something bite size and tangible that I'll now carry through my day. I think the theme running through all three of those is Bible reading that's active.
So what we're kind of doing when we go like, well, I didn't get anything today is like I dragged my eyeballs across it. But as soon as I have a pen in my hand, as soon as I'm needing to summarize, as soon as I'm marking, then suddenly my brain turns on.
It's actually just an education concept, but I'm engaging. And that turned the corner. And after that, I'm no longer sitting there going like, no, what do I do now? My problem today is, oh, I got to stop because we're having too much fun.
Okay. That was the thing that shifted.
That for me. Yeah. If I can add to that, I put this pen in my pocket this morning just to remember good counsel that I received a number of years ago that I've sought to take is by a good Bible. So I bought a good Bible with a good binding that'll last a little while.
It's a binding, it's a Bible with wide margins. And then I have a black Pigma Micron 01 pen. And the counsel I was given was buy a good Bible, get a good archival quality pen, and turn that Bible into your own study Bible.
And so whether you have a study Bible of your own, you're doing, you're listening to sermons, whatever that might be, get it to the point. And this is a relatively new Bible for me. Some of my folks from our church saw my previous Bible.
They said, how do you even read that? There's annotations between the lines even, but you cannot mind the depths of God's word to its terminus. You're just going to keep going and going and going. And so buy a good Bible, mark it up, fill it up, shelf it, buy another Bible, start over again.
Do you have.
Something to add, brother? No, I just want to say that if you probably looked at our Bible study methods, we're all doing the same thing. We're active. Like this isn't a progressive Bible, right? But it's all colored up.
And this is probably the 10th one I've gone through. And I I'm kind of silly, but I want all of my girls, I have five girls, and I want them, you know, sort of heirlooms, just like this is daddy's treasure, you know, that if I die, and they'll say like, he wasn't perfect, but man, he obviously loved the word of God.
He studied to show himself, you know, to be an approved workman who is not ashamed. And so if you were to look at probably the first one that I marked up, an old King James Bible, you're like, what in the world is this guy marking up?
I don't know, but I was sure marking it up. And then as you keep working through them, or, you know, if you have electronic, I'm sure you can change things. But it's not like a secret. It's just spend time in the word.
Like just be in the word and ask God to show you wonderful things from his law, you know, and I'll sneak one thing in is learn to meditate on it. Turn those things over. Psalm 11, blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but his what?
His delight. His delight is in the law, not just on. His delight is in the law of Yahweh. And in his law, he meditates, right? He chews it. He mulls it over. He goes with them, right? And so even as brother says, he's like, oh, you know, I wish I could be in here all day.
I got to go to work. And it's true. But then as you're driving to work in between, you can turn that Bible reading into prayers. It's on the forefront of your mind and you begin to bear fruit. And so I would also encourage not just Bible reading, but the Puritans were really good at this.
There's different ways of reading the Bible. And I try to employ this. I'm not perfect, but, you know, there's sort of three speeds. You know, sometimes you're just reading to get the big picture. And so you're not stopping at every word, but you're just trying to get what's the context.
And then sometimes you just slow down and you can read maybe, you know, a section or a chapter. And then sometimes you just want to really focus and zero in on one verse. And which of the three are best?
All three of them, but understand, you know, some of you probably have never read the Bible in one year. Make that a goal. It's actually doable. And I'm not trying to be arrogant or self-righteous. I hope I didn't come across that way.
You know, but if we're in the Bible reading a chapter a day, reading two chapters, you know, I listened to Kindle and you can put it to two times speed, four times speed, and you can get a lot in. And so just, so this is Proverbs 4, 7.
The beginning of wisdom is this. Anyone know the next line? Who said that? Get wisdom and in all thy getting, get insight. It's not really complicated. It can be, but the beginning of wisdom is this. Get it.
Yeah. So anyway, sorry. That was a bit long.
No, that's good. What I'll do, we could say so much more. I want to say so much more, but we'll talk about this. I think it'll flesh it out a bit more still. So that's, you're reading your Bible. You've got your iPad and your Apple Pencil, your Pigma Micron.
You're listening to your preacher, the pastors in your church. What counsel would you give for the one who says, okay, I'm doing all of that already. I want to go to the next level. What does that look like?
Joel's on the hot seat.
Okay, noted. You know, so I like what Ryan was just saying, like there's the comprehensive and there's also the deep. You want to do both. So I'll give some suggestions for each. So on the comprehensive, doing it in a year is great.
It's going to sound really negative and a little shocking. I think maybe one of the reasons we struggle with the through the year, read the Bible in a year plans is because we're going slowly. And I think it's actually harder to read slowly through the Bible than it is to read more quickly.
For me, doing three chapters a day, that feels painful. I have two modes that I primarily function in, and one is go a bunch, like, I don't know, 10-ish chapters in a day or go narrow as in one Psalm.
And I think those are the two modes I go in. And I think they both work pretty well. At least they work well for me. I think reading three chapters is hard, like actually really hard because particularly, and this is what everybody does with Bible reading plans, right?
You bog down in Leviticus numbers. That's the graveyard of Bible reading plans. And it's because at three chapters a day, you're kind of watching paint dry. So a proposal rather than the year plan, which that could be great as a start, but what if you shortened it down and went for a three-month plan or a one-month plan?
Okay, some numbers. Three-month plan is probably about 30 minutes a day. It's actually not too bad, okay? That three-month plan down to the one-month plan, at the one-month plan, you are getting into an hour, hour and 15 or something like that.
Now, audio Bible can cut a lot of that. So you could even do it on a commute or something like that. But you know what? Reading Leviticus, how about that? Read Leviticus in one shot, as in time it so it hits like on a weekend, on a Saturday, and do Leviticus in a day, the cumulative effect of the entire book hitting you as one shot is really powerful.
And the book is beautiful at that point, but it's a literary hole. It just works better that way, right? Psalms, Proverbs slow up a little bit. Epistles slow up a little bit, but I actually think Leviticus numbers, first and second Chronicles, Jeremiah, Ezekiel go a lot better if you hit them in a shot or maybe a couple of days and go fast.
I like to buy a word Bible. You can buy them for like five bucks and then just mark the living daylights out of them and then shelve them. I like to read when I'm doing a read through, I buy that a word Bible and I might market just for that read through.
And I listen with audio on like one and a half speed and it keeps me moving. All right. So anyway, read comprehensively, read big. I know a handful of people that have read the Bible in a week. It's doable.
You have to clear the whole week. That's your full-time job somewhere between now and when they bury you. That's a pretty good bucket list experience. I suspect it'll change your life. You have to do it about eight hours a day, plan your way.
I can give you some suggestions. I got a couple of articles. If you search Joel Arnold and search for Bible reading in a week, it'll come up. Some suggestions for how to do it. It's an experience, life-changing.
Okay. And then on the, I got to go faster into the like in-depth reading. Don't be afraid of using good sources. So start with ESV study Bible or the NIV biblical theology study Bible. Those two are excellent.
When I'm in Ezekiel, I'm like, what is this talking about? I am pulling up one of those two sources because they're concise, they're easy, they're consistently accurate. They just do, they're just good.
And then if I want to go deeper, I'm going into a lighter commentary set. Tyndale commentary is good. Exposers Bible commentary is good. And we can multiply from there, but you don't have to go straight to the super technical commentaries, get the mid range, get the right tool for the right job.
Don't overwhelm yourself. And between some of those, you are going to go deeper and broader.
Anything to add brother? No. One thing I will say that was tremendously helpful for me was if anyone's heard the name James Gray, he wrote a book, How to Master Your Bible. It's an old book. It's in the public domain.
You can find it in I'm sure PDF and a thousand websites. I don't know enough about the author to commend everything he's written, but that book was very helpful. And one of the things that he says is that you should identify a book and read it, read that book in its entirety every day for a month and then move on.
I know John MacArthur has commanded something very similar. And so I read that book. He said something that was interesting. I grew up on an acreage. I'm not, I wasn't a farmer. My in-laws are farmers and I understand the acquaintance that they have with their farm.
They have 160 acres, which is a very small farm, just a quarter horse farm. But they can tell you, my father-in-law can tell you where the fences are strongest, where the fences are weakest, where there's a big rock.
You know, you get to know, and having been out there snowmobiling and stuff, you know, I need to be careful and I'm riding my snowmobile on this part of this hill because I know that there's some old barbed wire somewhere deep underneath there.
And I've been told to watch out. So I need to look out in that section. They've mastered their whole domain, right? And they're farmers I know who have, you know, thousands of acres who could probably tell you the same.
And how is it? It's because they've been in their tractor, on their quad, whatever it is, their four-wheeler, if you're in the States, and they have just done laps around that thing. And so I started with Ephesians and it was remarkable.
I didn't do it for a month. I did it for 20 days. I started with Ephesians and then worked through Mark and other books. And by the end of the 20th day, I knew Ephesians backward and forward. I could tell you every, and to this day, I know Ephesians more or less backward or forwards because of that, what I did eight years ago, reading Ephesians.
So, okay, I'm gonna put the question to you, Ryan, and then we're gonna shift gears and go to theology. Advanced Bible study. Okay, so you're reading scripture. You have some commentaries. I should commend that they have them at the table.
The ESV Study Bible is an excellent, like a one-stop shop book. It's got a systematic theology in the back of the Study Bible. I don't know many that have that. So that's very good. But you have your Study Bibles, you're reading the text, you're getting in there.
What does advanced Bible study look like? For me, it's just reading the Bible over.
And over and over and over and over again. I know that's a cop-out. So for me, advanced just means just rereading it. Now, of course, I'll get into commentaries, et cetera. And then, you know, in seminary, I was obviously able to learn Greek and Hebrew, which I would commend to everyone.
In John Piper's book, Brothers Were Not Professionals, he has a chapter called Brothers. Bitzer was a banker. And some people think, oh, Greek, that's just for the guys who go to seminary for three years.
It's, you know, for the guys who teach at Bible colleges. And so John Piper talks about, you know, this banker, and he was able to teach himself Greek. And Luther was actually less gentle than I am. Luther's like, everyone should know Greek.
So for me, advanced is, yeah, you know, going from the English to the Greek. Now, not everyone can, but by God's grace, that's what I would... So I just slow it down. So my advances, I'll just keep reading it and reading it and reading it, and then I'll read it some more.
I know that's not very satisfying as an answer, but just immersing yourself in the text. You know, there's a gentleman who came to our church, and he says, you know, I love that you're Credo Baptist. And he says, you know, I'm so glad you guys are immersing, you know, believers.
He says, oh, that we'd be Logo Baptists, that we'd be immersing ourselves in the Word, you know. And so advanced, do I need to go, you know, get languages, et cetera? Those are great, but just, you know, keep immersing yourself in the Word of God.
And as Brother Jewel said, those things start coming out, right? It won't be until probably the fifth, tenth, fifteenth reading of Ephesians where you'll start to see, hey, there's a lot of things happening here that I never saw in my first or second reading.
It's not because you're getting smarter or more advanced, it's just because those things are starting to come to the fore because you're familiar, right, like your in-laws are doing. And so what is advanced?
Just doing the same thing, just reading and reading and reading and meditating and memorizing and praying, and then repeat. So I know that's a cop-out, but that's what I do.
No, that's great, and I think you're getting us in the right direction. And I'm sure Jewel can complement that more.
I mean, sometimes I think what we're assuming advanced Bible study looks like is somebody who can read, you know, like three sentences and then just a world of theology comes out of it, and it's all like really obscure and abstract, like, that's crazy, that guy's so smart, he preached for like four hours on, you know, three words or something.
We don't get any extra points for sounding profound. We don't get extra points for being obscure. And I think generally the attempt to try to look at a proposition, a sentence in, you know, in a New Testament passage, I'll just pick one randomly, a sentence in there and like come up with something that sounds crazy, that's probably in the weeds.
The straightforward reading is the best way to go. I would say this as a vision for profound or advanced Bible reading. I had a teacher in seminary who consistently would take us to a passage that we all felt like we knew, and he'd be like, but did you notice that it doesn't say, it says rather, or did you notice this word right here, and that therefore, and what is the like link between those, and did you notice that, and it was generally right on the surface of the English text.
It was generally kind of like, oh my goodness, I'm an idiot. It was there the whole time. I mean, that was the feeling. I think what made him an advanced Bible student was that he was observant. So it's the person who walks into the forest and I'm like, trees, and he's like, oh yeah, that right there, that's a, and he identifies it, and you know, it's surprising to me that that's already budding because this is a little early this year, and he's like, he's just, he's advanced because he sees, he can see, I can see everything he can see.
It's right there, but he's observant and I'm not. All right, so I think advanced Bible study is careful observation skills, and a second thing I would say, before we feel like we need to write, you know, 45 pages on two sentences, have we mastered the whole thing yet?
In other words, sometimes it's like that guy's advanced because he can drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, drill on this one sentence in Ephesians. Meanwhile, we're ignoring like the entire book of Ezekiel, like the whole thing.
It's massive, like most of the New Testament epistles would fit in Ezekiel, and I'm subject to this. I mean, this last semester, we had a major prophets course. The semester before that, we had a minor prophets course.
That was the first time I felt like I worked carefully sentence by, you know, paragraph by paragraph, I should say, through major and minor prophets. Prior to that, it's like, Jeremiah, it's so huge. I just, it's too big.
I couldn't get my head around it. I still don't have my head around it at all. Anyway, I just say that advanced Bible study is probably going back and looking into those portions of scripture that get shelved and ignored.
The minor prophets are glorious. Ezekiel, turns out, is really awesome. And so how about let's do some of that. Let's be.
Comprehensive. That's great. And I'll give a tip or a tool that you can use to develop that. It's something that we do with our students when we go through hermeneutics. That's the study or the art of biblical, art and science of biblical interpretation.
And I shamelessly ripped it off from the professors at the Master's Seminary. That is that they give their first year hermeneutics students an assignment when they arrive to class. And that is, here's a text of scripture.
Here's five verses. On Monday, come back with 50 observations. And it's remarkable when you have to stare at a text and go, okay, I need to make 50 observations. I mean, it's not 50 observations as in, you know, in these three verses, there are 18 D's, you know, the letter D.
But, you know, while here, Matthew is quoting from Isaiah in this chapter, and the larger context is this. This is, here, this is an imperative verb that's being utilized. So there's an indicative followed by an imperative, meaning a statement of truth, or an assertion of some kind, followed by a command that I'm to live out as a result of that indicative.
So I would say do that. Find a text of scripture. If you want to see more than just the trees, you want to see the individual needles on the pine tree, is get your Bible out, get a notebook out, and say, I'm going to make 15 observations.
Start with 15. 15 observations on this particular passage. I'm a tools guy. I like to direct people to tools. You can do a bunch of free study. Has anyone here heard of Bible arc? Bible arc? Or block diagramming?
Does that... Okay. You can ask, if you're in a church where your pastor is preaching expositorily, he'll be familiar with block diagramming. And what it is, is you're just following the logical conclusions of the passage.
You're looking at different clauses, and how this one is subordinate to this. When you're doing it, you kind of look like a bit of a mad scientist, or at least maybe to some other people. But you can go to Bible arc.
I believe it's biblearc .com. They have a free, used to be free, I hope it's still free, a free class that you could do to learn about block diagramming. And all it is, is you're just looking at a verse, and you're just exploding it, and you're hitting tabs to make it, just to draw out the kind of the logical conclusions of the passage.
Yes. Good question. A-R-C. Yeah. Not Noah's arc, but Bible arc. Yeah. And then, you know, shameless plug. Joel, you do Greek and Hebrew classes. Take a Greek or Hebrew class at Foundation Baptist College.
What we do at the Institute, we do summer languages. You know, a lot of people like to spend their summers on the beach. And we have some strangers, strange people in our church who like to spend their summers learning Greek.
And so we meet every week, and we go through Greek together. And it's, you know, maybe it's a dangerous level of Greek. They say sometimes, you know, the only thing, you know, more dangerous than not knowing Greek is knowing a little Greek.
But we're giving them, what I hope to do with the members of our church is get them to a place where they can be on White Avenue, and the Jehovah's Witnesses have their literature stand there at the farmer's market.
And they come up to the Jehovah's Witnesses, and they engage them in a conversation. And the Jehovah's Witnesses go, oh, okay. I can't just pull the hood over this, you know, pull it over this man's eyes.
This guy actually knows the Bible, and he can speak to the Bible at more than a surface level, which is where most people are. Okay, we were having such a good time at Bible. I let us sit there, but I want to talk about theology.
And that is this, that the study of theology is closely related. It can never be divorced. Good systematic theology arises out of good exegetical theology. But what counsel, or I should say, and what counsel would you give to those who want to learn to study theology, as distinct perhaps from exegetical theology,.
Bible study? Well, I mean, someone told me years ago, your theology is only as good as your mastery of Scripture. So essentially what theology is, systematic theology is, like some technical distinctions going, but systematic theology is somebody comes to you and asks you a question about God in the world, and you try to answer that thoughtfully from Scripture.
Well, you can't do that unless you know Scripture, unless you know comprehensively. So the best way to get your theology stronger is know Scripture better. And then when a person comes to you with a poor or corrosive idea, you're like, it doesn't smell right, because you know passages that confront it.
And then I think this pulls Ryan's idea from earlier. You read the Bible the way that you've seen other people preach the Bible. Okay, so the way that you hear theology coming through in the pulpit and or the way that you see theology done in good theology resources is the way that you're going to turn around and do theology yourself.
So you want to pick theologians that are Scripture-saturated. Wayne Grudem's systematic theology is strong on biblical support. So like when I say, I really want to collect all the passages on redemption.
You go to that section, and it's just thick. And he's probably given you like 80 or 90 of the passages that mention or discuss redemption. So I think he's really strong on the data, the information.
My current favorite systematic theologian is Beakey. So that's that big set out there, four-volume set. Now he has, you know, that thing's a bear, and financially and physically. But you can get, he's got a bridge version of it.
It's just one volume. It's a lot more due at one, and maybe it's two. Anyway, it's reduced down significantly. It's 25 of the other, of the full set. And I just like him for the fact that he's still, he's very rooted in Scripture, but he'll also trace church history.
He'll connect it to the other ideas, and he'll give you application and a hem for crying out loud, which Grudem has as well. So I just think it's amazing. I don't know anybody else that did all the things, like all of those different tasks.
He got them all done. And then it's also just, it's really not austere, difficult to navigate writing. It's just kind of fun to read. It's just well written. It's smooth. It's relaxing. So read good theology, and then you'll start doing good.
Theology. So it's the same answer. Find a good church with a good pastor, and ask him. Like, you can ask us today, but go to your pastor. And like, God willing, he's getting paid to be a man of study.
So you could ask us, but say you're in Grace Fellowship. Take your pastor out for a coffee, or take him out for a dinner. And just, right? Like Tim wants, right? Again, Ben was talking about, we're not in this solo.
And unfortunately, the first years of my own walk were solo. And so it's really unfortunate. I don't want anyone to have to replicate that, because I skinned my knees up a lot. And that's why, you know, show yourself to be an example.
It's not only in Titus 2, but 1 Timothy 4, right? Yeah, show them how they should talk, and show them how they should, but show them how to do theology. Show them how to study. Yes, on the Lord's Day when you're preaching expositionally, but throughout the week as well.
Like what, you know, who are some of your theologians, right? And then the pastor who knows where you're at, and he knows your soul, he's not going to say, well, let's start with some John Owen or some John Edwards.
Maybe we'll start with John MacArthur, you know, or fill in the blank. Or he can, like Joel, like Beaky's great. He's wonderful. He's actually, I think, almost introductory in a good way. And I wouldn't use anything else, but maybe even that's too much, you know?
And so a shepherd who's after, you know, in Jeremiah 3, he says, a time is coming, and it's come in the covenant, you know, and I will give to my people shepherds who are after my own heart. And shepherds not only know the scriptures, they also know their sheep.
They know the flock. And like a good doctor, they know what to prescribe to whom at the right time. And so I know it's a cop-out again, but being a good church who has a good pastor who studies and can help you walk, who can disciple you in this.
What do the shepherds feed the sheep in Jeremiah?
Depends. The good shepherds or the bad shepherds?
The good shepherds. Good question. That's a good question.
Well, if you go to Jeremiah 23 or in Ezekiel 34, they actually feed on the sheep, or they actually, they lead them, and they muddy the waters. And that's the thing. But the good shepherds will feed Christ.
They will, you know, Christ from all of scripture. I hope.
That's the answer you were hoping for. Yeah, and with knowledge and understanding, right? Brother, you had answered. I don't know if you had anything else. I saw you playing with your button. No. One of the thoughts that I have, you know, I'm the guy, I said it in my breakout yesterday, we have so much wonderful technology that you can take advantage of.
Many of us have commutes. Some of you have long commutes. You can get R .C. Sproul, I believe it's his Foundations systematic theology class. You know, R .C. Sproul, who can just, you know, he's with the Lord now, I trust, but would stand on a stage with no notes, just his chalk and his chalkboard, you know, and he'd go on about the holiness of God for, you know, exactly 24 minutes, and just with like piercing intensity, and yet at such a wonderful basic level.
So you can listen to, I believe it's 60 lectures. You know, say, okay, I'm going to listen to, on my way to work, my mind is, maybe my mind is sharp then, I'm going to listen to it for the next 60 commutes.
On the afternoon, I get to listen to my music, or pray, or whatever I like to do, look out the window. But I might suggest something like that. Grudems, you know, with every systematician, with every theologian, you have to be, it's like eating fish.
You take the meat, you spit out the bones, right? I'm sure, you know, we commend Beakey, but we disagree with his view of baptism. We commend Grudem. We might disagree with some of his views of the works of the manifestation of the Spirit today, but you can look at Joel Beakey, you can look at Wayne Grudem, another one who's very Bible-saturated, and it's very approachable, is Louis Burkhoff's Summary of Christian Doctrine, a little white book that's maybe 150 pages, and largely it's text of Scripture speaking to a particular doctrine.
One of the things that I have done, too, not with this Bible, but with a previous Bible, is turn your Bible into a mini -systematic theology, and so let's say you get to the end of Esther, you know how sometimes your Bible will, you'll have like three lines at the top of the page.
They couldn't fit it on the last page, and so you have a blank section. What I would do is make a table of contents at the front of my Bible, and then say, yeah, for Bibliology, go to page 322. It's at the end of one of these books, and I'll just have the title, you know, so it's Bibliology, maybe it's Inspiration, and some text of Scripture, just the references, or maybe I'll start with a couple of the sentences, and then an ellipsis, you know, dot, dot, dot, and carry on, and go through, and I mean, I have my Bible in my backpack all the time, or it's in my hands, so I want to carry my own systematic theology, my own study Bible, make it my own, and I think that's been helpful.
Yes, please.
So again, I'm just going to keep beating this drum. There's so much good stuff on the internet, but there's a lot of dangerous stuff on the internet, you know, and as a pastor, we've lost some very zealous young men who were led astray online by some very gifted, persuasive teachers, and so if you have questions, before you run to Google, or before you're YouTubing it, ask your pastor.
Again, your pastor's fallible, but your pastor loves your soul, and as you're doing these things as well, you won't become like I was as a young Calvinist, you know, cage stage, you know, and I needed an older, wiser man to hem me in, and to check my heart, and that's what a godly pastor will do, and I'm quickly sneaking, because in our discussion, I thought of it, you know, say like, oh, this is so much, so I hope you received one today.
If you haven't, I'm sure talk to Pastor Shane. I think the best tool for us would be a 1689 in modern English, right? It's even more concise than Birkhoff, but I agree 100%. This is for me. I'd be confessional.
I agree with it. You don't have to memorize it. Just carry it around, and you can read a paragraph. Grudem's pretty good, but sometimes you have to read, you know, maybe eight or nine pages, but you can get in one or two pages of the confession, so I want to give a plug for that as well, not because, you know, you gave it out today, but personally, I've benefited greatly.
Here's godly men, right? They're not just theologians. They were pastors, and not only were they inventing it, but they're actually on the shoulders of the Westminster divines, and then men like Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, who were like brilliant, brilliant, and then the 1689, they said, well, what do we believe as Baptists?
I just think that's a treasure that we've ignored to our own peril, especially as Baptists, so again, make sure you know your pastor, and he knows you, and then a 1689, if you don't have one, I'm sure you guys have a whole.
Bunch that you can still give away. Yeah, I think we have. If you didn't get one, there probably are at least 20, and they have proof, you know, the proof texts, the text at the end, so if you want the scriptures, I mean, we need to be Bereans, and I think your counsel, brother, is good to leave off with, that the under shepherds that the Lord has placed over you in your local church, if it's a healthy local church, they love you, and I think that one, you know, the thing that grieves us the most is when we find that someone has been going down a rabbit trail for the last two years, and didn't once mention anything to us, and they say, I'm converting to blank, and I had a conversation, a very painful conversation with someone, and I said, but why did you not ever mention this, right?
So I think that's a good place to leave it off. I want to turn it to you, and see if anyone has questions. Do we have a microphone for people who have questions? Okay, do we have one with a long cable that, if you're brave enough to come to the front, or this, why don't you do this, you can ask the question, and we'll repeat the the red, oh, this one, okay.
Are you okay to come just to the microphone, and then we get it on the recording for the, for those folks who are learning to pray.
Thank you for the opportunity to hear what you have to say. My first is, what's your definition.
Of discipleship? So when we're talking with young men, I don't know if it's an appropriate illustration, but I just think of apprenticing, you know, you're following, well, this is what they do like, you know, back in, say, Bunyan's day, or in the Puritans, you just spend time with your dad, and you would learn his trade, and yeah, he would maybe teach you the technical things, but you would just actually, you know, they say that a lot of these things are caught as much as they are taught, and it's actually just spending time, like Pastor Shane said, like, you know, in the ride-along, when you were, you know, in law enforcement, and so it's just walking together, and that's, that's actually a very important sort of picture, especially of the Old Testament.
Someone was talking to me, forget who it was, they actually dropped the word derech today, and that's the Hebrew word for path, I'm like, oh, you know, and so even Psalm 1, which is this picture of, of wisdom, discipleship is really wisdom, where you're walking together, right, and you're walking with the Lord, but then the Lord has also instituted the local church, where you're walking alongside, hopefully, someone who knows a little bit more than you, you know, and so what is discipleship?
Me walking along someone who's done this, right, like, if I want to learn sound, okay, Steve, I'm just going to follow you, I'm just going to shadow you, right, and, and so that's what it is, and then when he sees me making mistakes, right, like, you see it in, in the pastoral epistles, too, Brother Ben read it in, in chapter 2, verse 11, reprove, exhort, encourage with all authority, let no one despise you, you know, Paul says the same thing to Timothy, and, and so again, this is what shepherds do, right, it's not like the shepherds sort of, you know, like, okay, sheep, you know, he's out there quarreling, you know, he's with them, he's singing to them, he's feeding them, so it's a long verbose pastoral answer, it's just walking with people where they're at, and teaching them as you see fit.
That, that may be not a good, that's my definition. No, that's great, and, you know, the thing I would.
Add is, it's not just your elders that can disciple you, right, I, I would, I would go to your elders and say, I'm seeking to be discipled, and your elder might say, oh, I, I would love to do that, or he might say, you know what, we've got this, this brother who has walked with the Lord for the last 20 years, and, and I, I would be so happy, and I trust him, you go to him, and, and, and sit with him, do the same thing, and do it with him, and, and I think we overcomplicate it sometimes, we think that discipleship has to be, okay, we, we meet on Tuesday, 6 30, we sit down, it's coffee, I think of one brother I took, you know, Doug knows, we get a lot of books from you guys, and we're, I live in Sherwood Park, and the Edmonton pickup point is on the west end, and there's a brother who lives between my house and the pickup point, one day I picked him up, we're going to go pick up some books, and, and we went for, I think the drive was an hour long, and we had a solid conversation, I left encouraged, he left encouraged, and, and then I dropped him back off at home, and I went about my merry way, and so we all have to eat, go with someone to eat, you know, I, I take people for walks, you know, whatever it is, just, just find ways that you can be in each other's lives, and begin to ask those questions, I would say that.
If I can throw out a challenge, please,.
Each one of you, first off, find somebody older in the faith, and be accountable to that person, to go through a book, and learn it. On the other side, find somebody younger than you, to go through a book, and learn it together, you teaching them how to study, memorize, and apply it to your life, because you become the teacher, and you're helping them in their faith,.
And relationship with God. Amen. You know, one of my professors, he said almost the same thing you said, he said, every Christian needs a Paul in his life, and he needs a Timothy in his life, you know, and you even see it in the book of Proverbs, sort of the, you know, the father figure, right, and my son, but the whole implication is that the father's teaching the son, who himself will one day be a father, who will teach his son, so that was very helpful, thank you for that, brother.
Any other questions? And if you're, if you don't want to come up to the microphone, I should have said this at the beginning, you can ask you where you are, I can repeat the question, so we can, we can make it a bit easier that way.
Any others? I mean, maybe if we're waiting for somebody to,.
Somebody's thinking through, I think it's relevant with discipleship, and I like Shane's comment, somebody's gumming up a little bit, fundamentally in Matthew 28, go therefore make disciples, baptizing them, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, so I go for a really expansive definition of discipleship, preaching is discipleship, singing hymns together is discipleship, I mean, any kind of Christian activity that we have, where we are helping drive one another towards teach, observing all that Jesus has commanded us to do is discipleship, so we do have that, it's got to, like, you've got to have a hierarchical thing, you know, you've got to have the discipler and the disciplee, it's got to be casual in a coffee shop or, you know, whatever, and we're adding other components to it, discipleship is anything we do that drives other people towards following Christ.
Any other questions? Yes, brother,.
Mr. Merjad. So I'm currently a student at Foundation Baptist College seeking to pursue the ministry, and one question that I, like, have in mind and is a struggle for me is how do you keep the original languages as a pastor and you're serving in the ministry?
I'm Lord willing about to take Hebrew in the fall, so that's a scary thing for me, but, like, even keeping the Greek with me while learning Hebrew, and for you guys is, in your experience, preparing weekly, like, messages and stuff, how do you keep both languages?
Because I've just seen some people, they got their Greek, they're keeping their Greek, but they forgot the Hebrew, but then you have other men who they love the Old Testament, so they have the Hebrew, but they don't have the Greek.
I have yet to meet someone who has them both just handled, but I guess it just matters on your series, on what you're doing. If you're in the New Testament, and obviously you're in the Greek a lot more than if you're not in the Old Testament, right?
That guy right there. Brother, you've been in Lethbridge since 2007. You love the languages. I think you need to answer that question.
It's gonna be a very simple answer. I do my devotions in Hebrew and Greek. It's not very profound, and I should have a wide margin Bible, but you can tell that I do my devotions, you know, either in the Hebrew, in the BHS, or in, you know, Nestle, Elan, whichever.
This is technical languages for us nerds here. We're just zoning in. So it's as simple an answer as Proverbs 4 -7. I just do my devotions. Every day, no, but I try to do my devotions every day. Now, this is for pastors, right?
I wasn't able to when I was, you know, doing this full-time. Sorry, when I had a full-time job and was a pastor on the side, but by God's grace, He's just given me a desire, and I think that though people have an English translation, and it's good, the guys who translated the ESV, even the NIV, yes, you know, it's a good translation, but God has called certain men, right?
Not all of us have been given the privilege to learn Greek and Hebrew, and I see it as actually a valuable stewardship, you know, that I need to be able to be entrusted with this for the sake of the flock of Christ, and so it's not, it is, I am nerdy, so I love it, but like this is for the flock of Christ, and not, you never want to show off, but God inspired it in Hebrew and in Greek and a little bit of Aramaic, and so again, what is the short answer?
I try to do my devotionals, not just my study. I try to do my devotionals every single day in a little bit of Hebrew, a little bit of Greek, so I don't know if that helps, but just every day, because you'll lose it.
You'll lose it, and so try to, you know, and yeah, if you have to use your logos or, you know, some other stuff, fine, but just swim in it, like how do you, how do you stay such a good swimmer? You learned how to swim back then, how you good swim?
I just.
Swim every day, so. I think that, I mean, that's huge. I brought my, my, this is, I have a couple of different Greek New Testaments. This is, I mean, you can get a reader's Greek New Testament, and what I decided to do, and not to, not to talk down to your reader's Greek New Testament, is I thought, well, I'm going to make my own, right?
So, so I'll read it, you know, I've been in First Timothy, so let me just pull this open, you know, I got to learn some vocabulary, right? So I'm still working on that, but being in it, I don't have facility with Hebrew, and I'm working on that, but, but in terms of Greek, I think it pays to be a little bit weird, right?
You just have to, you have to love it, you have to, you know, and it helps when you begin to see how, how an understanding of that language, and I know you know this, brother, you drill into the word like labor, you know, kapiao, and, and, and what the meaning of that when Paul's talking about his, his toiling, you know, to make the Word of God fully known in Colossians.
You know, stuff like that enlivens me, I think that helps, and I teach other people, so, so, you know, we, we have these people in our church who are learning Greek, and, and part of the reason is I felt like I'm getting rusty, I, and I know the best way to keep it and to keep learning is to,.
Is to teach it, and so, you know. Can I add one more thing? Yeah. Just from nerd to nerd, well, maybe not nerd, from nerd to maybe nerd, so I've turned my English Bible also into English, so, so everyone loves, you know, Philippians 4, I can do all things through him who strengthens me, however, I'm nerdy, and so in, in my English, you know, when I write over the words, actually, it forces me to slow down, there's something tactile about it, so I take a black pen, anytime there's the word n-e-n for in, and so literally, so I'm reading it, I'm like, oh, I can do all things in him who strengthens me, so even in reading the English, it's forcing me, oh wait, no, I have here through, but black, which means it must be the preposition n, which means in, so again, so here's union with Christ's language, and so I'm not even going back to my, oh, what is the Greek, and so, so when I'm even preaching, and if you're, if, if God enables you to, to be preaching one day, I can take my English Bible, and I can preach as if it were a Greek or a Hebrew Bible, where I've marked it up, you know, and so little things, and so I, I remember this, where it says to make the God, the Word of God fully known in Colossians, so the word plerao, which means to fill, fulfill, it's used of the spirit, and that's what he actually does there, and so I actually, if you were to look, I guarantee, if you go into my Bible right now in Colossians 1, it'll be underlined and in blue, and so I'm preaching to make the, the Word of God fully known, and when you said that, it's to fulfill it, what's going on here?
I don't have the answer, but I do know what the Greek word is, because I've, I've turned it into sort of like my own little nerdy, like, like, it's not like a gay Bible with all the colors, right, because I've got like red and orange and brown, like, I wish there were more rainbow colors, and, and after like 20 years of this, like, you know, like a hockey player, he, or a goalie, they know their equipment, you know, a farmer knows his stuff, man, if we're in the Word, we should know this inside and out, and we should sharpen it, and we should hone it, whatever it takes, so sort of getting there, but like, turn your English Bible even into sort of a tool that you know, right, okay, I know what the, the Greek or the Hebrew is even behind this, because I, I do read my English Bible the most, so.
So the moral of the story is, is be in it,.
And hang out with nerds. That's, that's, that's the way to do it. All right. Well, brothers and sisters, I want to make sure that we have time to turn this room around for three o 'clock. If you do have other questions, you just didn't have the, you know, didn't want to ask it in front of people, we would love to ask, answer your question right here.
Feel free to come to the front. Brother, do you want to close us in prayer? Would that be good? Thank you. Here's the last.
Little thing. Get around people who are infectious about that. So the reason why I love this, and I don't agree with everything from Dr. MacArthur, but when, you know, he was discipling me, and he just gave me a love for Hebrew and Greek, and so it was contagious, and so if, if you catch it, brother, be a nerd.
Others will catch it, and be around others. That's, that's how it actually is. So when I'm with other pastors in Lethbridge, you know, we're talking, and we're nerding out over coffee, and it just, it stimulates.
So, but I would love to close in prayer. Thank you for listening.
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