What is the Bible?

Good to see you guys.

I want to welcome everybody joining us in Overflow, joining online.

We've got a lot to do today, so let's pray and get into it.

Lord, we thank you for this day.

I thank you for uh the breath that we have in our lungs today for minds to perceive Lord your word and to think and uh Lord hearts, Lord, to receive what you would have to say to us.

Uh God, I pray that you would anoint me today by your spirit uh to be able to uh say a lot in a little bit of time.

Uh and Lord, I pray you would do something in us individually, and then do something as a collective body today, uh, as we uh ultimately want to demonstrate your body in this world for such a time as this.

We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.

Amen.

Well, thank you so much for being here today.

Uh I hope that uh you you felt the love coming in, and we hope that you'll come back and uh hopefully bring somebody with you.

Oh, I was supposed to pray for a snow day tomorrow.

I've heard.

Lord.

You know, I actually I found out that teachers like snow days more than students.

I had no idea.

When I was growing up, I thought when there was a snow day, the teachers were grieving and mourning.

I thought they thought, you know, I didn't get to live my purpose today.

It turns out the teachers are the ones, you know, praying and fasting and flushing uh ice cubes down the toilet uh and begging for a snow day.

So, Lord help uh help everybody get a snow day tomorrow.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Now the parents are like, no, no.

Okay, um, we're starting a series of messages that's gonna go 15 weeks.

Okay, we got our work cut out for us.

It's gonna be 15 weeks.

We're calling it cover to cover.

And what we're gonna uh attempt to do here, I'm gonna do the best job I possibly can at looking at the Bible in its totality.

It can be a very intimidating book to go, am I reading this right?

We try to do this all the time and and uh every week, but I really want to through this series create some foundations that we can build on, not only uh for these weeks, but really moving forward uh as we um you know read the Bible and you read the Bible for years to come.

And so uh that's what I'm gonna do today.

Today's gonna be a little bit different.

Uh normally we like open up the Bible, go to Hebrews or go somewhere in the Bible, and then we just dig in and get right down to it.

But uh today I'm actually gonna do a message and uh talk really about the Bible itself.

Um I had a friend recently, he um he has an 11-year-old son, he has three kids, but his oldest is an 11, 11-year-old boy who uh came to him and he said, Hey, I had the uh a unique encounter the other day.

He said, My son came to me and he said, Dad, what do we believe about?

And then he started asking him stuff.

And he talked about the responsibility that he felt when his son asked him that.

You know, what do you what do we?

He said, What do we, what do we believe about this X, Y, and Z thing?

And of course, you know, you can think about that as related to the Bible or related to religion or faith, but also there are a lot of, hey, what hey dad, hey mom, what do we believe about all these things?

And so he and I had a great conversation.

I was like, what was going on in your brain?

You know, what'd your brain do when he asked you that?

And he was talking about, you know, it goes, it was a pretty wild experience.

He goes, because when he asked me that, he'd never asked before, and but he had a few things he wanted to talk about.

And he said, when he did, um he goes, I wanted to answer quickly and confidently, because when your your child comes to you as the expert and they ask you a question, last thing you want to do is start beatboxing.

You know, you don't have uh uh I I I uh you know, he's like, you know, you you want to like have an answer.

Like I want to be able to answer him.

He's like, so I felt this need and this urgency to answer quickly and to answer confidently.

He's like, but he's asking me huge questions.

He goes, so I did, like I kind of gave him some answers.

He goes, but I walked away from it and I started really questioning, like, okay, I just my son, this is a crucial moment.

He just came to me and asked me some big questions.

I gave him some answers, and I'm starting to think, where did I get those answers?

You know, I got them from maybe an authority figure, maybe I got it from a parent or a pastor or somebody.

He said, and then it was like, well, how do I know where they got it from?

Like, how do I know that they know?

Uh, and so, you know, you're looking at some of these big things that are being handed down generationally, almost like an inheritance.

And of course, when you're 11 and your parents says something confidently, definitively, somebody you trust, um, you know, that's something that really becomes crystallized even in that moment in your heart.

And so we had this conversation about it, you know, and it got me thinking about parenting, it got me thinking even about this job, this responsibility I have in pastoring.

And really, when you think about it as a parent or a pastor, I don't really think it's my job or your job as a parent to give your kids all the answers.

Really, what you're trying to do is to equip them for the journey that lies ahead, right?

So if you think about like if you were to train me to go into the wilderness and not only survive but thrive, you'd have to teach me how to make a shelter, you'd have to teach me how to make a fire, how to hunt, how to fish, uh, you would have to teach me ultimately how to distinguish when I come up to a water source, what is good water that will hydrate me, and what is water that will literally make me sick, give me parasites?

Uh, what berries am I able to eat that those berries will energize me and nourish me?

And what berries do I eat that could poison me and could kill me?

You'd have to teach me about uh nature, you would have to teach me about the wildlife and what animals, how do you interact and react, and if you're being attacked, what do you do?

And all of these things in order for me to be able to survive in the journey.

And so when you think about parenting, you can't possibly tell your kid every answer.

You can't possibly tell them, you know, every path to take and everything to do.

You're equipping them with tools to be able to navigate often uh uncertainties or things they've never faced before, but so that they can survive and thrive.

And I feel like as a pastor, you know, it's my job, my responsibility to not just give you a fish every week, although I'll do my best to give you the best fish I can every week, but to teach you how to fish so that you have the equipment that you need to be able to navigate through life and to be able to navigate, frankly, through God's word, through the Bible.

So, you know, this will probably be the only week you ever come that we don't go into a specific passage, a specific text and preach it.

This is going to be a message about the Bible, okay?

Uh, by the way, on that subject, as we look at the Bible and we think about equipping and tools, I want to talk about a couple things as it relates to kind of mindset around the Bible.

I I shared this graphic uh some time ago, I don't remember how long ago, but it's worth bringing back up.

This is uh go ahead and bring up that color-coded graphic.

When you think about the Bible, all right, this this uh this graphic in one glance demonstrates some of the beautiful complexity of the Bible.

So the white line that goes across the bottom represents every single verse in the Bible.

And then you'll notice um that's the horizontal white line, the vertical lines as it goes off of the bottom of the uh horizontal line, the vertical lines represent how many times that Bible verse is referenced or cross-referenced by another verse in the Bible.

All right, so you'll see it's it's almost like when you read your Bible, you know, um, there will be like footnotes, and those footnotes, think of them like hyperlinks that aren't actually hyperlinked, but it's like, hey, this links to this other passage.

So some when you see the you know everything going back and forth there, you see how many times the Bible essentially discusses itself or talks about itself.

And that's really important because often, again, you read something by itself, uh, we have this larger document of how this fits in overall in the meta-narrative or the overall story of the Bible, but there's a lot to it.

So let me give you some math.

In the Bible, there are a little over 31,000 verses, 31,000 Bible verses.

There are over 64,000 cross references.

Okay, if at age 15 years old, you became you decided you were gonna be the most diligent Bible student ever, and you said, Look, I'm gonna study one of these hyperlinks every day, 365 days.

I'm not skipping a day.

I'm not gonna miss for Christmas, I'm not gonna miss for any holidays, birthdays, Saturdays, I'm not missing anything.

I'm gonna go every single day, I'm gonna study one of these hyperlinks, and you from age 15 to age 85 hit every day and never missed one.

You would hit about 25,000.

There are over 64,000 of these cross references.

Now, I say this not to demoralize you, to discourage you, but to give us a sense of reverence and awe and I would say respect for the complexity of the Bible.

This is why, you know, probably to the end of time, you'll have somebody that can always pull one of these 64,000 verses, they throw something up there, and they declare it to be God's word and declare it to be true, and yet it really may not, when you put it in its full context and look at it in the literary design, it may not be communicating what it appears to be communicating on the surface.

And this is why within the complexity of the Bible, you have some really simple things that are done, right?

So Jesus says, Hey, uh, all of the law and the prophets can be summed up in this.

And then he makes a concise statement.

Um, you know, you think about a picture is worth a thousand words, a story is worth 64,000 hyperlinks, a story of a prodigal son, a story of a lost sheep, uh, stories.

You know, Jesus would use uh agrarian uh metaphors because it hit them where they worked and where they lived.

And so we we have to keep this uh in mind as we navigate through the Bible.

Um uh I want to uh another thing I want to give you is I I want to encourage you as far as like equipping you for the journey to get a really good study Bible.

So when you think about the the complexity of all the cross-references, we've all been in the place where you're reading a verse, you're like, man, that feels weird, but I feel like there's more I need to know about that.

Um I've had many, many study Bibles over the years.

I want to recommend everyone get one.

And if you're not sure which one to get, I would I can't recommend this one highly enough.

This is the best personal study Bible I've ever had.

I tell you this, I don't get any money for this.

Uh, if you get it on Amazon, you get about 30 bucks.

Uh I don't have any deal with Bezos.

Uh I get no kickback, I get no percentage.

Um, in fact, what I did was I bought a bunch of these and I'm gonna give them some of them away.

So, what we're gonna do throughout the month of January, we're gonna do drawings.

And here, how do you sign up for it?

All right, here's how you sign up.

Go to if you text study Bible to 97,000.

I think I have that right.

Study Bible to 97,000.

It'll send you a link, basic information, and we're gonna we'll do a drawing.

We won't, uh, it'll be random, and then whoever gets it will either mail it to you or give it to you, but we're gonna give one of these out every single week.

I I don't I can't think of one sermon I've preached in the last five years that I didn't at least look at this.

This is an incredible resource.

The the concentration or the focus of it is cultural backgrounds.

So when you're thinking about the historical distance between today and the day the Bible was written, this often, especially when something feels weird in our context, they do an outstanding job of explaining um the differences in the cultural context and makes things make a lot more sense.

So, so you know, get in the drawing, but get one anyway.

Get one, and if you win the drawing, give it to somebody else.

Okay.

Um last thought on that.

Uh N.T.

Wright has a great quote, and he's talking about when you think about the 64,000 hyperlinks and you think about the complexity of the Bible, he says, uh go ahead and bring up this quote.

He says, I don't know that any of us will ever be able to hold all this in our minds at any one time, and that's part of the point.

You can no more read this story at one level only than you can plant a garden in a coffee cup.

The only way forward is to allow all the different ideas and levels, the clashes of meaning and misunderstanding, echo around until they produce prayer, awe, silence, and love.

And so I think when we think about pace, to take a patient approach to the Bible, that we're going to move through it and we want to move through it in the right way.

Alright?

Okay, here's what I'm gonna do in this message.

I'm gonna answer three questions as we talk about the Bible.

The first is, what is the Bible?

Uh the second is how did it come together?

And the third is how should we approach it?

Alright, so what is the Bible?

How did it come together, and how should we approach it?

Um, okay, so what is the Bible?

The Bible, uh, we would refer to it as God's Word, but how did it become God's Word?

How did it come together, these these uh all these books together?

Okay, the Bible, uh really another way to say it or to think about it, it's a library of ancient writings, 66 books in two divisions.

So you have the Old Testament, which is 39 books, the New Testament, which is 27 books, and when you think about the Old Testament, the the term Hebrew Bible or Hebrew Scriptures is synonymous with Old Testament.

So if you hear me say or somebody say, uh talk about the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew Scriptures, they're referring to the 39 books of the Old Testament.

Let's talk about how those came to be.

So again, I'm I'm gonna, this is gonna be like a semester's worth of learning in about 20 minutes.

So I'm gonna give you just the high points, and if you want to know more about this, you can uh do study on your own time, but I'm gonna give you uh kind of uh an idea of some key moments.

So go ahead and bring up that first slide, the um BC slide.

So this is before Christ.

Let's look at the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew scriptures, and some of the key moments.

So until about 1200 BC, 1300, 1200 BC, all of the um the Torah, Matthew, or I'm sorry, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these books of the Old Testament and the law and the prophets were all verbally transmitted.

So it was part of oral history.

And at about 1200 or 1300 BC, they began to write it down.

When you think about how they would document at that time, it was a very primitive way of doing it.

It was labor-intensive, it was expensive, and it was slow.

And so you're you're talking, you know, to have a scroll on papyrus.

Um, you have all of this oral history, and then, you know, Moses begins to write this stuff down.

Hey, we need to document.

And of course, you have all of the writings of Moses, and they don't want to go, well, hey, this is the only copy.

So they start this slow, laborious process of transmission.

So go ahead and bring up those dates, those uh oh, they're behind me, aren't they?

Okay, the uh they switched it up on me, this service.

Okay, so uh the 1200 to 1000 BC or the earliest written text, about 500 uh BC in the fifth century, they uh the the Torah was canonized.

When you hear canonized, think it was put into it to that group of essentially that group of 39 and was declared to be God's word.

So they the early um fathers, you know, that would got together and said, look, this isn't just Moses writing, this isn't Isaiah writing.

This was um people being moved by God.

This is God breathed, okay?

This is wisdom that's been here since before creation.

And so we're gonna compile this.

And they they canonized the Torah, which again we would call the first five books of the Old Testament.

About 200 to 100 BC, the writings, basically the rest of the Old Testament was added and canonized.

So the writings of the prophets, the poetic books, a lot of that brought together, and now you have that solidified.

So what we need to know about that is basically at the time of Jesus, it was pretty much universally accepted.

These 39 books are the Word of God.

They've been canonized and we we accept them.

In fact, you see Jesus quoting from them.

So when you when you hear Jesus say, hey, the law and the prophets, he's essentially talking about the Hebrew Bible.

Another noteworthy thing that happens here is actually the creation of the Septuagint.

Okay, the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

So think about, you know, at this time you have the nation, the Jewish people, are um mostly Greek speaking.

And so if you think about like if you have a family heritage and you came here from another country and your grandparents or great-grandparents, you know, speak the language from your home country, and yet by the time it got to you, you might understand like a few words here and there.

You don't understand it completely, you're not gonna get all the jokes, you're not fluent with it, but you understand a little bit.

That's kind of where they were at.

So they they said, look, in order for you know generations to be able to read this and to be able to understand it, we need to translate it from the original Hebrew into Greek.

And so that that's what happened with the Septuagint.

Another thing to sort of bear in mind at this point is as you know, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is being documented, it's being written down and transcribed, it wasn't accessible.

So it's not like you have a Bible on your phone or you know, I have, you know, Bible on your nightstand, or whatever that might be.

It might be a whole village has one part of the Hebrew Bible.

And so it was again, it wasn't like everybody could have it and study it and think about it and do small groups around it.

There was a tremendous limited accessibility.

So that's BC, right?

Jesus shows up, go ahead and go to the next thing.

Um, this is in A.D.

So AD 33 is when Jesus, you know, dies, resurrects, ascends, and his disciples now, the apostles, begin preaching and spreading Jesus' teaching.

So it wasn't until about 50, between 50 and 100 A.D., that now the New Testament is starting to become written down.

This is interesting, is that actually the epistles or the letters that Paul wrote were written and documented before the Gospels were written and documented.

So think about it.

They go, Jesus ascends, he goes, hey, take this to the whole world, and they begin planting churches and spreading the gospel throughout the Mediterranean rim, and they're forming communities.

And these are tremendously diverse communities.

You have Jew and Gentile together, you've got the Hebrew Bible that they're clinging to, then you've got all these uh Greco-Roman um traditions and theologies all in this, you know, melting together, conflict all over the place.

So the apostle Paul is essentially writing to them both doctrine and how to work through their conflicts, because that's the most immediate need.

When it gets toward the end of the first century, you have like these eyewitnesses, these people like John, people like Matthew, and even Peter, okay, who, again, he worked through Mark.

The gospel according to uh Peter uh Mark is really the gospel according to Peter, but you have these apostles who are eyewitnesses who are aging.

So do a little bit of math.

You have AD 33, Jesus ascends.

Um, you then have Jesus' disciples who would have been, you know, young, maybe teenagers when he met them.

John, when he writes the book of John, is probably in his 80s, right?

So these guys are getting older, they're like, we need to write this down.

We've been spreading the good news verbally, but we need to write it down.

So between 80 50, 80 100, um, they were written and the the letters and the writings were being you know passed around and viewed.

Um, during that period of time, you have this crazy phenomenon where you have tremendous persecution between you know 100 and 300, 200 years of persecution, but 200 years of the church exploding.

So the body of Christ, the you know, what we might call Christendom, there were no denominations, it was just kind of one thing.

It is exploding and growing over a couple hundred years.

And it was actually the um the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian who was destroying um these documents.

He was destroying these these New Testament documents, and because of that, it forced them to get together and go, okay, we can't protect everything.

We have to determine what is uh canonical, what is in the canon, what is God breathed, and what is just people writing.

And so they they started this process because they had to protect, preserve, and transcribe, you know, which writings were they gonna pick to do that.

So they started having these meetings uh to decide which of the New Testament books, the Gospels, the Epistles, were considered the Word of God.

So, interesting thing happens.

Now you have Constantine, who's the emperor, and he legalizes Christianity.

A lot of people think Constantine, you know, made Christianity the religion of Rome.

He didn't.

He just made it legal.

And so now we, you know, you can't persecute and kill these people.

So now they can have their councils, they can get together and meet, and now we can determine.

And by the end of the century, so 397 in the Council of Carthage, they finally recognize the 27 books of the New Testament.

So we'll call it 400 AD.

We have now confirmed the 66 books that we that were determined to be God's Word.

There was a whole criteria of how do you come up with these books.

We're not just randomly grabbing books, but I don't have time to go into all that.

You can look all that up on your own time.

Alright, are you still with me?

Alright.

So we have from Jesus to the New Testament canon.

Now we're going to go from the New Testament canon to the Reformation.

Alright?

So go ahead and bring up those next set of dates.

Okay, so a key moment here in 405 A.D.

is you have the Bible again translated into the into Latin.

So you have the Latin Vulgate from St.

Jerome writes the Latin Vulgate.

And for about a thousand years, the Latin Vulgate was considered the standard in Christianity.

Okay, so think of these dynamics.

We still don't have a printing press.

So you still don't have the Bible being accessible.

And over this really thousand-year period from the Latin Vulgate in 405 to our boy Gutenberg in 1439, creating the printing press, you have about a thousand years, and think of the cultural dynamics.

So you have a monopoly on biblical interpretation from the church.

And so in some ways, when you have everything coming from one source, there are some advantages to everybody's hearing the same thing.

In fact, in that thousand years, you're going to see a lot of the liturgies and the prayers and things that are formed that everybody is saying.

So, in a sense, there's a unity or there could be a unity.

But also what you see is an open door to power manipulation.

And so my wife and I had a chance to go to Rome this last year, and we went and saw, went to the Vatican, we went to a lot of the historical places and saw a ton of Christian art, things that were put together during that period of time.

And you see that kind of like depending on who was in power, you see that the art and the sculptures in many ways shaped people's theologies because you didn't have a Bible on your nightstand.

You didn't read it for yourself.

And so a guy like me stands up and tells you, and this is what it says in Latin, and I'm I'm I'm telling you what it says, and who are you to argue with me?

How are you going to dispute me?

You don't even have access to it.

And so a lot of the theology was was actually formulated through the art.

And so you'll see a lot of the, you know, from different eras represent different leaders, and the art has different coloring and different tone and texture, and what they're doing is teaching people, you know, what ultimately the Bible says in forming theology around the Bible.

So during that period of time, key moment is in 1054 AD, you have what's called the East-West Schism.

So up to this point, there isn't like denominations like what we think of.

There was one, we'll call it Christendom, or one, you know, group of everybody.

And at that time, as they organized themselves, as what started to happen was there was a division around some small nuance type things, but really the big issue was around the authority of the Pope.

And so when you think Pope again, we think Roman Catholic.

Up to that point, there wasn't like it wasn't one denomination, it was everybody.

And what the Eastern, what became Eastern Orthodox, so that in the schism, you have the East West, you have East Eastern Orthodox, and the West is Roman Catholic.

The Eastern Orthodox felt that the Pope was too powerful, ultimately was given too much authority, and so it was really a fight for power that caused this schism, and now you have these two uh big groups of people.

Um now you have the again, the big moment is in 1439.

This is breakthrough, game changer.

You have the printing press.

So now the Bible is becomes accessible, it becomes affordable, it starts to become translated into um you know modern vernacular, into people's uh different languages, and now it's given away, which really then leads to the Reformation.

So 1517, you have Martin Luther and the 95 Theses, right?

So, what is what does he do?

Martin Luther goes, look, we can distribute the Bible.

I'm looking at it, I'm reading it, I'm seeing that the people who have controlled it and monopolized it have abused it.

And so he comes up with 95 things that he thinks are unbiblical, 95 things he thinks are wrong.

And he, you know, history tells us he hammers them to the door of the Roman Catholic Church.

And one of the things is like indulgences, right?

Which is uh ultimately the powerful people said, if you want your sins forgiven, you have to give me money.

And you pay, and then once you give this much money, then I'll forgive your sins.

So they're using forgiveness to line their own pockets.

And he's like, that's wrong.

And so he has 95 of those things, and so that begins the process of the reformation, and so now you have the Bible being put into a more modern, understandable language, um, Bible being translated into many, many uh languages now and accessible.

You have groups that can meet together, discuss, and the dynamics are interesting because, again, now it's power to the people, and now the powerful people who have held power are fighting against that the best they can.

But then think about this now, too.

Like, in some ways, it's awesome that you print off a whole bunch of Bibles and give one to everyone, and now the family can sit around the fireplace and we can open up the Bible and read it.

But think about what we started this conversation with.

You have 64,000 hyperlinks.

We're gonna look next week as the Bible is literature and history.

Like, there are so many literary elements to the Bible, just like what we have today, where we have puns and we have nuance and we have rhyme scheme and poetry and things that you know communicate something.

If you, if you're not like who sat down in the 1600s, 1500s as they were starting to get a Bible and understood ancient Near Eastern poetry to be able to really understand what they were reading.

So you're reading it in your language, and there's a lot of good that came from that.

But there was also some bad that came from that, which was people, we'll we'll say some of them sincere, some of them might have been less than sincere, but who read things in the Bible, interpreted them, and we we say around here, good interpretation leads to good application.

Bad interpretation leads to bad application.

And so you don't even need me to go historical event by historical event, some of which were contaminated by poor interpretation that came out of the accessibility, the proliferation of the Bible.

Okay, so that's up to the uh Reformation, and then from the Reformation till now.

Okay, so now we'll start to get closer to like um our history of our country, right?

The the our colonies and you know, um ultimately our our country.

So you have the the Bible's put into English.

Uh initially the King James Bible came out in 1611, and that was in early, what's called early modern English, which was um it was like Shakespeare, would be like Shakespeare English that that it was written in.

And then over time, more translations uh begin to come out.

But what you have, and these are two, there's a lot that happens here, but I'm just gonna give you a couple key things.

In the 1730s, you have what's called the First Great Awakening.

And the First Great Awakening is essentially a revival that sweeps through the American colonies.

And again, 1776, we're going to officially become a country, you know, on the between the first and second great awakening.

So in the first great awakening, you have a guy, if you Google him, Jonathan Edwards, who was a famous revivalist.

He was somebody during the first great awakening who was traveling huge tent revivals, come to a town, throw up a tent, people come from everywhere.

He stands up and preaches, and I mean he's preaching.

He is confident, he's Yale educated, he's dead serious, he's sweaty, the room's packed, the room's quiet, and he stands up and he preaches all over the East Coast, all over New England.

He preaches a sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in 1741.

Here's some excerpts from that sermon.

Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 1741.

The bow of God's wrath is bent.

Go ahead and bring it up.

The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string.

And justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow.

And it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

Another line, another uh excerpt.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked.

His wrath toward you burns like fire.

He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.

You are, look at this line, let it hit you.

You are 10,000 times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.

That's less than 300 years ago.

You just got a Bible, you don't really understand how to read it, you don't understand the literature of it, you got 66 books, you haven't even started to understand the hyperlinks.

You come into a room, everybody's in there, a really confident guy gets up and tells you that God abhors you.

Tells you that God is disgusted by you, says, look at that serpent over there.

You are 10,000 more times more abominable in his eyes than the serpent.

And I'm assuming at some point, Jonathan Edwards, who if you Google today, there's a lot of glowing things about, and I'm not here to throw shade on the dead.

But what I am saying is that is that statement, you're sitting in that crowd, you're hearing that?

I'm assuming at some point he said something about God so loved the world that he sent his only son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life.

I'm assuming at some point he said that God made he who had no sin to become sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.

I'm assuming at some point he said that God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were sinners, he died for us.

I'm assuming at some point he tells about God, Jesus' very simple illustration about a shepherd that loved that one sheep so much, had so much value, didn't abhor it, didn't dangle it and tease it over the flame, but but had one sheep and left the 99 for the one.

Or the the illustration of the woman who swept the whole house looking for her wedding ring all night because she wasn't gonna stop till she found it.

Or the father whose son disrespected him so bad, the prodigal who left him, took half of his stuff, dishonored him deeply, and rebelled against him only to heap love and grace upon his son, to be eager to see him return and to love him unconditionally.

I'm assuming at some point he brought like the spider over the flame and then together.

Imagine what your mind is doing.

What do I believe?

And so during from that time until now, you have a lot of denominations that are created, you have a lot of different groups that are created with uh a lot of different theologies, and and and again, people who have stood up flat-footed, confident, people that have sat around church houses and school houses and and literal houses, homes where they sat around and they read the Bible.

And so, in many ways, we have to sort of get our bearings in our moment in time.

That's not very long ago, okay, that that that sort of hit.

We're talking 300 years ago, and a lot of us are downline of people that go, Dad, what do we believe about this?

Mom, what do we believe about this?

And a lot of these things are are handed down, and if you're not careful, you might end up feeding your child poison berries.

I want to help you navigate God's word better and better, and this is going to require you to approach it the right way, and it's gonna take courage provoked by faith.

That I understand that all the way back since Genesis 1, God said his creation is good, that you're made in his image, that he loves you.

And that doesn't mean you can't get into some deep stuff, and that doesn't mean that there are never consequences, and that doesn't, I'm not saying that.

I'm saying that we start from a place of confidence in the character of God.

That is faith.

I have confidence in the character of God, and that means that I'm going to have to approach the Bible, and I'm gonna give you four quick ways to approach it, and then we're gonna pray, and then we'll come back next week.

The first uh way that that I want to encourage you to approach it is patiently.

Patiently.

My wife and I did a podcast this week.

We had people call sending questions, and one of them, somebody said, Hey, I'm gonna be reading through the Bible cover to cover this year.

You have any recommendations?

And dude, I'm not here to dampen anyone's spirit around reading through the Bible.

That's beautiful, that's wonderful.

But think of what our boy N.T.

Wright said.

He said, Look, if you think you're gonna contain all this in your mind and hold it all at one time and master this, he said, you're probably not approaching it the right way any more than you could plant a whole garden in a cup of coffee.

That's not even the point.

We have to come to a place of trust and faith in the love of God that it allows us to take the proper pace and to be patient and to trust that you finishing your full Bible reading plan and getting an A plus in Bible this year doesn't make God love you anymore.

You have to operate from a place, I'm already loved and accepted, now I'm curious.

And I'm gonna get in, I'm gonna approach this the right way, which then gives you the courage to go through patiently.

The second is prayerfully, prayerfully, patiently, prayerfully.

Don't just read it academically, certainly read it academically, but read it prayerfully.

Allow the Lord to take this and to search your heart.

We study God's word, and then God's word studies us.

And so we pray, we do it prayerfully.

Uh, the the third, it starts with a C.

What was it?

No, uh is it up there?

I'm gonna bring it up, help a brother out.

Confidently, confidently.

Again, again, it comes back to again trusting that as I read through it, I'm gonna read through it, and I'm trusting the grace of God the whole time.

And then the the fourth is critically.

You hear critical, don't be critical, you're not supposed to okay.

We're not talking about mean critical.

We're talking about logical, we're talking about looking at it in the form that it was written and to be able to do that.

And when you do, in that process, you might find that there are some things that have been handed down to you about what we believe that we no longer believe.

You might learn to actually shape and reshape some thinking about God and about yourself and about the kingdom of God as you start to see the Bible in its proper context.

So do it critically, do it confidently, do it patiently, and do it prayerfully.

Next week, what we're gonna do is we're gonna begin looking at the Bible in three ways.

Is is is literature, the Bible is history, and the Bible is theology.

Let's take this journey together.

All right, let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

I thank you, God, for uh this opportunity, Lord, to uh really get to know you better.

And I thank you, Lord, that the foundation of this relationship is that you loved us first.

You loved us first, you made the first move.

You demonstrated your love to us.

And so, God, I pray that in this moment as we receive that fresh and new, for some the first time they're receiving that, they're believing that now by faith.

And for others, Lord, it's uh it's a re-reaffirming, it's a recalibrating that I'm not getting into this word because I'm afraid that you're dangling me, that you're eager to make the arrow drunk with my blood.

It's none of that, Lord.

It's it's a relationship, the healthiest, purest, most loving relationship that we've ever had.

And so in that process, Lord, your word becomes a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, and it produces prayer and awe, reverence, glory, goodness.

We praise you and thank you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.