3 Steps to Effective Bible Study

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Decently and In Order (1 Corinthians 14)

Decently and In Order (1 Corinthians 14)

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This morning we're going to be opening up our Bibles to 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17.
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Very familiar passage, especially for us here at Sovereign Grace.
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We have looked at this passage before, but this morning I want to point out a few additional things and use it to talk about the importance of having an effective Bible study.
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Today's message is entitled, 3 Steps to Effective Bible Study.
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Last week I taught a lesson on the value of family worship.
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We looked at 5 things that make family worship better.
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Family worship is better when it's worshipful, when it's planned, when it's regular, when it's joyful, and when it's pure.
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And by pure, if you remember last week, what I meant was doctrinally pure.
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What we teach our children should be accurate to the text of the Scripture.
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What we learn about God, we should seek for the utmost accuracy in what we want to know about our Lord.
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And sometimes the most difficult thing for folks, when I talk to them, is their ability to study the Bible for themselves.
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It's often difficult to have a confidence that we really know what the text is saying and compound this with the fact that many people will then challenge that and say, oh well that's just your opinion, that's just your interpretation.
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As if to say, you couldn't possibly be right, or you couldn't possibly know what the text actually says.
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Beloved, I want us as a church to be students of the Word so that we will be able, when we speak to our families, when we speak to our neighbors, when we speak to the lost, that we will have the confidence to say, thus saith the Lord, that we know what the Bible says.
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So in addition to last week, I want to give the sermon today, How to Study the Bible.
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And I want to say this from the outset, this is one of my most favorite subjects to teach.
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Because I truly believe that there is life changing value in learning to study the Bible for yourself.
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And I want to preface this by saying, if you're a part of our Sovereign Grace Academy, you went through a course last year, we did eight weeks of study.
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On hermeneutics, how to study the scriptures.
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And I certainly cannot put all of that into one message.
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But I want to encourage you by saying this, all of those messages are online.
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So if today encourages you to go further in learning how to study the Bible, go to our sermon audio page and look up those lessons, the fundamentals of Bible study.
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So let's read the text together.
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We're going to read 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17.
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All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
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Father in heaven, as I seek to give an understanding of this text, and as I seek to expound on the subject of the importance and the method of Bible study, I pray that you would keep me from error.
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I thank you for the prayer that Brother Andy has already given.
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And I simply second by saying, Lord, keep me from error.
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Speak through me by your Holy Spirit.
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And may this internet stream, may it reach people that we've never even seen.
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And may our church be edified by it.
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And may it all be to the glory of Christ in his name.
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Amen.
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As I said a few moments ago, if you've been at our church for any length of time, you've probably heard me mention 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17.
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It's certainly one of the most important passages of scripture when you think about doctrines such as inspiration and inerrancy and infallibility.
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Inspiration is regarding the source of scripture.
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This text tells us that the scripture is God-breathed.
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It says that it came from the very mouth of God.
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Theanoustos is the Greek.
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And it means to literally be breathed out by God.
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And that's what we talk about inspiration.
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And it also speaks to the inerrancy of scripture.
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Inerrancy means it's without error.
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What it says is true.
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Why is it true? Because it comes from God.
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And God himself is true.
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The Bible says God cannot tell a lie.
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And therefore, when we hear God's word, we know we are hearing the truth.
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And also, it speaks to its infallibility.
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What's the difference between inerrancy and infallibility? Inerrancy is that it doesn't err.
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Infallibility is that it cannot err.
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The Bible cannot err because of its source, because of the authority of the one who has given it to us.
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And all of this is based on God's nature.
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God himself, who is truth, says that his word is truth.
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And this passage doesn't only tell us that the word of God is truthful, but it tells us that the word of God is profitable.
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And it tells us that it's profitable for four things.
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First, for teaching.
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The word teaching here is where we would get the word instruction or doctrine.
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It's profitable for doctrine.
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Some people don't like doctrine.
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Some people don't want to hear the doctrines of scripture.
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They only want to hear the stories, and they don't want to really know what the Bible truly means.
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But this says it's profitable, not for storytelling, but for doctrinal instruction.
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It's profitable for teaching.
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It's profitable for reproof and correction.
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Now, the way that I believe those two words work together is like this.
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Reproof, another word for that could be rebuke or chastisement.
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Thus, that is in the negative.
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And correction actually has the idea of being restorative or improving.
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So the idea is that the Bible not only tells us what we've done wrong, it tells us what to do that's right.
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It not only gives us the negative, where we ought to repent, but it gives us the positive of what direction that we ought to go.
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I think of Psalm 1, which tells us to not walk in the way of sinners, but rather to go the way of the righteous.
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So we have the what not to do, and then we have the what we should do.
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So it's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
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Now, this phrase, training in righteousness, I love what Thayer's Greek commentary on this says.
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It says that this essentially means cultivating the soul.
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The Word of God cultivates the soul.
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And so that's what it's profitable for.
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Teaching, reproving, correcting, and cultivating the soul.
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And what's often missed about 2 Timothy 3.16 is where it falls in Paul's letter to Timothy.
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Remember, this is Paul's last letter to Timothy.
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This is very near the end of his life.
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And where this statement about the doctrine of Scripture falls is right between two other Scriptures that Paul is talking about in regard to the importance of the Word of God.
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I want you to look with me very quickly at verses 14 and 15.
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Right before we get to our passage for today, it says here in verse 14, Paul is speaking to Timothy.
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He says, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.
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Earlier in the book, Paul tells us that Timothy was taught as a child by his mother and by his grandmother.
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And Paul is hearkening back to that at this point.
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And he's saying, What did they teach you? They taught you the sacred writings.
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That is, the Word of God.
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And then he goes into verse 16 and 17.
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What is the Word of God? The Word of God is God breathed.
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The Scripture is God's Word.
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And it's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.
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Then he gets to chapter 4 and he says this, I charge you in the presence of God and of Jesus Christ, who is to judge the living and the dead and by his appearing in his kingdom, preach the Word.
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So what he says in chapter 3, he says, You were brought up with the Word.
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Here is what the Word is.
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It is God's Word.
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It is the breathed out Word of God.
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And here's what you are to do with it.
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You are to preach it.
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Preach the Word.
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Don't preach your opinion.
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Don't preach your own thoughts and your own ideas.
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But Timothy, preach the Word.
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And the reason why Paul is telling him to preach the Word is because the Word of God has its own power.
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It's like Spurgeon said.
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He said, I dare not seek to defend the Word of God.
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The Word of God is like a lion.
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All you must do with a lion is set it free.
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And when it is set free, it will defend itself.
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There is power in the Word of God.
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It has the power to change men's lives.
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It has the power to change the hearts of people.
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That's why we're doing this today.
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That's why we're live streaming today.
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Because we hope that this message will reach people and it will change hearts beyond this relatively empty room.
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But consider this, beloved.
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When you wield the Word of God, whether it's in your own personal Bible study, whether it's in your family worship, or whether it's in your evangelistic opportunities, when you wield the Word of God, you are swinging a very powerful sword.
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Hebrews 4.12 tells us that the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.
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And like any powerful weapon, the person who wields it must do so responsibly.
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As many of you know, I teach classes for people to learn how to use firearms.
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We spend an hour or more talking about the importance of safety.
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Because when you're wielding a firearm, you're wielding a powerful weapon.
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Might I say to you today, that when you wield the Word of God, you're wielding a much more powerful weapon than any handgun, or any rifle, or any weapon forged of man.
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You are wielding the very sword of the Spirit of God.
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So you have a responsibility.
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2 Timothy 2.15 tells us, Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the Word of Truth.
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I like it how it says it in the King James, Study to show thyself approved unto God.
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Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman who needeth not to be ashamed.
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We who have been given the right to have the Word of God, have been given the responsibility to handle it rightly.
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But how? How do we study the Word of God? How do we wield the Word of God responsibly? Well, that's what I want to move to now.
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I want to move to what I have prepared today.
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An outline of three steps to effective Bible study.
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And I want to, as I do, any time I use an outline which I have learned from someone else, or I've received from someone else, I want to give credit where credit is due.
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One of the greatest Bible teachers I have ever learned from is a man by the name of Howard Hendricks.
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And many pastors know Dr.
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Hendricks.
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He was a preaching teacher and a Bible study teacher at Dallas Theological Seminary for many, many years.
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And Dr.
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Hendricks has spoken into my life many, many times wisdom from God.
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And he wrote a book called Living by the Book.
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And in that book he explains the method that I'm about to share with you and the outline that I'm going to share with you.
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And might I encourage you, if you want something to accompany your own personal Bible study, Living by the Book is one of the best tools that you could get.
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So let's look now at the three steps to effective Bible study.
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And I've written them down on the board here.
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Hopefully everyone who is watching will be able to see this.
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Is it coming through there, brother? Can you see the screen? A little bit more this way? Okay, good.
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All right.
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That's what's great about having somebody here with me.
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I can ask that question.
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All right.
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So we're going to look at three steps to effective Bible study.
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The three steps are as followed.
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Observation, interpretation, and application.
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Observation asks this question, What does the text say? Interpretation asks the question, What does the text mean? And application, How does it work? What does it say? What does it mean? And how does it work? Let's look first at observation.
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What does it say? This step is absolutely the most crucial thing that I learned in studying from Dr.
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Hendricks' work.
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Because what he shows and what I learned is that I too often want to run to the interpretation of the text before I have really spent time observing what the text actually says.
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Too many people are too concerned with what does this mean rather than simply asking the question, What does this actually say? One of my favorite fictional characters is Sherlock Holmes.
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I used to read Sherlock Holmes for my own personal entertainment.
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And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writings were so mesmerizing and interesting.
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And one of the great quotes from Sherlock Holmes was this.
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He said, The problem is that you see, but you do not observe.
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You see, but you do not observe.
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And that's why I don't call this simply read the text.
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I say observe the text.
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Look at the text.
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Read it and read it again and read it again.
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I want to offer you a challenge.
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And this is a challenge I hope you take up.
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I would like for you to take a section of scripture.
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Maybe a couple of verses, maybe an entire paragraph.
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But I would say a small section of text.
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Maybe the first two verses of Romans 12 that we read this morning.
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And I would encourage you to sit down and write down as many observations about that passage as you can think of.
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When we had our Sovereign Grace Academy, I actually encouraged the students to come to class the very first night with at least ten observations from the text.
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And because they hadn't really learned how to do that, it was very difficult for them.
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But by the time we ended the course, eight weeks later, I had them give me an additional twenty observations.
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And it was amazing the things that they were discovering as simply observers of the text.
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As they learned to observe more and more and more.
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I'm reminded of a biology professor who was a brilliant man.
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And he was asked, what have you done with all of your time as a teacher? What have you taught your students to do? He said, I taught them how to be observers.
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What he would do is he would take a new student and he would set them down in front of a fish.
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He would have a dead fish laid out on the table.
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And he would set them down in front of the fish.
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And he would say, observe and write.
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Observe and write all the things that you see.
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And he would leave them that way for hours at a time.
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And then he would come back and he would say, the student would say, I found thirty-seven things.
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And he would say, good, look some more.
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And then he would come back later and he would say, I found fifty things.
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He would say, good, look some more.
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Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul employed this in his own teaching.
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He tells a story that when he would go into the classroom, he would demand that his students write fifty observations from a single text of scripture.
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And he said they'd spend all week finding these fifty observations.
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They would be calling one another and asking questions.
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And they would be dialoguing back and forth.
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And they'd come in the next week and they'd hand in their fifty observations.
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And he would say, good, now go find fifty more.
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You might think that I'm exaggerating.
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But beloved, the word of God is a mind that we simply cannot exhaust.
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When I sit down with a text of scripture, I'll give you my own personal way to do this.
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When I sit down with a text of scripture, I print it out on the page.
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I print it out in big letters.
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And I put spaces in between the verses so that I can take my pen and I can begin to observe.
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Where are the verbs? Because verbs are where the action is happening.
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Who are the actors? Where are the nouns and the pronouns? How are they being described? What are the adjectives? Those are simple observations that begin the process of really, really understanding the text.
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Because let me tell you this, it is very unlikely that you will arrive at a proper interpretation if you have not made the effort in observation.
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So that is number one.
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Observation, and I would say this, the most crucial because it is the most overlooked.
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Number two, interpretation.
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What does it mean? What does the text mean? The question that most people ask, unfortunately, is not what does the text mean.
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But they ask, what does the text mean to me? Maybe you've been in a Bible study and someone will read a text and they'll say, hey, what does that mean to you? What does that mean to you? And what does that mean to you? Let me say something as boldly and yet as nicely as I can.
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I don't care what it means to you.
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I don't care what it means to me.
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I only care what it means.
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And that begins with the question of what did it mean to the original audience who received it? We call this the contextual study of the text, where we studied the grammar and the history to know what Paul meant when he spoke to the Corinthians.
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What was the situation the Corinthians were in? What were they facing? What were the sins that they were dealing with? And therefore, now we can better understand and interpret what Paul means when he says the things that he says.
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And always remember, the three keys of interpretation are context, context, and context.
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The text cannot mean what it does not say.
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And therefore, you begin with observation, and your interpretation is based on your observation.
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And it's not about what you want it to mean, it's about what it meant when it was written.
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What did the Holy Spirit of God mean when He inspired the writing of this text? And that's the goal of interpretation.
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Now, I'll do very quickly, different books require different interpretational methods because some books are written in historic narrative, and they're meant to be read as history.
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Some books are written as poetry.
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Some books are written as prophecy.
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And therefore, it does take a little bit of knowledge to be able to really break down the interpretation of those books.
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But let me say this.
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If you begin with observation, what is it saying? Then what it means will be a lot more easy to discern.
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Finally, the third thing is application.
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How does it work? Notice we don't say, does it work? Because the question is not, does the Scripture work? The Scripture works.
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The Bible is always relevant.
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It is always applicable.
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But often, we don't want it to work in our lives because when we get to the point of application, the text becomes very uncomfortable.
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It's okay to know what it says.
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It's okay to know what it means.
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But we don't want it to have a personal application because oftentimes, we do not want to make the changes the Scripture tells us we should be making.
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In the first chapter of the book of James, James says this, Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
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For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in the mirror.
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For he looks at himself and goes away at once, forgetting what he was like.
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This is an illustration James is saying.
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He's saying, imagine you get up in the morning and you walk over to a mirror and you see your face and you see all that crusty stuff in your eyes and you see that your face is disheveled and your hair is all disheveled and you see the changes that need to be made.
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You need to wash your face.
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You need to comb your hair.
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You need to brush your teeth.
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But you see yourself in the mirror.
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You turn away from the mirror and you walk away and you don't make any changes.
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And James says that is a person who is a hearer and not a doer.
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That is a person who looks upon the word of God and sees those things in his life that need to change and says, I will not change them because as I turn away from the word, I am not applying the word to my life.
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And might I say this, such is a dangerous way to live because the Bible is not simply meant to be studied.
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The Bible is meant to be lived.
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There was a great illustration, a video that came out a few years ago of a little girl who was laying on the couch and her father came home.
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And her father said, did you clean your room? I told you to clean your room.
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And she said, well, I spent a lot of time meditating on your command.
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And he said, that's good.
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And she said, and I gathered some friends of mine to the house and we studied your command.
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And the father said, that's good.
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And she said, and I even learned how to say your command in Spanish so that I could share your command with other people who don't speak English.
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And the father said, that's great.
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But did you clean your room? We get so invested in wanting to know what the text says.
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We should understand that God didn't write it just to puff up our minds, but to change our lives.
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When we read the Word of God, it should change us.
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And I want to say this, not every text is as easy to apply as others.
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Sometimes the Bible is filled with directives and it's filled with things that we ought to do and ought not to do.
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But then there are times when we're reading through long narrative passages or we're reading through prophecies, there aren't any specific direct commands and it's dangerous to apply all those narratives to us because the context and the situations are different.
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And so might I say this, sometimes the application is simply this, how does this text affect how you understand God? Because let me tell you something, when you read the story of David and Goliath, you're not David, you've heard that before, you're not David.
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We often put ourselves in the role of the hero and we're not.
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If anyone's the hero, it's Jesus.
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But what does that story tell us about God? What does that story tell us about God's concern for the glory of His name and the protection of His people? There's so much that we can learn and apply.
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We just simply have to learn to observe, learn to interpret, and then apply properly.
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And the goal of all of this is what we call exegesis.
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Exegesis means to take out of the text what is there rather than eisegesis, which means to read in the text something that isn't there.
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And might I encourage you today that your goal as a Bible student is to be an exegete, a person who can read the Word of God and draw from it the nourishment that it provides without imposing yourself into the text.
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Beloved, we have been given the right to have the Word of God and in our day that right is so spread, so widespread that it's hard to even imagine the fact that our forefathers did not always have that right.
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We have a right that many in the Christian church would have given their lives to have.
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But with that great right comes a greater responsibility.
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So my encouragement to you today is that you would understand the weight of that responsibility and take seriously the call of Scripture which tells us to study to show ourselves approved unto God.
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Saint Augustine said this, the Holy Scriptures are our letters from home.
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God loved us so much that He sent His Son to be our Savior and He cared so much that we would know that that He provided us His Word to tell us that.
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What better thing could there be to invest our lives in than to become better students of the Word of God? May God encourage all of our hearts to draw closer to Christ and closer to God Himself, the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit through the study of His inspired Word.
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Let us pray.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for the opportunity to have looked at your Word today.
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I pray that the first part of this message where we broke down 2 Timothy 3.16, I pray that that was an example for the church.
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And I pray the second part where we talked about how to do Bible study, that that would be a methodology that could be employed.
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But most of all Lord, I would pray that the understanding among our people would be this, that the Word of God should never be studied just to build up our minds, but Lord to build us up in the Spirit and that we might apply the Word of God to every area of our life.
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Lord, forgive us for those areas that we keep back from you.
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Forgive us for those areas that we hold back away from you.
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Lord, forgive us for our hidden sins.
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Lord, may those sins be repented of as much as the ones that are in the light.
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And Lord, may we love your Word.
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And I pray this all in Jesus' name.
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Amen.