How I Read the Bible (and How You Should Too)

Wise Disciple

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Well, excellent. So let's get into how we read the Bible. Now, this is a personal question. So let's go ahead and start.

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Gene, you can start us off. How do you read the Bible in your morning times? Walk us through your process. I am very poor about creating good

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Bible reading habits. I'll say that out front. I am probably not a good person to ask this question to because I really struggle making it a habit to, every day, have time set aside to read my

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Bible. When I personally read my Bible, it is with the intention to create a study or create a sermon or whatever

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I'm on to do for the church that weekend or the following week or whatever. So it's often very study or topic -centered.

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So I'm reading chunks of Scripture at a time related to a specific topic. That is not a good way to read the

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Bible as part of a general practice. So I want to make that clear. That's just how

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I'm personally doing it right now. So yeah, just reading the

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Bible every morning, like you said, Nate, or anytime, making a habit of doing it is the best way to read the

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Bible. Not the way I do it. But I should also preface that I've been a

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Christian now for 16 years. So I've had long stretches of my life where I have read the

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Bible every day, every other day, through entire books, full context and everything.

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So there's a degree to which I'm familiar with the context of every passage I'm coming to for study or for topics and things like that.

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But that shouldn't be how you start. Yeah. Logan, what do you think? So as far as what

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I do personally, so I first thing after making my coffee in the morning,

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I sit down with the Bible and I am usually working through a book at a time.

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And what I will usually try and do is I have my journal with me. And so after reading each chapter,

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I'll jot down some thoughts that are usually geared towards. So I've been saying

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Genesis a lot recently. So for me, it's been about pulling out character lessons from the text.

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And I write those down in a journal. And then after I've done that through a book, I go back and I read it with a companion book that's going to help me get the cultural and historical context.

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Usually that's a commentary, although it doesn't have to be. So like right now I'm reading Derek Kidner's Genesis commentary, which is in the

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Tyndale Old Testament commentary set. But I think the key is

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I want to be very familiar with the book before I introduce somebody else's opinion on it.

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And so, for example, when I was studying Philippians not too long ago, in part because we were doing that in the

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Bible class I was in at church, I would read that since it was such a short book, I read it through for about two weeks before consulting anything else.

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And I think that does a couple of things. One is you want to be sure that you are other people's input is really helpful.

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I need other people's input a lot of times to help me think through things. But I don't want that to be the way

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I'm introduced to the text. I want the text to stand on its own first. And then when

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I encounter things that I disagree with, there are things I disagree with in the Derek Kidner commentary,

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I'm more equipped to kind of navigate the text. And so I can take what's helpful and leave what

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I think is not well -founded. And so, but what I'm looking for, as I'm making those notes and pulling those things out,

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I'm looking for more of the character application points. I'm looking for less of the logic, systematic theology points.

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Not that those things aren't helpful, those things are. But one of the things when

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I'm going to Scripture is that one of the things I'm trying to keep in mind is that if I emerge just with more and more facts and information,

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I've missed the point and it's really not done me much good. That Scripture is really supposed to work a change with us, especially when you look at the fruits of the

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Holy Spirit in Galatians 6, and that is more what my eye is on when I'm doing my personal reading, as opposed to something that's more preparing for teaching a class or something like that.

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Yeah. You know, in a moment, we're going to talk about what the ultimate goal of reading the Bible is, but you're already touching on it, aren't you?

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The goal is to read the Bible so that you are more conformed to the image of the

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Son, which is the reason that you were created in the first place. It all comes together. We'll talk more about that in a moment.

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Trevor asks this question, isn't there proof that oral tradition of the gospel was already taking shape?

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Yeah, that's true. 1 Corinthians 15, I think verse 3, Paul talks about what he received and then he passed on, you know, and then he goes down the list that Christ died for our sins according to the

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Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and what you'll note is that that refrain keeps repeating, according to the

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Scriptures, according to the Scriptures, and that is a clue that shows us that that is something that was orally transmitted.

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It was taken from the churches and passed on to other churches, and 1 Corinthians, I mean, that was very early.

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That's one of the earliest attested documents that we have from the New Testament period, right guys?

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Yeah, I mean, that's basically a creed, right? I mean... Yeah, Gary Habermas, I'm pretty sure it's him, he does a great job of taking that bit of Scripture and showing how it fits in a rhythmic pattern.

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If you look at the Greek, it fits a rhythmic pattern such to make it memorizable.

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Is that a word? Easy to memorize, and so he takes that and, you know, recognizing it as a creed, an early creed, you know, this is what

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Paul was taught or what he was told and what he passed on, and ascribing that rhythmic pattern to it, it follows a rhythm.

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He uses that to argue how early that is in teaching in the New Testament and saying it was set to this rhythm to make it easy to memorize.

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That didn't just come about, you know, automatically. That would have taken some years to get to that point, so the teaching was prior to that, and so he uses that in some of his arguments for how early to date a lot of these letters, including 1

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Corinthians. That's real good. We have a few minutes left, and we have a couple questions, and again, don't forget, join us in the

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Facebook room and forum, and we'll go more deeply into all these things. I want to share with you something that I show, so whenever at my local church people come up and ask me, you know, how do you read the

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Bible? I've been asked enough to write it down, so this is what

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I'm sharing with you guys is something that I actually give out to people. It's a five -day Bible reading plan, and the goal is basically, like I said, to be conformed to the image of Christ, okay?

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So another way of saying it is, you know, you have to read the Word until the

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Word gets into you, you know? It kind of just changes you. It's the—part of the sanctification process is knowing

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God, knowing Him intimately, and so that's how it all happens.

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You behold God, you know Him intimately, and He changes you. So the plan is to read one chapter of Scripture for five days.

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The same chapter for five days—yeah, that's right, Nate. That's right, guys. It's the same chapter for five days.

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Each day you reread the chapter, but then you ask these questions. I don't know if everybody can see this. Let me put this up on the big screen. So day one, you're just noting what's going on.

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So this is kind of like what Logan was actually talking about, you know? These are just annotated, you know, responses to the reading.

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You can do this, like, in the margin of your Bible, or you can do this on a separate sheet of paper, but you're noting day one what's going on, the main idea of the passage, what's taking place.

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And day two, you go back and then you note who's involved. Who are the main players? You know, how are they interacting?

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Why are they important? What are they doing? What are they saying? And then in day three, you're going to look at the lesson for the original audience.

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In a paragraph, you have to explain what the original audience needed to understand. This becomes very vivid when it comes to the epistles, and it becomes very vivid when it comes to the gospels,

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Jesus interacting with people. Day four, what's the lesson for me today? Now right here, so this is what

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I was taught in school, guys. Right here, you are bridging the gap, the 2 ,000 -year gap between what was going on for the original audience and how those principles can apply to your life today.

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And that's where you find wisdom, you know, to make decisions, to be a certain kind of person in the daily life.

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What's the lesson for me today? And then finally, day five, what am I going to do about it? I think a lot of us in the

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West, we like to consume a bunch of information and do nothing about it. And so that's why it's really important to have that action step on the last one there, day five.

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What I've learned, guys, is that following this particular plan has actually, it's grown me quite a bit just in the last several years of doing something like this.

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So if you notice, these are all W questions, by the way. You know, the five Ws, they teach you in elementary school, you know, the who, what, when, where, and why.

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You're just taking it to the Bible and that's how I do it. But anyway. You know, it occurs to me,

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Nate, that day three is really important, which is what was the original audience supposed to understand?

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What were they supposed to get out of it? I think we tend to, we either swap three and four or we skip three altogether because we just want to get to, all right, but what's the point, right?

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And we miss, so there's a couple things we miss when we do that.

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We miss a lot of depth, because especially when you look at the prophets, if you read those understanding certain things about the culture or the historical context, it adds a lot of richness to the text itself.

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And we also run the risk of getting a lot of things wrong, simply because there are sometimes, especially to stick with the prophets as an example, sometimes there are prophecies that are very specific to a particular people in a particular time and place, and they weren't meant to be extended out to 2020, right?

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And so, that's a really important piece. And even when a prophecy is not directly meant to me in Indiana in 2020, there's still a lot

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I can gain about the character of God and how he dealt with those people then. And that has a lot of impact as to my daily life as well.

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That's right. And you'll make a mistake if you don't spend some time trying to figure out what what the lesson for the original audience was.

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You'll be all over the place, and it'll become much more subjective. No, that's good.

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Well, let's go ahead and jump into the next question here. How should Christians read the

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Bible? But here's the real question. What is the ultimate goal of the Christian in reading the

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Bible? Now, I already said a few words. Let me just go ahead and make my point, and you guys can jump in. But word studies are really great.

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Thematic studies are really great. You can study the fulfilled prophecies of God. You can do a study on the promises of God.

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But I think the ultimate goal of a Christian in reading the Bible is to know God, to know him intimately, to spend time with him where the focus is on him.

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Jesus said in John 17 3 that eternal life is to know the one true God in Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

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We have to read the Bible to know God. And I don't mean no theological things about God so we can win the

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Bible trivia quiz every Tuesday night at Steve's house. I mean know him the way that Adam knew

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Eve, that level of intimacy, that kind of level of intimate knowledge. That's why

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I think when Jesus said in Matthew 7 22, on that day, there are going to be people that say to me, Lord, Lord, we did all of these things in your name.

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We prophesied. We cast out demons. And he's going to say, I never knew you. Jesus is not saying, come again,

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I never caught your name. Who are you? That's not what he's saying. He's saying, I never had intimate relationship with you.

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Depart from me. And that's our ultimate goal in reading the Bible. What do you guys think about that? Yeah, I completely agree.

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And to the verse that you cited, you should strive to know God to the point that you can understand how a

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God would say, depart, I never knew you, to someone who would have said they're doing all these things in his name.

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How can those two things jive together? If you buy society and culture's elevator speech about God and God is all love and that's it, then how do those things jive?

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And if you read the Bible to know God, to understand his character, understand his motives, what his love means for us and what that means in terms of our responsibility and in terms of how he would handle us and manage us, learning those things helps you understand all of those difficult passages.

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And all of a sudden those things are no longer near as difficult, not that they are not difficult anymore, period.

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But those things are easier to cope with and understand and come to a good place of understanding on them.

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So yeah, I completely agree to know God. And I would say just as kind of a branch off that, not that it's different or anything, but to understand what the good news is.

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The New Testament is the gospel, the gospel according to all the disciples, it's the gospel of Jesus and it's the good news and understand why it is good news.

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Understand how it can be good news if it means that some are lost in eternity, how it can be good news if it means that it pits you against your family or you against your friends, how can that be good news?

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And understanding good news doesn't mean good personal outcomes, materialistically or financially or anything like that.

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Good news is referring to something very specifically in your eternal security. And understanding that, you know, you know

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God, you understand what the good news is, that should be your goal in reading the Bible. Yeah.

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Logan, what you got? One of the things, I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention stand to reasons guideline of never read a

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Bible verse. And I want to extrapolate that out a little bit instead of just stating it as a negative.

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There's a Bible teacher that I respect a lot who I was able to listen to some of his teachings when

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I was younger, when I was a young teenager. And he actually recommended when you can reading the

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Bible for long stretches of time in the same book. And he actually emphasized doing that above just, you know, maybe in a super, the same amount of time, a super in -depth study of one chapter.

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Now both can be valuable, right? But one of the things that he said is we tend to chop up the text a lot and we miss a lot of not just context, but we miss a lot of the story when we do that.

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Right. And I was thinking about this cause I mean, I read a lot. I've read 20 some books so far this year.

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And when I think about the amount of time I spend reading, let's say rereading a

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Harry Potter book, how long I do that in one sitting versus how long I read the

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Bible in one sitting. There's a lot of discrepancy there. Right. And, and, you know, if you, and I just think about that a lot in terms of we, as we want to gain more appreciation for the story and for the story to dwell in us more you know,

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I think part of that means spending a lot of time with it and spending time with it in the form that it was originally intended, which was not in little chunks at a time, except,

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I mean, you could probably say that about Psalms and Proverbs, maybe Ecclesiastes, but for something like the gospel, that's more of a narrative, for example,

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I think that, and I saying this to, as a challenge to myself as well, I think doing the Bible in longer stretches,

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I think would be a good thing for all of us to consider. Well, this actually leads to Folly's question.

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So I'm happy to circle back around here, Folly. How, so the question is, how would you approach a fellow Christian who believes that their interpretation of a passage of scripture is correct, but under careful consideration is out of context?

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We have about two minutes in closing here. Gene, what do you think?

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Boy, two minutes. First thing to understand is that it'll take study time.

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Most of the time, these are interpretations that they have been clinging to for a while.

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It's usually not something they're brand new adapting. If it were, it should be fairly simple for you to kind of point out something to them and kind of put a thorn in their shoe.

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But most of the time, these are long -held beliefs. And so it's going to take study.

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It's going to take time with them to be able to convince them that they are taking it out of context. And I think pointing that out, that how it is out of context is the best way to approach that, because I think it's fair to assume of your fellow

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Christian that they want to be interpreting scripture correctly. And so if you can get them to agree, it shouldn't be difficult that interpreting something within its context is the correct way to look at it, then making that next step of pointing out what the context is and how perhaps the way they're interpreting it completes strips of all context and therefore all meaning, those two steps there,

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I think you can hopefully get them to see. I think you'd have to get a level of base agreement on how to read it first.

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Do you agree that the Bible, the way that we'll answer this question is in the context, is in looking above the verse and below the verse and finding out perhaps if there was a greater point that was made before this verse or after this verse that ties it all back together.

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You would have to start there, I think, as the base level of agreement so that you could find the actual answer.

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And then I think the biggest thing is ask them to show you their math. How did you get there?

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How do you know that that's actually the best explanation? How do you think that that's actually a good reason? And not to do so to be argumentative or anything, but just to get somebody to reflect on their own claims because this right here, their interpretation of the