How To Read Your Bible

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Tonight, we're gonna talk about how to study the Bible. I think it's probably gonna go more than one week, but how to study the
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Bible, how to read the Bible. And so we're gonna look at two things. We're gonna look at motivations. What should our motivations be to read the
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Bible? Why is it important for us to read? And then how do we actually do it? And so I'm gonna try to make it so it's not too technical.
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Maybe you know everything I'm gonna say, that's great. And you can teach the class the next time. That would be perfect for me.
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And I could just sit in the back and critique, encourage. And if you're not gonna learn something new, great.
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I'm already excited that so many people would come out for the night, right? I think you're here to learn how to study the Bible better versus the ice cream sandwiches, but either way, we got you, right?
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So we're gonna look at motivations to start and then actually how to read the Bible after that.
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So let's talk about some of the motivations. I'm down here on the floor for lots of reasons. One is I wanna make it a little more interactive.
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We should be motivated to read the Bible, but why do you think we don't read the Bible? What are some of the excuses or difficulties in reading the
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Bible? Anybody? Why don't we read the Bible as much as we should? I can't fit it in my schedule. Can't fit it in my schedule, right?
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Oh, you've heard that said. Okay, so it's not for you personally. That's good. Uh -huh,
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I have a friend who struggles with reading their Bible, right? And to that, we might say what?
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People make time for things they love, right? You can figure it out. What are the other excuses maybe people have for not reading their
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Bibles? Yeah, John? I don't understand it anyway, right?
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It's difficult to read. There are difficult things. Certainly children can read some of the Bible and understand it, but some of the things are hard.
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There are hard theological concepts, imputation, right, the crediting of righteousness to someone else's account,
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Romans 5, and headship and other things. And there are hard things to take in terms of go kill all the
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Canaanites and don't let any men live, our women live, our children live, right? How holy is
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God? Some of them are hard. He's an infinite God and we're finite people tainted by sin, and so it's sometimes hard to read the
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Bible. Even the content might be hard. Yes? Okay, yeah, come on, it's one and done.
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I mean, how many times can I read the Daniel Boone book or Tarzan book? I mean, one is enough, right?
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Okay, I've already read it. Yes, Jonathan. Okay, so why would we wanna read this book and study it so much if it's written by men?
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And of course, when we say that, behind that is to err is what? Human, so humans wrote it.
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And so therefore, if there's errors, why devote ourself to this? Okay, good. Yes, Wesley.
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It's just a turn off.
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You're supposed to be engaged in that. Okay, for the sake of the audio and the visual, would you say something like this?
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Maybe lots of books we would just read, but other scholars have said this book reads us.
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And so it makes it almost harder when it's not just, oh, I'll pick and choose and I won't have to read this chapter.
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Who cares about understanding that? And so it's hard in that manner because it is this divine book that God has used humans to produce and there's inerrancy, but I agree, yes.
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It exposes that sin. Okay, that's one of the things I was driving at. It exposes our sin.
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We see ourselves, you think about James chapter one, the mirror of God's word, and you look at it, and I've said this very often, as my sight gets worse and my hearing gets worse, it's like I'll shave in the morning in the mirror in the living room.
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We have mirrors everywhere all over the house. The mirror in the bathroom, and then
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I have to go over to the mirror that I have on my dresser, that's the 10X, because when
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I'm doing this in the mirror in the bathroom, I can't see that I've missed spots until I look at the magnifying glass.
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And that's exactly what James talks about in terms of the mirror of God's word, and it exposes our sin.
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It makes us uncomfortable. And so that's one of the things we have to be careful about is, all right,
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I know I'm gonna see God and his holiness, and that means I'm gonna see myself, but the solution to all that is, for us who are
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Christians, right? We're sons and daughters adopted. God accepts our feeble works and our feeble
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Bible reading because he accepts us. And so then we're free to come and read his word.
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How about this? Do you think it's sometimes because we're lazy? We're just lazy and say, you know what?
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I just don't wanna make time for this, and I don't wanna do that. Sometimes we have bad habits.
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Can you think of anything else before we keep going? So many translations.
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It's paralysis analysis, and what am I gonna do? We're gonna talk about translations tonight too.
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Good. So yes, okay.
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That kind of ties into Ecclesiastes 12, does it not? There's so many books that are written, and even books about the
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Bible. Sometimes it's easier to read books about the Bible than it is the Bible itself. Have you ever noticed that? I notice it.
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I think, oh, I'm wanting to read that Sinclair Ferguson book or that R .C. Sproul book, and I think, well, you know what?
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I should be trying to read my Bible as well. All right, anyone else? Excuses that we have, reasons why it's hard to read the
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Bible. And by the way, don't we all love the sound of little ones?
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So I'm so thankful for that. Yes. I mean, come on, it's 2 ,000 years old.
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Some of it's 3 ,500 years old, and this kind of old, kind of patriarchal male dominance, these and thys and thous and, you know.
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Come on, the trajectory of the world is way past this troglodytish, caveman -ish, caveperson -ish.
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Are there cavepersons? So in light of all that, here's the good news.
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I know, dear congregation, you wanna study the Bible more. You wanna read the Bible more. Why would you be out on a
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Sunday night for that? And so if you have had a hard time reading the Bible and you haven't had a good habit, you haven't done the right things, does the
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Lord like repentance? Does He say, well, you know what? You haven't done a good job reading the
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Bible, and you're gonna ask my forgiveness, but you've already asked for it for probably like seven times, 70 times.
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And so therefore, you know what? Just go ahead and suffer. Is that the way our Father is? You think about the
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Heavenly Father, the Father of lights? So what we're gonna do right now to make this just as practical as anything, we all could read the
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Bible more. Is there anybody here that reads the Bible too much? It's got it memorized, down? Let's just tell some kids, if I just have a facial expression that's excited enough and go, right kids?
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If somebody is bound to raise their hand, why don't we just take a minute and why don't you just pray and say,
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Lord, I know it's your word. I'd like to read it more. Could you help me have better habits? Please forgive me for the times that I haven't, whatever you wanna say, and then
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I'll pray for us. And then we're gonna ask Him to give us motivation to study the Bible more this week.
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Okay, let's just bow our heads and ask the Lord. Father, when we ask for wisdom, you generously give it.
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When we ask for help, we think about the right man on our side, the Lord Jesus.
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And now there's help and mercy and grace in time of need when we pray. When we're anxious, we're thinking about you and your good provision.
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And when we need to study more and read more and reflect upon you and your holiness and your omnipresence and grace and kindness, you'll answer certainly.
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So I pray for these dear people here tonight. If they have good Bible study habits and they love the word and they wanna read it and they do, would you just encourage them to keep doing that?
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Give them fruit in their labors and let them see the wondrous things found in your law. And for those of us that could study more and we know we should and we're convicted about that, would you please forgive us?
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Would you motivate us to learn and to study and read? And certainly if we received a love letter from someone we were dating and we cared about, we'd read it over and over and over, our spouse or a friend or a dad or mom.
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And so we realize that this is a true gift to have the Bible in our hands.
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And would you help us to be good studiers of the word? And then like James says, to be doers of the word and not merely hearers only.
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And we ask this in Jesus name, amen. All right, motivation number one, to help you be motivated to keep reading your
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Bibles. Number one, you are blessed to be holding a Bible in your hand.
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Did you know that? What used to take a year worth of salary to buy a
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Bible, it now takes about one hour of work. That's pretty amazing to think about.
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It was a long, long time in church history before people could have their Bibles. And now we have hundreds of Bibles.
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And how many English Bible translations do you think there are? English alone, one report is 450 different English Bible translations.
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And on our phones, we have all kinds of translations and you can get Greek and Hebrew interlinears and all these other things.
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It is such a privilege to be holding the Bible. And you think about, oh, that I get to hold a
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Bible. In the old days, the only way you could get a Bible is someone would hand copy it.
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And they started off back in the days when they were trying to transmit Bible knowledge and other knowledge.
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First, they started trying to write things and engrave them on slabs of rock. And just think about how big that rock would be to bring to church every day, right?
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I wonder if we could have some kind of e -car to get us there for that. You can imagine slabs of rock.
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Remember Dan Rathbun, he plays the keyboards here. And his father came once to preach.
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His father has since gone home to be with the Lord and Dan's father is blind, was blind. And so he got up for the men's breakfast here at the church.
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And he said, normally when you go to men's breakfast or church, you bring the whole Bible. I'm sorry, I haven't brought all my
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Bible because my Bible is in Braille and it's 20 different volumes at about 10 pounds of volume.
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So he said, and he had his little notes right here on his belt. And so he said, I only brought my notes that I keep right here in my belt and one section of the
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Bible. I mean, if you had to carry around slabs and then after slabs, everybody started writing on skins, vellum, and that was very time consuming.
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And then after that, the Egyptians figured out a way to take some leaves, some papyrus, flatten them out and you're able to write on those.
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And therefore it was light and it was portable and you could carry it around. We've come a long, long way.
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In the old days, it was hard to get a Bible. Did you know it was the Pope that commissioned Jerome to make a translation of the
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Bible into Latin at 405 AD. And then strangely, the
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Roman Catholic church in 1229 says, you know what, now it's illegal for you to have a
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Bible. Why would anybody say it's illegal to have a Bible? What kind of strategy might they have for that?
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Control, right? Because now I'm the holy man, you have to come to me. We'll tell you what the Bible says you can't understand.
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You come to the church to find that. So in the old days, it was very, very hard to have a
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Bible. Did you know in the middle ages when the monasteries started copying down the
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Bibles, how many quills do you think they used every day while they were copying one
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Bible to the next? So there was no pens. There were no, what do you call those things that make notes on an iPad?
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Styluses, no styluses. You had to use quills. How many quills do you use a day if you're a scribe? 10, 50, 80, or 100?
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80. Can you imagine 80 quills a day just writing, writing, writing. And now we get to have the
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Bible in our hands. You've probably seen the videos of some of the folks overseas in communist countries where they finally get the
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Bible smuggled in. Luke showed me one the other day. And opening the boxes of Bibles, they've never had one.
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And they're rushing over to grab the Bibles and holding the Bible and thinking, this is so amazing.
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I get to have a Bible in my hand. And so all of us can have a Bible in our hand and that should motivate us to study.
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Is it important to go to church on Sunday to sit underneath the preaching of God's word? Yes. Are sacraments,
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Lord's Supper, baptism, we call them ordinances, are those important? Obviously they are.
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That's the ordinary way God moves, matures, and saves.
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But now that we have a Bible, can you think of any good reason why we would not read the Bible if we're able to read the
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Bible? Motivation number two.
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The Bible's not an ordinary book because God wrote it. In other words, we should be excited about this book because God, in fact, wrote it.
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If you take your Bible and turn to 2 Timothy 3 .16, it's a verse you all know.
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Remember this verse is set in the pastoral epistles and Paul wants to make sure
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Timothy knows he's got everything in his toolkit, right? 25 years ago, it's like I was parachuted into West Boylston, not literally.
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I should have known something was going on 25 years ago when Luke, Haley, Kim, and I were on the plane in Los Angeles to fly out one way.
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And they said, you know what? We're gonna have to have a delay. Somebody on the plane decided they don't want to go to Boston.
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And therefore we have to find their luggage because there might be a word you can't say in the airport,
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B -O -M, something else. Some of you are probably thinking
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Bomba because they have a Tarzan ripoff and his name was Bomba. Anybody remember Bomba growing up?
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You know, as the Adams family had, what's the opposite of the Adams family? The Munsters?
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So too did Tarzan have Bomba. I would not eat eggs. My grandmother said, you know what, son?
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Because I was over at grandma's house every day while mom and dad work and she said, you better eat your eggs. I'm like, I'm not eating the eggs.
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And she goes, you know who likes these scrambled eggs? Bomba. Okay, I'm eating the eggs.
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So scrambled eggs to this day are Bomba eggs. What does that have to do with anything? Nothing, I'm just bringing you to the passage.
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Second Timothy chapter three, verse 16. What do you need in your toolkit? I'm flying all the way out here.
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What do I need? Do I need degrees? Do I need psychology? Do I need this? Do I need that? Here, Timothy is going to be at Ephesus.
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Titus is gonna be at Crete. What do you need? What's in the toolkit? And what does Paul say? You know the passage.
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All scripture. What's he referring to? Be careful before you answer. Yes, Jonathan. Old Testament, anything else?
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So close. By implication, all the New Testament, right? But since this is second
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Timothy, so we've got at least all the Old Testament and first Timothy.
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All scripture is breathed out. That's the ESV, that's the original, right? God breathes out.
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It's expiration, not inspiration. And then it's profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.
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Everything you need is found in the scriptures, dear Timothy, dear Titus, dear pastor.
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And so this is not an ordinary book. Matter of fact, we know some of the Bible is extraordinary to the point that did
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God write some of the Bible with his own finger, as it were? Using language that he doesn't have a finger, right?
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This is anthropomorphic language, language that we would use to describe something. But did God write some things with his own finger?
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Yes, he did, right? The 10 words or the 10 commandments. In one sense, you can read the
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Bible in an ordinary way, right? You can look at grammar and verbs and nouns and syntax and genre.
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You can read it in an ordinary way. You can say to yourself, well, there's different cultures,
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East and West, different geography, history, language, but the
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Bible isn't just ordinary because it is a spiritual book. It is actually
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God's word. Unlike every other book, it is inspired or breathed out by God.
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And therefore we have words like this. Since God wrote it, it has authority. It has, it is sufficient.
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It is inerrant. What does inerrant mean? If you hear somebody talk about inerrancy, without error, it is infallible.
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What's infallible mean? Can't fail. Which one would be higher ranking, infallible or inerrancy?
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Are they same? Which one? Which one would guarantee it's perfection more if we had to just pick one?
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So we have, you know what? This is how you divide a church. Everybody who's inerrant over here, everybody who's infallible here.
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It's like Jesus. Remember, he healed two different people of blindness. One guy, he put the mud on their eyes, his eyes.
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Then the other guy, he didn't. And you can just imagine those two guys sitting down, talking, how did Jesus heal you? Oh, he put mud on my eyes.
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No, no, he didn't. He just spoke the words. No, no, the way you get healed by Jesus, he has to put mud on your eyes.
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No, no. So then one guy said, that's why you have a church split early on with the muddites and the anti -muddites.
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So we just, I'm trying. Infallible, there can't be a mistake.
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It can't be a mistake. It's impossible. Inerrant, there are no mistakes.
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Infallible actually is a higher word in the language of scripture, but we use inerrant more now because it was the liberals 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago that would say, you know what?
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The Bible has errors in it. So when you hear like R .C.
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Sproul and James Boyce and MacArthur and those guys who came together for the Chicago Council on Biblical Inerrancy, that was the key word to use.
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Yes, they all believed in infallibility, that's true, but the weasel word for the liberals, the code word for the liberal was errant.
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So that's why we say, of course, it's infallible, but it's inerrant. And so now you get to read a book that has no errors in it and you think it's breathed out by God.
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The Bible is not any other book. This is the book that causes growth. Turn to 1
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Thessalonians 2 .13, please. And as I'm motivated to read the Bible, do you know, it changes you.
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When you read the Bible, you should expect to be changed. Revelation 1 talks about you should expect a blessing when you read that book, but you should expect to be changed.
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Would you like to be able to say no to sin better? Yes to righteousness more? Would you like to be able to love your wives better or submit to your husbands better, et cetera, encourage one another, pray more, evangelize more?
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This book changes people. Now it might be slow, you might not notice, but you are changed from one level of glory to the next as you look at Christ Jesus and his word, 2
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Corinthians 3 .18. And now 1 Thessalonians 2 .13, and we also thank
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God constantly for this. He's writing to that church at Thessalonica, that when you receive the word of God, which you heard from us, the apostles, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you.
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One of the reasons why we should study the Bible is we should expect that it should change us and it should help us grow.
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My default is probably your default. If you're married, you want to try to change your spouse and you want to try to fix your spouse.
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There's a new book. I wanna read it before I recommend it, but it's written by a good author, Van Dyckshorn, Chad Van Dyckshorn.
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And he's got a book written with his wife on marriage. And it's something about the gospel and grace and marriages.
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And so I just was flipping through it and I thought, you know what? I'm gonna have to read this. It'd be good if Kim and I would read this together.
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It's sitting in my desk and it has an appendix. And I was zoomed straight to the appendix, how to change your spouse.
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Like this is gonna be good. And the appendix is blank. But as your spouse sits and reads the word, and I hope you encourage them to do that, you're being changed.
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As newborn babes desire the pure miracle of the word that you may thereby what?
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Grow. That's 1 Peter 2, verse two. The Bible isn't ordinary.
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It's given by divine inspiration. One of the best things you could do when you read the
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Bible is to say, Lord, would you help me understand what I read? Motivation number three.
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Did you know, dear congregation, there are Bible translations to fit every person and every stage of Christian life.
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We've got tons of Bible translations. What are the most popular translations?
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In this church is ESV in the Pew Bible. By the way,
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I think this church started in 1977 with, I think they were just started with King James.
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Then quickly they went to the NIV. Then I got here in 97 and in 98, we went to the
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New American Standard. And then five or eight years ago, we went to the ESV. But the probably the most popular translations are
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King James, New King James. Any King James readers here besides? Oh, we do.
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We all know Bob loves the King James anyways. He didn't even raise his hand. So King James, great translation.
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New King James, who's the ESV person here? Lots of ESV people. How about New American Standard?
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Okay, quite a few. And then what else? Would anybody here be the message Bible people that would be willing to admit it?
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Oh, a literal standard. Oh, sorry. Legacy. Legacy, the
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NAS updated by some of the MacArthur professors. Okay. And then some probably read the
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Broadman, Holman. You speak called Holman Standard. Now it's Christian Standard Bible, Southern Baptist.
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Okay. Pardon me? Revised Standard, right? There's Revised Standard early on.
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Then they revised that. And then there's even a newer one, New Revised Standard version. Let me talk to you a little bit about Bible translations.
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And by the way, here's something very practical. If you get yourself three
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English Bibles, you have no other Bible study tools. You're pretty much set.
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I encourage other tools. I brought two tools today. If you get these two tools, you'd be set.
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But first let's talk about Bibles. If you get a Bible, I just pick this one, ESV Study Bible, and a
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New American Standard Bible and a New King James Bible, for instance, and you use those to study, you are gonna be asking questions like this.
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Well, why does the ESV do this and the NAS do that? And it will help you. If you only had three
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Bibles, you're gonna be in good shape. The other recommendation that I have today that I think everybody should get,
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I don't even know if they sell it anymore, how expensive it is, the Wycliffe Bible Commentary.
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Wycliffe Bible Commentary. Now Wycliffe, of course, was a famous martyr. He didn't write this.
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It's just called Wycliffe. And it's written by a variety of other authors on every book of the
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Bible. And they're conservative. S. Lewis Johnson wrote 1 Corinthians Commentary.
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Gleason Archer's in here. Feinberg, Meredith Klein, and many others. The Wycliffe Bible Commentary.
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Now, if you have a question about any verse, Nahum or Ezekiel, you have some reference.
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You say, well, I don't use books. So then you could go to biblehub .com and you can pull up commentary after commentary after commentary.
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And you can look up John Gill. You can look up John Calvin, et cetera, et cetera. But if I only had a study
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Bible, this is my favorite study Bible is the ESV Study Notes. I think their notes are probably the best.
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Second is probably, in my mind, the Reformation Study Bible for notes. And third would be the
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MacArthur Study Notes. So I think this is by far the best ESV Study Notes. Great articles in the back of this.
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Great articles in the back of the Reformation Study Bible and great articles in the MacArthur Study Bible as well.
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Let me tell you a little bit about Bible translation philosophy. There's word for word.
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I mean, because remember, we're going from Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.
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There's word for word, and we call that formal equivalence. You're like, what does that mean?
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It doesn't really matter. Word for word, NAS, New King James, King James, ESV.
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They try to go word for word as close as they can. Then there's something called thought for thought.
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And we call that kind of a dynamic equivalence. That would be probably
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Holman, NIV. By the way, do you think NIV is good these days or bad these days?
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Anybody know the inside secret on NIV? So remember, NIV was pretty solid in 1984.
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And then 10 years ago, they said, let's add in some gender neutral language and a bunch of other stuff.
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And they got caught in a lie, Zondervan did. And so they backed off and said, we won't do that. So then what you do is you just wait a little bit and then nobody remembers.
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And then you jam in some of those errors into the 1984 NIV that was solid.
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But now you introduce 30 % of the cheat NIV into the NIV and publish it at the
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NIV 2011. And don't let anybody buy the 1984. Did you follow me? So anyway,
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NIV these days is difficult, but it would be called a thought for thought translation.
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So we've got word for word, thought for thought. And then we've got paraphrase like living
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Bible or the message Bible. If you're a brand new believer and you think, what should I buy? Would ESB be fine?
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King James be fine? Certainly they're fine. But if I found some brand new believer or maybe somebody from another country, do you think overseas, the new
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American standard Bible is more popular or the new international version? I can just hear
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Dick Lucas now saying, the Anglican from England, the Americans don't set the standard in anything.
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But one thought word for word is at a higher grade level. King James is at 12th grade.
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NES is about 11th. ESB is about 10th grade. NIV is about eighth grade.
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And so in the old days, we would run around a seminary students and we'd sniff out people if they had the NIV. Ooh, you're
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NIV positive, stay away. But now if you've got a Bible, I'm gonna encourage you.
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And especially if you're trying, you speak Chinese as a main language, Mandarin rather or something like that, that these new believers kind of get the flow and the thought, that's excellent.
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By matter of fact, if you read the 1984 NIV, the ESB and the new American standard or new King James with one of those three
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Bibles, it's gonna really, really help you because you're gonna see how the flow goes. You can see the particulars.
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And therefore, I'm just happy when people have a Bible. Okay, here's what we're gonna do. Turn to John chapter one, verses 12 to 13.
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My purpose in this little section is to try to get you to study more than one Bible. I purposely study the
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ESV and the NAS all week because I live in the new American standard world. That's how
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I grew up as a Christian. And I preach from the ESV. So I'm reading both all the time.
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Matter of fact, that's one of the most difficult things about public scripture reading is I see the words ESV, but my mind is defaulting to NAS.
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And so I'm not trying to give you excuses on when I make a mistake reading, but actually that happens quite a bit.
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So we're gonna go to John one, 12 and 13, the gospel of John, super important verses.
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And if you've got a translation, I want you to read a translation and I want the rest of the congregation to hear any kind of differences between translations,
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John one, 12 and 13. And this talks a lot about who believes and who's the one who causes us to be born again.
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Who's the one in charge? Is it man's will? Is it God's will? Okay, make sure we say it loudly.
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Robert, King James, please. John, it's in the
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New Testament. John one, verses 12 and 13.
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But as many as received him from the sons of God, even to them that believed on his name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
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Okay, good. Who's got ESV and could read it nice and loudly. Yes, Spencer. Who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.
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Okay, good. Does anybody have the NIV here? I won't make fun of you. Okay, you've got one, good.
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I like it that you're bold. You're brand new. You're like NIV, here we go. Is it Joe? John.
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John, okay, John. You guys know John? All right. We should always introduce ourselves.
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Hi, my name is Mike, ESV, right? Hi, my name is Spencer, New American Standard. We could put you all in little boxes right there.
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Okay, please. Which NIV do you think that is, John? Okay, let's give it a shot anyway because it'll be interesting.
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Now remember, we've gone from two word for words to now thought for thought. So it's got a better flow.
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NIV is easier to read because it's got the flow down versus sometimes you've got kind of a archaic kind of jammed in word and you go, oh,
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NAS is kind of wooden. It's literal, but it's wooden. This flow is real easy. It received him to those who believed in his name.
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He gave the right to become children of God. Children born not of natural descent nor of human decision for a husband's will but born of God.
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Okay, good. I don't know if you could hear that, but you could see. Now, just super simple tonight.
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We had one, two, three translations. And if you had those three translations and you were looking them in your study, you begin to go, oh,
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I have questions and I'm getting ahead of myself. But one of the ways you study your Bible is to ask questions, right?
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You ask questions. You say, okay, what does it say? What does it mean? Why is there a difference here?
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Why is the thought for thought a little bit different than word for word? If you simply get ESV, New King James, King James, whatever the three are, and just sit and study,
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I think it's going to really, really help as you see the similarities and notice the differences.
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All right, now let's move to how to actually read the Bible. I may forget, so I should probably say it now.
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Or let's make a strategy for tomorrow reading the Bible. What are we gonna do to read the Bible? We heard the sermon preached this morning and now we're talking about reading the
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Bible tonight. What's our strategy for tomorrow? How many people are morning people? Okay, how many people like to read it in the night?
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They're night people. Okay, here we are splitting the church again. Haves and the have nots.
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It doesn't matter if you read first thing in the morning. Your day's not extra blessed if you read. You might be thinking biblically if you read, but remember you're already blessed in Christ Jesus.
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So you're not better off if you read or worse off if you read. That's kind of this transactional
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Christianity. We're in Christ and it would be good for us to read. I like to read the Bible in the morning. What should be the strategy?
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If you normally don't read the Bible in the morning, but you want to, I want you to get up at least 10 minutes early tomorrow.
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It's only 10 minutes. Does anybody here get up at four or earlier? Okay, a couple.
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Nice, what do you do for work? Iron work. I like that.
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You're a Steelers fan? Okay, good. Or give me five minutes extra at the dinner table.
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You have all your kids there. Or stay up 10 minutes later at night.
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Let's commit that tomorrow morning by the grace of God, we're going to make sure we've got our coffee ready. The Bible's ready.
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If you don't know where the Bible is, just pretend like I'm coming over to your house as the pastor. So you put the Bible on the little front desk, just to make sure, dust it all off.
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Gary's like, ow. Make it easy. All right, let's make sure we read the
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Bible tomorrow. So now we're talking about how to read the Bible. Let's start off with what not to do. And I think it was said earlier, what not to do is just simply open it up randomly, right?
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So you open it up randomly and you think, okay, where am I? I'll just do it for fun. This is not planned.
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What does it say? This God, his way is perfect and the word of the Lord proves true.
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Wow, I'm feeling it now. Can you imagine on the night when we learn how to study the Bible? Wow. My bosom's burning,
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I'm telling you that right now. Okay, so that's bad to do. I mean, if you read the
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Bible, it was either that or nothing. Would we take it? Okay, we take it, yes. But there should be a little more planning and strategy.
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That would be a bad way to do it. Here's something that you shouldn't do. You shouldn't read too fast.
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I think what we end up doing is we think to ourselves, well, I got five chapters in.
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Is it good to read the Bible in a year? Yes. Is it good to read the Bible in a year if you just check off the list, you didn't understand what you're reading?
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No, the Bible doesn't teach us and say to us, read the word in terms of just reading it.
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He wants to have us read with understanding and to meditate and to think and to cogitate. I can think of in Nebraska cows and how many different stomachs do cows have and how long do they have to chew that cud?
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How long do you think a cow has to chew the grass? Probably a long, long time.
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I don't know. Nothing else to eat. How would you like to just eat grass all day? I have a lot of questions in life.
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How can a brown cow eat green grass, make white milk turns into yellow cheese?
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I don't know. How does that work? Do you know? I don't know.
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I don't care how much you read. I don't care unless you, as long as you understand it.
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It's not this speed reading course. When I was younger, they had the Evelyn Woodhead speed reading course or something.
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Is that what her name was? Or that was a Saturday Night Live knockoff was Evelyn Woodhead one.
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And so it's like, okay, I've got to read my Bible. I've got to read, read, read, read, read. Just to nice and slow down.
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One of the ways you can reinforce this, by the way, to understand is you read your Bible. Let's just say tomorrow, you're gonna get up and you're gonna read
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Psalm 139. That'd be good. Get up and read Psalm 139. And then when you're changing into your clothes to go to work or maybe you wake up at work and you say, you know what?
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I'm just gonna turn on my Bible app and have it read Psalm 139. That would be a good reinforcement to do this very thing.
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I don't want you to read very, very fast. What should we do when we come to the
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Bible? What not to do? Is to somehow place ourselves over the Bible. Some people
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I know, they'll never set any other book over their Bible because they want to make sure in their minds that the
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Bible's preeminent. But what we don't want to do is put ourselves over the Bible and even say things like this.
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Well, that verse to me means very, very important.
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What does the Bible say? What does Psalm 139 say? It says what it says. Well, to me,
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I think the scriptures mean that. Why is that dangerous? To me, it means such and such, right?
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Now, this is kind of a New England way to say it, but here's what we might say with a smile. What would the
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Bible mean if you were dead? Because it has its meaning, right?
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Whether we're alive or dead or anything else, what does it mean? It has a fixed meaning. Remember that bumper sticker? God said it,
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I believe it, that settles it. Do we need the center slogan? God said it.
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Somebody said to me, they said, well, you know what, have you thought about, well, there's all these visitors today and the sermon you preach is kind of, you know, maybe that wasn't a good one for visitors.
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And I thought, well, the Lord has to bring people and if they're visitors, they're visitors and I want to say hi afterwards and all that.
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But it's God's Word. It is what it is. It's living, it's active, it does its work. And our job is to just proclaim it.
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Okay, now let's talk about what to do. We have a little bit of time. What to do. Number one, think sections.
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You're gonna come to the Bible and you're gonna read your Bible and you're like, this is a big book. I mean, sometimes pretty people say it and if you don't have your
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Bible, there's a pew Bible next to you and the reading is on page 4 ,010. I mean, there's so many pages in this.
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How do I get my arm wrapped around this? So I want you to turn to the table of contents. You all have a table of contents and I'm gonna steal,
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Kim's gonna know what I'm gonna do. What do you think I'm gonna do, honey? Oh, you're not telling, okay.
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So let's go to the book of contents and when you want to read the Bible with understanding, you need to think to yourself, what section is this coming from?
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There are all kinds of different sections, all kinds of genres and we'll start off with the Old Testament and you can see your
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Old Testament in your table of contents. There are sections. Here's a section,
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and we call that what? The Torah.
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Torah means instruction, it means law. It's not all law, but it contains a lot of that law.
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There's law here and you think, okay, I can go to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, think there's a lot of law here.
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Then the next sections from Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1
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Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.
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These are called historical books. These are books of history. So we've got law and we've got history and it talks about how the 12 tribes are united and become a nation.
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Then you've got poetry. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, that's the poems.
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So when you're reading poems, remember they read differently than if it's a history or if it's law.
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Then you've got five major prophets. Major prophets just means they're bigger. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel.
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And then you've got 12 minor prophets found in Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
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So you have law, you have history, you have poetry, you have major prophets and minor prophets.
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And if you open your Bible to Proverbs 12 tomorrow, you need to be thinking this is wisdom literature.
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It's not like a promise like in Romans 8. Oh, it's guidance. It's true, but it's guidance.
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It's a proverb. So Mark Yarborough is the president of Dow Seminary and Kim and I heard him preach this summer.
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That was the conference we went to. And he's just excited and enthusiastic and everything. And he goes across the world and he does this very thing.
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And he says, you need to know what section you're reading in the Bible so it makes sense. After all, if you're reading
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Ezekiel, it's different than Genesis. And so what he would do is he started this little kind of song and he'd say, 5 -12 -5 -5 -12.
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And then he started kind of singing it and clapping it. 5 -12 -5 -5 -12, 5 -12 what?
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5 -12 -5 -5 -12. And he's clapping, 5 -12 -5 -5 -12. 5 books of Torah, 12 historical books, 5 books of poetry, 5 major prophets, 12 minor prophets.
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This huge book now is starting to get smaller. And then he did something that was brilliant. He said, you know those 12 historical books, how can
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I understand them? How can I figure out, well, where does Malachi go and where does Ezekiel go and all that?
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So he said, you go over here and you pick up these two sections of prophets, the major prophets, the 5, and the minor prophets, the 12, and you walk them over into the historical section and sprinkle them all out and you go, oh, within the historical sections of Israel as they're coming together as a nation, you have
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Malachi, you have Jonah, you have all these prophets. And so then he's like, 5 -12 -5 -5 -12.
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Okay, let's just do it, all right? 5 -12 -5 -5 -12, 5 -12 -5 -5 -12, 5 -12 -5 -5 -12, we got it.
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And you're like, hey, what's the New Testament? Oh, that's easy, it's 4 -1 -21 -1, 4 -1 -21 -1.
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Four Gospels, one Acts, 21 epistles, and one, I'm making up the song now, one revelation.
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So it's 5 -12 -5 -5 -12 and 4 -1 -21 -1. Now I got it.
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Anybody think you could do it off the top of your head? Bob, could you?
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Come on, let's see, come on. Nice, that is excellent.
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And so when we're dropping in to one of the Gospels, we're thinking, this is a certain kind of genre, a Gospel genre, and it's telling a story about who
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Jesus is. And then we're in the epistles, and it's more didactic, it's more doctrinal, it's more understanding the doctrine that undergirds it.
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And so you go and you're like, I'd like to read Jonah. Where's Jonah? Well, 5 -12 -5 -5 -12, it's in the 12, but it takes place in the history of the nation.
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And so when I learned that, I thought, that really, really helps me put things together so I don't have to say to myself, where am
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I, what's going on? I've got a language problem. I don't speak Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. I've got a cultural problem.
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I'm from the West, not from the East. I've got this problem, that problem, and I don't even know where they all go. I might as well just open up my
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Bible and just read randomly. No, no, there's a section. So you just start figuring out, and you're like, okay,
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I think I can get that. I should have said we're gonna do two parts, but you know what?
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Here's the good news about two parts. Kim calls this the Church of the Two -Part Sermon. That's not the good part.
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Double ice cream sandwiches. So we come back next time. Next time, we're gonna talk about,
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I don't know when that's gonna be because Evan's here next week. We'll talk about how to study the Bible with interpretive principles, with hermeneutics, with, okay, we're gonna look at different genres.
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We're gonna look at the poetry. How do we read poetry? Apocalyptic, how do we read that? Gospels, how do we read that?
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Just make it super simple. So when you pick up the Bible, you're not intimidated and you can study.
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By the grace of God tomorrow, I'm gonna try to get up in the morning and read my Bible. You? Okay, because the riches that are found in here,
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David said, it's better than my food. You think I'm reminded that Jesus Christ, as the song said,
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He loved me, He sought me, He bought me with His redeeming love. He loved me ere
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I knew Him and all my love is? Do Him, guilt, grace, and gratitude.
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Aren't you glad you get to go to heaven when you die, dear Christian? It's paid for. I already know what
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God's verdict is when you get to heaven. It's called Romans chapter eight, verse one. Not guilty, no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.
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Isn't it good that the Lord would say, you know what, I'm not gonna let you wait until judgment day to know what I'm gonna say.
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If you trust in Jesus who's been judged for you, you already know what I'm gonna say. Welcome, son, welcome, daughter.
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And so we wanna learn about this great God. You'll be learning about this great God in heaven. Did you know that? You think, well,
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I'm gonna be on billows of clouds in heaven. No, no, you're gonna be studying God and you'll never forget anything about God that's true.
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And you'll just worship Him and learn more and more and more forever and ever. And so we might as well get a little taste of His goodness now, right?
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You have a Bible in your hands. I trust you'll read it tomorrow. Let's pray. Father, thank you for these dear folks.