2023-03-19 How to Study the Bible

The speaker starts by talking about their interest in fishing and how it relates to the saying "if you feed a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, if you teach a man to fish, he'll eat for life." They then discuss the importance of personal Bible study and how it is the primary driving force behind one's growth and relationship with God. They emphasize the need to study the Bible in context, understanding the author, audience, and genre of each book. They also highlight that studying the Bible does not make someone a Christian, but it is essential for living a fulfilling Christian life. The speaker encourages approaching the Bible as God's word and following his teachings rather than interpreting it based on personal preferences. Tonight, I wanted to do a little bit of something different. I know I said that last week. We're not doing the same different thing that we did last week. Here's something different again. I wanted to do something super duper practical today. Because I think, well, first of all, who likes eating fish? Someone like fish? I didn't bring fish. That's not the different thing I'm doing, I'm sorry. Who here likes fishing? OK, less people. Yeah, I do like eating fish. I used to go fishing, offer to go fishing, actually, with both grandfathers on both sides, because they were super into fishing. And I didn't care for fishing myself, especially the cleaning the fish. Wasn't into that. But I offered to go fishing with them, because they were super into it. So it was something to do with them. And on my grandfather, my mom's side, he would take us to this fishing farm place, where you could go fish. And then he'd be like, OK, see you have fun. I'm like, wait, what? Like, I was only doing this because you were interested in it. And then my other grandfather, they had a huge, huge property with a pond on it that they stocked fish. And he's like, oh, yeah, you want to go fishing? Oh, no problem. I'll take you down there. OK, I'll see you when you're done. Bye. OK, I did this just for the, but anyways, I digress. The reason I ask that is, I'm sure some of you have probably heard the expression, if you feed a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for life. And so normally, in a sense, I do a lot of feeding you fish when we do these kind of settings, when I'm preaching a sermon, that kind of thing. Today, I want to do a little bit more of teaching how to fish, so to speak. A little bit more about that. I really want to talk to you about and show you, practically, methods by which you can have your own personal Bible study at home. Now, probably some of you are already doing this. That's great. That's awesome. I'm not here to tell you that the way you're doing it is wrong. I just want to offer suggestions, tools, helps, things that can help you, things to consider as you are studying the Bible, right? Because really, ultimately, I believe that a church gathering like this is not the primary driving force behind your growth and your relationship with God. I believe it's part of it, but I actually believe it's the smaller part of it. I think that the primary driving force is going to be as you study God's Word for yourself. And we come here together, in context together, to make sure we're not going super off course in our own, like, oh, I think it means this. And we're like, we're way off in la-la land. And we can come back to something like this and get a sense of continuity and grounding as we come together along these things. But I do think that our personal development and growth in relationship with God happens all throughout the week, right? I know a person, his whole catchphrase is seize the 167. You get 168 hours in a week. You get approximately one of those hours in a church gathering like this. And so seize the 167, the idea being that, like, yeah, make it all through all of those things. So this is only a small part. And I think that the context of what we normally do when I'm preaching a sermon to you guys is I'm here to do kind of two things, you know, to encourage us to journey with God in our life and to challenge us where we may be going off course. And that's the kind of thing, you know, kind of like I'm a cheerleader or a coach telling you to give it your all. But all of that's meaningless if we don't get on the field and play the game, right? This isn't the game. This is the locker room pep talk, where then we go out and we actually live it, right? I'm sorry. I got to turn this mic down. That ringing's driving me crazy. Would you be able to? Thank you, Pat. I don't know if it's, it should be the only one that's unmuted, unless I've changed it, in which case, that's fine. Oh, you're just going to, yeah, that works, too. Perfect. Thank you, Pat. I think it's important, too, as we're talking about some of this, that we're setting a little bit of the expectations, laying a bit of a groundwork here. So we're talking about studying the Bible. First of all, I just want to mention that reading the Bible is not the same thing as studying the Bible. Those are two different things. Any more than me reading an article on penicillin makes me a doctor, right? Just merely reading the Bible is not quite the same thing. Study is vastly different from reading. It means our goal is to learn and to be changed by the information that we learn. And our goal in study is not to improve ourselves, but rather to learn who God is, based on the terms that he lays out in the Bible, and to follow his ways, based on his terms that he lays out. And I think that's a really important thing to get out of the way, because I think it's important that we understand that Christian, I've had this conversation, I feel, like half a dozen times in different ways in the past two weeks, but Christianity is neither strictly, you could apply this word in some senses, but I just want to try and draw a distinction here. It's not really a religion, worldview, or ideology. It is really none of those things, ultimately. It's meant to be a relationship, a committed relationship with God. And that distinction is very important. It's also important that you may have heard Christians before say, even the phrase, it's not about religion or it's not a religion, it's a relationship. And I appreciate, respect, and agree, and have used that phrase before. However, I think it's important that we define what that relationship is, because there are many kind of relationships that we have, right? And I think it's important that we understand that as much as Jesus is our friend, Jesus is, and we should have no fear in approaching him, I think it's also important to understand that this is not an equal relationship. This is a relationship where he is our Lord, right? And that term is not something we use a lot in modern day vernacular, but if you go to medieval vernacular, it certainly did mean something, right? It's synonymous with something like master. This is not, this is the teacher and the apprentice. This is the king and the subject, right? So I don't mean that to make us feel unimportant, or I don't mean that to make us feel oppressed or any of those kinds of things, but I think that it's important to understand that context in the relationship, because when we approach the Bible then, we understand that this is not God putting out what he thinks, and then we put out what we think, and we say, that's really cool. We agree to disagree, and I do things my way, and you do things yours. This is all or nothing. This is what he says, and the relationship is that he is our Lord, and so therefore, we take it or we leave it, right? We don't take some of it. We don't take the parts that we like, and I guarantee that there's parts that all of us don't like. I'll be honest, there's parts that I don't like. I'm going to be completely honest, but for me, it's not really about what I like. It's about what I believe, because I believe that God exists, that he is, and that I can have a relationship with him, and therefore, if that is the case, then he knows better than I do, so it really doesn't matter what I prefer or what I like, in that sense. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad. I'm just saying that that's the logical deduction for me, right, so based on his terms, so in a goal, we're not, I think, because a lot of times, we're looking for what's the moral of the story for me, right, and that's not a bad thing to do, but sometimes, it can distort our view, because the goal is not to learn about me. It's to learn about God, and we will learn about ourselves in the process, absolutely, but the goal here is we're trying to learn about God, right? If you found someone's diary, and you were snoopy enough to read it, you wouldn't be trying to learn about yourself, and you might have been like, what did they say about me? You might want to know, maybe that, but overall, the diary is not about you. It's about the person who wrote it, right? I also think that it's important that as we read it, we also kind of bear in mind that studying the Bible in and of itself doesn't make someone a Christian, but one cannot live a fulfilling Christian life without it, right, and I think that may sound surprising at first, but I think it's also quite obvious when we think about it. I've read writings from other religions and religious groups to understand their viewpoints, but I didn't agree with their viewpoints, just because I read their text doesn't mean I am now a member of their group, right? So I think that's something to understand there. I also think that we should be prayerful in this, but we have to understand that, again, this is about coming to him on his terms, right? Even in prayer, that's a conversation with God, right? But we oftentimes come at it as a conversation at God. We all know the difference between when we've been talking at someone and when we've been talking with someone. There's a big difference, right? Okay, so I got my preamble out of the way, but when we look at the Bible and when we're studying the Bible, the first thing that I want to highlight for you in the practical is studying the Bible in context. Bible verses are not nuggets of thought like a tweet on Twitter, right? They're not tiny little nuggets of thought. When we separate them up into Bible verses, and so you know, they were not originally written with verse distinctions. That's something that we added afterwards. That's not a bad thing. What those are there for is coordinates for locating a particular section, right? It's not saying that this stands alone, but it helps us find that spot, just like you have page numbers in a book and that kind of thing. I knew a Sunday school teacher who used to like calling them the address, the address of the book, like you have the address on your house, find the address kind of thing, right? So it helps us find things, but they weren't meant to necessarily be taken in just that one spot. And it's funny because the Bible is the only book I know where we do that, where we take one random spot and we're like, yeah, that must be the whole thought, right? And you know, try reading a news article halfway through and just a random paragraph, and it might be something about something entirely different. Like I remember somebody who gave an example before of saying that like, you know, take a news article and you read the middle of the news article and it says, or the end of the news article, it says that the polar bears finally made their way to Egypt and you go, that's what? That doesn't make any sense, right? It's like, yeah, read the whole article and it's about a zoo in Egypt, right? So it's important to understand context. And when we're looking at the context of anything that we study in the Bible, first, I would suggest that if you're doing personal study in the Bible, that you choose a book in the Bible. Now, I wanna outline this because not everybody knows this too, but like we tend to think of the Bible as one book because it's bound in physically in a book, right? Just like this. But I think a more accurate look at the Bible is a library that we just happen to bound, be bound into one book, right? It is a library of many books though that are in it. Another way to look at it is my mom always used to get these like Reader's Digest books that had like four books in them, like condensed. You ever see those books, right? Yeah, so kind of like that. We didn't condense them, but that there are multiple books in here, right? If you're to grab in front of you, there are Bibles in those pews. There's a blue, the blue one, not the red one, unless you just wanna randomly sing, that's a song book. But the blue one there, there's Bible. So if you grab that, you'll notice that near the beginning, much like any other book, there is a table of contents. Now I don't know exactly the blue ones that you have there, exactly how they laid out. My Bible and many Bibles have a broken up in the table of contents between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It does? Okay, great. Now the Old Testament would be similar to the Hebrew Bible, whereas the New Testament, that's just us. They don't have that part. Because that deals with Jesus and everything there specifically. So, and the reason I bring that up is as you're studying something in the Bible, if you wanna do your own personal time and study, a lot of people's approach to the first time, especially that they're looking at the Bible is, well, just like any other book, I'm gonna start at the beginning, right? I wouldn't, that's not, again, that's not the wrong, I wouldn't say that's a wrong way to go about it, but I think that you may be more confused doing it that way. Anybody here like Star Wars? Okay, one person maybe? Okay, two, okay, okay, all right. One weird thing about Star Wars is they made three movies, right? Starting in, I think it was 77, I think the first one came out, right? Then they did their original trilogy of movies, and then later, George Lucas, the creator, came and decided, I'm going to do a prequel series, right? I'm gonna do these stories that come before. That's a little more how I'd actually recommend reading the Bible, is read the second part first and then go back. It's there for good reason, but it's there, in my mind, for context, primarily. So, I usually recommend starting in the New Testament. Again, there's other ways you could do this. This is just the way that I'm suggesting that you look at it. And the two places I would personally recommend going is either choose one of the Gospels. That's Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Those are the four. And each of those is the record. I try and shy away from using the word story in this context, because when people hear that, they think, oh, it's like a made-up, little, fun, little story. Like, no, I believe this is all real, this is all true. So, I'm saying a record. And that's perhaps actually the best way to think about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's almost like reporter. And it's the account of Jesus coming here in his ministry, here. Each from four different perspectives. Not perspectives in the sense that they all had vastly different ideas. It's just if you and your four friends went to a thing and I asked each of them how that happened, they're gonna tell it slightly differently. And so, that's kind of, we're there. So, I usually recommend starting with one of those, because Christianity, I mean, it's in the name, Christ, Christian, right? It's all about him. So, it's usually the best place to start. If you don't wanna start there, then I usually recommend just choosing one of the letters. Or your Bible might say epistle. That just means letter. And I don't know why they use an additional word that sounds like apostle and makes it confusing. But that just means letter. But, and those are written to particular churches and that sort of thing. So, it's important to understand each one you, maybe you've chosen a book. You said, that sounds interesting. I've heard about this book. I wanna read that book of the Bible. That one sounds interesting. I'd like to do that one. Okay, so you've chosen your book. And I am gonna use, for the sake of example tonight, the book of James. So, if you use that table of contents, you'll be able to find James where it's found. The other thing you can do, if you're not familiar with the order of the books of the Bible, and that's okay. A lot of Bibles, I don't know about those blue ones. Probably though, most Bibles will also have in the back of the Bible, instead of a table of context, an index, which will have the books of the Bible sometimes in alphabetical order, which sometimes makes it a little easier. It does? Excellent. And the front end though is okay. Has it in alphabetical order. So, the book of James, which is another great book to start with as well. Why is it a great book to start with? It's incredibly practical. It's one of the most, it's a short book too. That's another great reason to start with it, because I'm not gonna recommend you go start with like the book of Numbers or something like that. That might be the last book of the Bible you wanna read. It's there for a reason. Don't get me wrong, it is. But, yeah, it's not the best one to start with. So, say you wanted to start with James. The book of James. So, what I recommend in helping you understand any book of the Bible is trying to find out who the human author was. I say that way because we believe that the Bible was inspired by God. We don't believe that God reached his arm out through the clouds and actually penned it himself. We believe that he inspired human authors to write those words. So, they find out who the human author is, and that's number one. So, in this case, it's James. That one's a little easy. It's in the name, right? That one makes it easy. But the specific purpose for writing the book, it's also good to understand that as well. Like, what was the audience? Who was it written to, right? Because each of these books, and I think this is something that's easy to forget, you know, multiple thousands of years later, that this was not directly written towards us. It was also written for us and for our benefit, but each of these books had an original audience in mind besides ourselves. And so, understanding that. Like, a lot of the books in the New Testament are named either after people or places. So, you'll see something like Ephesians was written to the church in Ephesus. So, that was written to a specific church that existed in a specific place with a specific congregation in mind. And so, sometimes, the writer of that letter might say some things that are hyper-specific to that congregation and to those people, mentioning people by name and stuff. Like, if I went away for a trip and I wrote a letter to you guys for here, and I said, you know, tell Kelly, I said, hey, you know? Like, it's a very specific to that congregation kind of thing. But there's still things for us, too. But it is important to understand those contexts. And the last thing to understand in any book, and these are not in a particular order, but is the genre of the book. So, as I said, this is a library. Not every book in this library is the same genre, right? And so, for example, if I look back at my contents here, books like 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles are specifically history of Israel, usually to do with the actual, the kingdom of Israel, specifically. Books like Psalms is actually more like that red book in front of you, which is a songbook, right? Psalms is the songbook of the Bible, essentially. In fact, a lot of the songs in that little red book in front of you are based on Psalms. So, Proverbs is actually probably the closest thing to that Twitter analogy that I made in the Bible. Those are short thoughts of wisdom and that kind of thing. Song of Songs, obviously a song. So, there's different things like that. Then there's also what is called prophetic books, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. Most of the last ones of the Old Testament, rather, are prophetic books. So, they were written by prophets of God, people that God was speaking to, who had a message for Israel, oftentimes involving, not exclusively, but oftentimes involving things that were going to happen in the future. In some cases, that future has already happened by now, in some of those. In some cases, it has not happened yet. And then in the New Testament, we have unique, we talked about there, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are called gospels, which just means good news, the good news of Jesus coming, right? And that's a specific genre, a very unique genre. It's the closest, this is not a totally accurate comparison, but the closest comparison that we would have in modern times is like a biography, but they didn't really write biographies the way that we think of biographies. We're very hung up on exact linear order and all that kind of thing, whereas the gospels are not necessarily all in completely linear order. You'll notice from different ones, the events are in slightly different orders, and that's not arbitrary. That's not because the authors couldn't remember the order that they happened. It's because they were trying to make a specific point because they had a specific audience in mind for each of these gospels as well. It's been said that Mark, which is the shortest gospel, so if you're looking for the quick version, the Cliff Notes, was written for busy Romans is one way I've heard it said, right, which kind of sounds like a lot of us. So that's a good way to look at it as well. So there's a specific audience in mind. Acts is a history, history of the early church, and then most of the rest of the New Testament is what we talked about before, epistles or letters, right? Letters that were written to specific churches or specific people, like 1 and 2 Timothy was written to a young pastor named Timothy that Paul was specifically speaking to that specific person, right? So James is a letter. In fact, this one's a nice, easy one to do that with because the very first verse of James says this letter is from James. So that makes it easy. We know who the author is, and we know what the genre is. This is a letter, right? And he goes on, he says, my translation's a little bit different than what you guys have in the blue book there, but a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, I am writing to the 12 tribes, Jewish believers scattered abroad, greetings. Okay, this is a perfect one for the sake of example because we know the genre, we know the author, and we know who he was writing it to. He was writing it to the 12 tribes, Jewish believers scattered abroad, right? So he was speaking to Jewish believers in Christ, so people who are Christians of a Jewish background. So that's important to understand within the context, right? Now, how many here own a physical Bible? Physical, yeah, yeah, okay. If you do not own a physical Bible and you would like to own a physical Bible, you can let me know. You could let Hannah know or Les or Kathy. We can make that happen. But if you're more of a digital person and there's nothing wrong with that too, you can use, there's a Bible app that's on I think both Android and Apple called YouVersion. I recommend that as well. You can use different translations and all that kind of stuff. You can check all kinds of stuff there. And as I said, there's nothing spiritually or morally wrong with using the Bible app or the website on your phone or your computer compared to using a physical Bible. I will say the benefit of using a physical Bible that I find for me, and particularly when I get up in the morning and I want to study something like that, it's very easy on my phone to suddenly get a text and then, okay, I'll answer that real quick and then I'll get back to reading my Bible app and then before you know it, you're going through all these notifications and where's the time gone? I've just, I've got to go now, right? And I don't have time to read. So there's no notifications that pop up when I'm reading this one, right? The battery never runs out. I never run out of signal or any of that kind of stuff. I will say the drawback is that you're not likely to have this on you at all times. I will say, if you do, that's great, more power to you. But you probably don't. What you probably do have on you at all times is your phone. So I don't see it as an either or thing. I see it as use both, right? You'll have both and sometimes I'll even, I'll Google where's that verse found and then I'll go find it here, you know? So I say use both for what they're good at. Another benefit is if you have one font size here and if anybody like me wears glasses, it's helpful to pinch and zoom. But. So, we'll actually go through a little bit of this in a minute and I wanna be conscious of time here. But I wanna, like I said, I wanna make this real practical for you. I'm gonna recommend a YouTube channel called The Bible Project. The reason that I'm recommending it is if you have trouble, if you're the kind of person that learns visually or you're the kind of person that is easily distracted or has trouble focusing or any of those kinds of things, this is really good for that. Or you're a big picture person. I am not. I am the opposite of a big picture person. I'm like, give me the next step. That's all I wanna know. But if you're a big picture person, this is great for you. So The Bible Project on YouTube and you can look up any book of the Bible. I think they have all of them now. And they'll give you an overview of what those things that we just talked about. Who's the author? Who's the audience? What's the genre? Can I put it in simple terms of an overview? So I'm just gonna read you a little bit and you can follow along in the Bible there that you have. But I'll read you a little bit from James to show you how I might go about this personally. And again, I'm not saying this is the only way that you can do it. I'm just trying to give you a practical example. So we read that first part there. He says, dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind, actually, somebody wanna hand me one of those blue ones just so that I'm not too far off of what you guys are reading. Thank you, Kelly. Okay. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. Now, if you're like me and you're a highlighter type person, I like highlighting things. I don't just do this with the Bible. I do this with pretty much every book that I own. That's one I would highlight right there. Don't do it in these ones though because you can do it with your own at home, not these ones. But if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and will be given to him. That's a really important verse right there, right? So if you feel like you're lacking wisdom, you need, there's something you need to make a decision or you need some wisdom on kind of thing, God gives generously to all without finding fault. So if you've ever felt like, well, you know, what do I know? Like I can't, whatever you think, he will give it to all without finding fault. It doesn't matter who you are. He will give it if you ask. But then he goes on, he qualifies that statement. This is what we're talking about context, right? Because maybe you asked, nothing happened. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord. He's a double-minded man, unstable in all he does, right? You know? A while back, Hannah and I went ziplining. I don't like heights, but it was a lot of fun. I would do it again. We went ziplining though, and they harness you in, right? And you're ready to jump off and go down the line, right? And if I said to them, hey, I believe, I trust that I will be safe in this harness, on this rope. But just in case, I'm not going to leave the ledge here. I'm double-minded, as they're saying here, right? I'm trying to play both sides of the fence, and I shouldn't think that I will then have the enjoyable experience of going down the zipline if I'm trying to straddle the fence and live well. So we're saying that if you ask, you must believe and not doubt because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord. He's a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. That's not a punishment, that's cause and effect. Then he goes on, the brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position, but the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wildflower. For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant. Its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business. So this is speaking in metaphorical language here now, trying to draw an analogy about those riches of this world are not forever. So blessed is the man who perseveres under trial. This is the second time now that he's talked about trial. So this is obviously important to the key point that he's saying, that's something you're looking for. If you're reading, say, one chapter a day, because I recognize that maybe you don't have time to sit down and read the entire thing in one day. If you ever get the chance to read any book of the Bible in one day, do it though. It will really change your perspective on the book and then go back. Speed read through it if you have to and then over the next few weeks, just read a chapter. Right? Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because he has stood the test. He will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. So as I said, this is the second time he talks about trial. So it's obviously something really important. This is a key thing that we'll be taking from this. When tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then after his desire has conceived, he gives birth to sin and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death. This is where we can't be, you know, blaming others for the things that go on in our own life. Well, they made me angry. So that's why I flew off the handle. You know, I try to be patient. Nope, that's on you. That's on you. They can do whatever they want. Your response is on you. Don't be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of all created. My dear brothers, take note of this. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. That's another one I would highlight. For man's anger does not bring about the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word, but does not do what it says, is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror, and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. I've totally done that before. But the man who looks intensely into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it, he will be blessed in what he does. You're saying that as we read the word, that God's word is powerful and has power to change our life, but if we're not being changed by it, we're not actually living changed, has it actually done anything to us? And this is all connected. I think at times, especially because this is being translated from another language, and if you've ever, who here ever watches foreign films or foreign TV or any of that kind of thing, just things in another language? Yeah, okay. Every once in a while you might come across something that you're like, wait a minute, it's a cultural thing, and you're like, I don't, the way that they're structuring this maybe throws you off. So sometimes as you're reading some of these things, especially as someone like me is stopping and talking every few minutes, it can feel like these ideas are unrelated, right? It's like, oh, this is all in one chapter, but it doesn't seem like they're related. These things are related, right? He talks earlier about the one who asks, he's not going to receive when he doubts, right? He's also talking about here, saying he's putting in, I don't even want to say condition, because I'm going to use Les' phrase, the premise to the promise, that there is a premise for what happens, right? There's this cause and effect. If we're reading the word, but we're not doing what it says, we're not going to get anything out of it. So if anyone considers himself religious, and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself, and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. By the world there, he just means the life outside of the Christian life, is what he's saying, right? He's not talking about the earth. He's talking about the world around them. That's what the terminology that's often used to make a distinction between the world of the believer and the world of not, right? It's interesting too, right? I use that phrase about religion versus relationship right there. This is the one time in the Bible that he talks about religion specifically, right? So, you know, the word religion is not a bad thing, kind of thing here. It's that we are called to something further. There is that aspect to it, but there is something further and deeper than that, that relationship that we live out from what we read. And this here is the key as we are studying the Bible, right? We have to think, and this is something I would suggest. I would suggest that you always, that you have your open Bible along with maybe an open notebook and an open heart, right? Open heart, open Bible, open notebook, right? I really suggest that you have a notebook or maybe if you're doing it digitally and you like the digital kind of things, you can use a notes app on your phone or anything like that. That's totally fine too. I do that all the time, but because we want to be asking ourselves what spoke to me out of that, right? Because God is speaking to us as we read. He is speaking to us through his word. This wasn't just kind of like a neat thought. It was something that he really wanted to get across to us, right? So he's speaking to us through his word. What is he trying to say to me here, right? And then we have to live that out, right? Because if it just changes, this is why I say it's not really an ideology. If it just sits there as an ideology that changes my outlook, my worldview, but has no practical implication, is there really much point to that, right? Does that really serve much of a purpose? The last part of studying the Bible that I want to recommend to you before we call it a night is taking these things and talking to other believers about these things. It's absolutely, as I said, vital to your relationship with God to be studying his word yourself as well. But I think it's also important that then we have these conversations with each other, right? We talk about lots of great things when we have dinner tonight, and that's awesome, all range of things. And I by no means want to say, stop talking about anything about the Bible or I'm going to hit you with the Bible or any nonsense like that. No, but I think that's also a great opportunity to have conversation about this. Maybe something you read during the week, you're like, yeah, I read this verse and I think it means this. I'm not really sure, it was confusing. And then maybe somebody else read it too and you guys can talk about it, you know, that kind of thing. Because there's a verse, I didn't have time to look it up, that says that basically that none of this is of private interpretation, which doesn't mean that you don't have private time with God, you absolutely should. But it means that like, I'm not going to read this and find my truth and you're going to read it and find your truth and it's all going to be different and contradictory, right? There's going to be a unified word here because God has put a unified message that he's trying to speak to us. Now, there will be individual application sometimes, right? The same truth, the individual application with the circumstances of your life. And I read that same passage, we all looked at that same passage and God probably brought certain things to mind for you, that certain verses, maybe one particular verse jumped out to you about something in your own life. You know, and if it didn't, then like, you know, don't feel bad about that or anything like that. I would encourage you to read it again when you go home. But there's an actual unity of message that's being conveyed, but how it's applied may be distinct to your own life. So I know this is a little bit different and I went on a little bit long tonight, guys, so I'm just going to pray. But I really wanted to give you guys something practical this evening. So I hope that that was practical and I hope that was helpful for some of you guys. And for some of you, that may just been total review that you've heard before and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We all need to be refreshed with those things and that kind of thing. So, but I hope that if nothing else, that whether it was the video or any of the things we said or read, that it will stir up a hunger for you to actually open God's word for yourself and see what he has to say for you. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word, the Bible, and how you speak to us through it and how we are so privileged to live in a time where we can easily access the Bible, whether through mass print media or through digital means, Lord, that we can access the Bible without any barriers, Lord. And we live in a country where it's legal and it's allowed for us to actually read the Bible where that's not the case all around the world, Lord. So we pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ in those difficult circumstances tonight, Lord, for your comfort, for your peace, for your protection over them, Lord. But we also want to acknowledge the position that we've been given, Lord, and thank you that we have this opportunity. Help us not to squander this opportunity with the information overload that our culture has for us, Lord, and put your word, your holy, precious word aside, Lord. Help us to take it, to put it into our heart, Lord, hide it in our heart, Lord, and then share it all around, Lord. Help us to learn and be changed by what we read, Lord, not just in our mind, but in our action and who we are. In Jesus' name, amen. Have a great week.