Eat this Book: How to Feast | Part 2

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Good morning, Awakening.

We're so glad you're here this morning.

My name is Christina, and I'm one of our pastors here on staff.

And y'all, I'm just so excited that I get to be with you today.

I've got my fancy blazer going on this morning, and I'm so excited I get to bring the second week of our series, Eat This Book, to us today.

Chris spoke last week.

It was fantastic.

He talked about why the Bible is important.

And if you haven't had a chance to watch it, I just highly encourage you to go back and watch it.

It's really, really excellent.

Today we're getting a little bit more specific, answering this question how do we feast?

Like the how and the why of why we should be in the Word of God every single day.

So, Church, I want to start with this.

Eat this book.

I gotta tell you, I love to eat.

Like I like I really love to eat.

It's it's my Enneagram type, it's my love language, it's my personality.

It might even be like my spiritual gift.

I absolutely love food.

And I come from a long line of people that also love food.

I have a brother, he and his wife are organic farmers, and they not only cook amazing food, but they grow it themselves.

And another one of my brothers is a chef.

I'm from a family that when we're together holidays, it's pretty common at one meal that we're discussing what we're gonna have at the next meal, right?

I don't know if any of your families do that.

We we just we really love food.

If you're a friend of mine and you go on a trip, I do want to see your pictures, but I really want to hear about the food.

Like, tell me about the sauce and really tell me about dessert.

My camera roll and my phone is full of pictures of food and recipes, although I don't, I don't really like to cook.

But food, it's a favorite of mine.

And so I really love this series, and I especially love this verse that we're gonna read through just about the word of God.

It says this in Jeremiah 15, 16.

It says, Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name.

I love this verse.

I love the imagery, I love food, and I love the word of God.

And so I love that pairing of the two of them together.

And I think the way we view the word of God, it really depends on our experiences with the word of God.

So I want to ask you this question just for starters.

When you think about the Bible, when you think about the word of God, do you imagine this?

This delight, this joy, this meal that you just like cannot wait to devour.

It's so delicious that you have to lick the plate afterwards and hope no one sees you do it, right?

Or when you think of the word of God, does it just feel a little bit more like the soggy broccoli that you had to eat when you were a kid because it was good for you, you know?

And church, there's just no judgment on where you lie within that spectrum because we all kind of have a different experience with the word of God.

But not only is it good for us, but it also sustains us.

It says in Deuteronomy 8.3, man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

This first speaks to the massive significance of the Word of God.

It is our delight, it is our joy, it is our bread, it is our survival for every single breath that we take.

And as we survive and sustain in our physical bodies with food, right?

We survive and sustain in our spiritual bodies with the nourishment from the word of God.

The word of God is our joy, it's our delight, it's our bread, it's our sustenance, and it's also powerful.

Check out this verse from Hebrews.

It says this in Hebrews 4 12, for the word of God is alive and it is active, sharper than any double-edged sword.

It penetrates even to dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow.

It judges the thoughts and the attitudes of the heart.

The word of God is alive and active.

Y'all, taking this back to our food analogy for just a second, it's like the best yogurt, right?

Like the live cultures in this food, it's better than like sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, all put together.

It's alive and it's active.

And it's so powerful.

It divides between soul and spirit.

Church, why is it that we need to be in the word every day?

Why do we need to be in the word daily?

Because the word of God is our spiritual nourishment.

It's our spiritual nourishment.

It feeds our hearts and our minds and our souls.

Without physical nourishment, our bodies, we grow weak and we fail.

And it's the same with our spiritual lives.

Church, throughout all of history, throughout all of Christian history, the word of God has fed his people, right?

Like Bibles have not always been available to people.

In different times and cultures, maybe the word of God was passed down from generation to generation through stories and songs, when people couldn't read or write or hold their book, but the word of God has fed his people for generations.

And now in our generation, when the Bible is so accessible to us and so easy to get into, we find that sometimes we're just not getting into it, right?

Sometimes we just aren't in the book the way we want to be.

But church, when we are being fed, when we are in the words of God and we are well nourished, this is when we're allowing God to speak to us.

When we're allowing our hearts and minds and souls to be transformed by the power of his spirit, we want to be in the word.

Last week, Chris shared with us this pyramid slide that I want to show with you guys again.

Um, and this is from Brett McCracken.

He's writing a book all about this, but this is like the wisdom pyramid.

So taken, kind of like the food pyramid, but with wisdom.

What we should be putting into us, right?

You see the Bible at the bottom, the church, nature and beauty, books, internet, and then we have we have a little bit of social media, a little tweets, a little bit of the other stuff on top.

Friends, last week Chris was telling us the great significance of this.

And this week I'm gonna dive a little further into this by saying this.

We are eating something.

We're eating a lot.

Am I right?

There is a lot that we are taking in every week.

And everything that we consume, we read, we watch, we listen to, everything we allow to rile up our hearts and our spirits, the things that we repeat over and over in our minds, all of that shapes our spiritual nutrition.

Some of us were very well nourished, and some of us are dealing with a little bit of malnutrition.

So here's what I want us to do is just to take a little minute to think through some of those things and see where we think we fall on the scale.

This is a no-judgment zone, people.

So I'm no way throwing stones at you or anything.

I just want you to be aware of where you are.

So here, let's start with this.

Signs of spiritual nourishment, okay?

These aren't that different than physical nourishment.

But here's the first one.

The first one is growth, right?

The first one is growth.

As we're in the word, as we're reading the word, our heart shifts towards God.

It shifts towards him.

Our values and our passions and our lives shift towards them.

Like a newborn baby, for those of you who have had babies.

I didn't realize this.

Y'all, they grow so fast.

When you give babies milk, they ground, they gain ounces.

Like I, my children were huge, but they ground pounds like so quickly, they grow.

Same with us in the word.

The second is health.

When we're in the word of God, we become spiritually healthy.

We thrive.

We grow in our awareness of like the sin in our lives.

We grow in the quickness of confessing our sin.

As we grow with Jesus, we're healthy.

We we use our time and our energy and our money in healthy ways.

We're living this abundant and beautiful life that God created for us because we're reading all about it in his book.

Okay, so we're growing and we're healthy, and then we have strength.

We have spiritual strength from the Lord.

It's an energy and endurance that comes from his word.

It's our foundation being Christ, and our power and strength coming from the truth of God's word.

What this looks like is, you know, scriptures popping into our minds when we're dealing with hardships, right?

It's it's when life gets really crummy and things are hard, and the first thing we turn to is it's the word of God or it's prayer.

Right?

That is a spiritual strength.

And because of all these things, then we crave more.

As we're growing, as we're feeling like we're thriving, then we crave more of the good stuff.

In 1 Peter 2, 2 through 3, Peter says this.

He's commanding people.

He says, like newborn babies, just like those newborn babies, church, crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.

Now that you have tasted that the Lord is good, the more we taste that the Lord is good, the more we want of the Lord.

That is spiritual nourishment.

That's what it looks like to be nourished.

Let's look at the opposite.

What does it look like to be malnourished in our faith?

And this is when we're not spending the time in God's word.

We're not making the effort or the time to be in it.

The first one is it's stagnation, right?

It's the opposite of the growth.

We're stunted.

We don't actually grow.

Our faith kind of has like a limit.

And it's not because of the Lord, it's because we're limiting the Lord.

We're limiting how he can grow us and teach us and develop us.

We're not growing into his image.

We don't get to experience the extent of his love and his care and his conviction and his wisdom because we're not listening.

So we grow stagnant.

Second, we start to get sick.

We can actually get spiritually sick.

And the symptoms of that is that our lives don't look like Jesus anymore.

We don't smell like Jesus, we don't taste like Jesus, we don't sound like Jesus, we don't act like Jesus.

When people look at us, they don't say, Wow, that's Jesus.

We get sick and our lives stop emanating the love and the law of Jesus.

And then because of that, we don't walk in freedom.

We don't walk in that abundant freedom because we become sick.

And then we get really weak.

We get spiritually weak.

We don't have the strength from the Word of God to sustain us.

And we know that life is hard.

And when we don't have that with us, it's like we're ignoring this tool and this life raft.

It's like we have an anchor or a manual or a playbook and we're just totally disregarding that.

And so because of that, life gets crummy.

And then, friends, you know what happens?

We stop craving the good spiritual milk.

And we start craving just anything.

We just crave anything to fill our bellies on this.

We don't crave the good and nourishing food.

We don't crave the goodness of God.

It makes me think of um, and this is so sad, but I think of little kids in developing countries, right?

Where they're starving, they're dealing with malnourishment.

And I'm sure you've seen these pictures of little kids sitting in the dirt just eating mud.

Just eating dirt or mud just to fill their bellies, to take away the hunger pains.

Friends, I think we do that.

When we're not filling it up with good spiritual stuff, that's when our pyramid gets all out of whack.

And we just take in anything that we can.

So we have spiritual nutrition, spiritual malnutrition.

And here's what I think is interesting.

We all know what we need.

And I've yet to meet a follower of Christ who says, like, I just don't really want to thrive.

I just, I don't really want my faith to grow, right?

I just don't really want to.

That's not the hearts we have.

And yet sometimes we find it hard.

Now, church, I know some of you, you're in your Bible, you have a routine, you have a schedule, you have something.

Maybe you've lived a long life with Jesus, and this is not an issue for you.

But for I think a lot of people in our church, this isn't necessarily a pattern or an area of their faith where they're like, I've got this.

So why?

Why is it so hard for us?

I want to kind of talk through just a couple reasons of why I think this can be hard for us.

Putting a name to a couple things, maybe it will kind of help you, and then we'll talk afterwards about like, well, then how do we do it?

All right, so why might it feel so hard to be in the Bible?

And church, the very first reason is because you have an enemy.

You have an enemy, and I have an enemy, and he wants to keep us away from God.

He wants to keep us away from the word of God because he knows how powerful it is.

And he will stop at nothing to keep us away from God.

He will cause confusion, he will cause chaos, he will cause our lives to be busy and loud and noisy, he'll put any obstacle he can in our way to keep us from the Lord and to keep us from his word.

Now I know that can sound a little bit defeating, but we will not be defeated by that.

We will just be aware of that.

We'll just be wise.

We'll just know that that's a truth, and then we're gonna combat that.

I wanna share this verse with you guys from Ephesians 6.

This is 14 through 17.

It's gonna be here.

This is the armor of God.

You might know this, you might not, but this is a powerhouse verse.

It says this stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.

Do you love that?

The foundation is peace, you guys.

In addition to all of this, you're gonna take up a shield, right?

Visualize your shield, and with it, you're gonna extinguish the arrows, the flaming arrows that are coming at you from the enemy.

Take the helmet of salvation, pop that on your head to protect it, and then you take the sword of the spirit.

The sword of the spirit.

My boys are obsessed with swords and all sorts of weapons right now.

I got a great visual on this one.

You take out your sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

Church, everything that that verse describes is defensive.

To block, right?

The only thing that is the offense is the weapon, is the word of God.

The word of God is the tool that we use in partnership with the spirit to combat the evil one.

This is so, so powerful.

So, first we have an enemy.

We acknowledged him, we know how to fight against him.

Next, church, maybe it's hard because maybe you're out of shape.

Maybe you're just out of spiritual shape.

Let's be really honest, our bodies, physical bodies get out of shape.

We can also get out of shape with our spiritual lives.

Like maybe the muscles that it uses to sit, read the Bible, and reflect on it, our muscles, they're lethargic.

Or maybe we've never even had those muscles and we don't know how to use them.

No problem.

Everyone has to do this, right?

Athletes, they gotta train.

Amazing musicians, they have to practice.

Writers, they have to write draft after draft after draft after draft.

We will not be discouraged by it being hard, right?

We will learn how to do it.

Third, it might be hard because you just need help getting started.

You just need some help, right?

The questions of like, well, what Bible do I get?

Like, I looked up Bible on Amazon, there's so many.

What Bible do I get?

Like, how?

How do I read it?

And where do I start and how much am I supposed to do?

And it can feel really confusing.

Church, we are here for you, and we have two things I want to tell you about that will help you with this.

The first is our school of faith, okay?

We have a school of faith class that is called What is the Bible?

It is three weeks.

It's led by Chris and I, one of our pastors, some other of our amazing staff, and it's three weeks teaching you history of the Bible.

How do you read it?

How do you know it's valid?

All those really important questions that I can't totally get into right now.

We want to invite you to join us on Zoom for that.

All the information is on our website, it's gonna be awesome.

And then, second, maybe you maybe you know all of that, you just need a little help getting into the word.

We're gonna do a Bible reading plan together as a church.

Starting tomorrow, February 1st, we are reading through the book of Acts and some supporting gospels as well.

And the Bible reading plan, Burger's already told us about it in announcements.

It is on our website.

It is going out tomorrow morning in an email.

Print it out, pop it in your Bible, take a picture of it, do whatever you have to do.

But there's two ways that we wanna help you get into the Word.

Maybe another obstacle is that you have kind of the wrong expectations.

Okay?

Hear me on this.

But maybe you have the wrong expectations of what it looks like to be in the Bible.

And I wanna say this: not every meal we have in our lives is memorable, but every meal we have in our lives is nourishing, right?

Physical meal, same as spiritual meal.

So for instance, the crock pot chicken that I fed my family on Monday, and you're welcome.

They did not love it, it was not memorable, it filled their bellies, right?

Same with the word of God.

Now, my best meal of my life.

I I love food, so this is hard, but the first thing that pops to my mind is this meal in Paris.

I know, I know I sound so bougie, but we visited family in Greece a couple years ago, and we got to stop in Paris on a little layover.

We went to the Eiffel Tower one day.

There's a massive heat wave in Paris.

It was so hot.

I don't want to say there was a lot of disorganization at the Eiffel Tower, but let's just say there was.

We waited in line for hours with our prepaid tickets and security and this and that, and finally we got to the top, and it was amazing.

And we were dripping in sweat and we were out of water and we were so hungry, and we realized the line to get back down would be hours long.

So we walked the stairs.

It was absolutely fantastic.

And then we get to the level where there's the restaurant, I look at my children, okay?

Five, eight, and ten, total troopers, we're all just dripping.

We're just a mess.

And I say, Steve, let me just look at the menu at the restaurant.

I'm sure it's too expensive.

You know, let me just look.

The lunch prices, they were doable.

So, y'all, best meal of my life, maybe.

Sitting in the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower.

You guys, I remember how cold the water was.

I remember the taste of the butter on the bread and the truffle raviolis I had and the chocolate.

It was phenomenal, right?

Okay, so memorable.

In the same way, reading the Bible every day.

I don't remember what I read every day, but you know, I have memories of times in my life when I sat in the Word and the Lord showed up.

When I was 15 and I felt like the world was ending, life was hard and it was struggling.

I remember crying, crying out to the Lord and the Word of God encouraging me and me hearing from the Lord.

So here's what we need to do.

We need to make sure our expectations are in line.

The word's not not gonna feel like fireworks every time we read.

It's okay.

We still eat every day.

We eat our breakfast every day, we get up, and we do life.

Same with the word of God.

There's another reason why it might be hard, and it might actually be because we're doing it wrong.

I know that sounds a little mean, but let's call it what it is.

We might actually be doing it wrong.

Isaiah 55, 10 through 11.

I love this.

It's an analogy of like rain and snow falling from heaven and nourishing the earth, and comparing that to the word of God.

And the word, God says, so is my word, like the rain is that grows up the flower, so is my word that goes out from my mouth.

It will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I desire, and it will achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

So we know there's nothing wrong with the word, but sometimes we don't quite receive it right, right?

And this is what I'm gonna say, friends, you can buy the most expensive steak, but if you don't cook it right, it's not gonna taste good.

Do you know what I'm saying?

So let's figure out the best way to consume the word.

Here's some ways that we're not, we're we really shouldn't.

Here's what it could look like to be doing it wrong.

Okay, the first one is reading it like a textbook.

I don't know if y'all have ever done this.

I remember this in college.

Reading a whole chapter, getting to the end.

I know I read every word, I have no clue.

No clue what I just read.

Okay, we don't want to read the Bible that way.

Also, we don't want to read it like an inspirational quote.

It's not just like a little feel good moment for the day, glance at a pretty little picture with a verse on it.

Oh, that's nice.

Met the quota.

Not quite, not quite enough.

And a third, we um we don't want to have it just be something on our to-do list.

You know?

We don't want it just to be something that we go check, check on our list and it's done, and we've got it.

That's not what engaging with the word of Jesus is.

We also we don't want to ever do the Bible drop.

Have you seen the Bible drop?

The Bible drop is when you go like this.

And wherever it lands, oh, that must be what I'm supposed to read.

And then we just read it.

I mean, I know we want this to be like this mythical, magical book.

But church, that's not how it was intended to be, to be read, right?

It is a book made up of so many books inside of it.

It has history and genealogy, it has psalms and poetry and proverbs and the words of Jesus.

And in the same way that we wouldn't just like walk into a library, not that we can walk into a library, but when we can walk into a library, you don't just walk in and pluck a book and just read anything, a couple a couple verses or a couple words and hope that it makes sense.

The word of God is not meant to be read that way.

Also, church, you don't want to read the Bible according to someone else's plan.

You know?

You don't want to read it according to someone else's plan.

Let me explain this to you.

We all eat differently, but we all need to eat.

Does that make sense?

When I wake up in the morning, I just want my coffee.

Don't I even want to look at food.

It doesn't even smell good to me.

But come 10 o'clock, I just really want some fried eggs.

I want three.

It's what I have every day.

Three fried eggs, I love it.

It makes me feel good.

It's so nourishing.

That's my breakfast routine.

Some of you, you might be up at five.

You might need your oatmeal and your yogurt and your fruit by 5 30 to feel good.

Right?

We eat differently.

Some of us, we wouldn't imagine having dinner if we didn't sit down at the table and have a cloth napkin.

And some of us cannot think of the last time that we sat down at a table for a meal.

We don't we just, it's just not how we do it, right?

Some of us are like, three meals a day, that's what I do.

And some of us are like, I just like to snack.

I just kind of like to have a little bit here or there.

We all eat differently, but we all need food.

It is the same with the word of God.

So if you are trying to ingest the word of God according to someone else's plan, it's not gonna feel right.

It's gonna be like me having a ham omelette at 5 a.m.

It does, it's not right.

It just doesn't work for me.

So so what does this look like?

Um, you have to figure out when are you the most awake, the most alive, the most alert?

When do you have energy to invest?

And then how do you process, right?

Some people love to read.

They can sit and read for hours the word of God.

Some people are just not readers, and I'm not dissing you.

You just five or ten minutes, and that's all you've got.

So find a way.

Let me listen then to the word of God too.

Let me, you know, figure out what it is.

Some of us love to journal, some of us don't.

You have to cater your walk with Jesus and cater your time in the word to when it's best for you, when you can show up and when you can receive.

Your time in the word looks different based on who you are, how you were wired, the life stage you are in, right?

For instance, we have families in our church with tiny kids.

You guys don't might not know this.

We've had 16 babies during COVID, either born or about ready to be born.

We have a lot of tired people, right?

If you're in that season of life, you're exhausted day and night, it's hard.

To find time in the word.

I have a sweet girlfriend who has like a million children.

And I remember her saying that the way she received the word when her kids were just tiny and she was exhausted was that when she would go to a mama's group and other people talked about the word, she would receive it that way.

That works.

That works.

There are seasons of life.

Maybe you're working the night shift.

And it just it's trickier.

Maybe you're dealing with some physical health concerns or maybe some mental illness problems that are exhausting you.

Your life season affects the way you're in the word.

And Church, so here's what I'm gonna ask you to do.

Instead of saying as an excuse, I just can't.

I just can't right now.

The question is, then how am I ingesting the word?

Right?

Because when we get busy, we don't stop eating food.

We just do it in a way that works different.

I'm working the night shift, I'm exhausted.

I get it.

So how are you ingesting the word?

Can you listen to a sermon?

Can you what can you do that works for you?

Does it have to be the morning?

The famous question.

I always have felt like real spiritual people, like the real spiritual people, they get up and they read in the morning.

You know what I'm saying?

And Psalms talked about this.

The Bible talks about this in a few different places.

Like Psalm 119 says, I rise before the dawn and I cry for help.

I have put my hope in your word.

So here's the thing about mornings, friends.

Our mornings set a tone for our day, right?

I am not gonna be one that does deep Bible study in the morning because my brain is not alert in the morning.

It's not my time to study.

But to start the day with a verse or two before you see and get bombarded with the stuff of your day, it's an awesome way to set your hearts and minds on things above, right?

From our 21 days of prayer.

It's a wonderful way to start your day.

Just like the food you eat first thing in the morning nourishes your body, what you put into your mind spiritually also nourishes you.

Friends, another reason why it might be hard to get in the word is because life's really hard.

And right now, life is really hard.

And one thing we've been hearing as a staff, we, you know, we chat about how people in our church are doing and always keeping in anonymous and honoring and respecting people, but we're just hearing this trend.

People are saying, I'm exhausted.

I'm just so worn out, I'm feeling so discouraged.

And it feels like almost too much to even just pray or to just get into the word.

It just feels overwhelming to me.

And here's what I want to say, church.

It's okay to not be okay, right?

Ryan said it a couple weeks ago in his message, and it was so powerful to be reminded.

It's okay to not be okay, but don't do it alone, right?

This is the time that you need to lean into community.

Borrow from the community the strength that you need.

Bearing each other's burdens is what God has told us to do.

And I love this analogy.

Actually, Roland, our youth director, gave this to me yesterday, but he said, the word of God, maybe it's like a family meal.

And sometimes you cook the food, and sometimes you set the table, and sometimes you serve the food, and sometimes you need someone to like carry you and place you at the table and put the fork in your mouth, right?

That's just how it is.

So we want to lean into the power of our community.

Felicia's gonna get into this a little bit more next week, church.

So those are some of the ways that why we're not in the word, some of the things that are hard.

Here's what we wanna do now.

We want to shift to what we can be doing within the season of life we're in, within all of the things, how can we be in the word of God?

And you guys, I wanna go to Psalm 119 for this.

Psalm 119 was written by Ezra, who was a priest.

It is the longest psalm in the whole book of Psalms.

It's also the longest chapter in the whole Bible.

And the focus of Psalm 119, it's all about the Word of God.

Almost every single verse talks about the Word of God.

Psalm 119 is it's divided into 22 different sections, you guys, and I just think this is so cool.

But each section has a corresponding letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and then the first verse of that section also starts with that same letter of the alphabet.

I mean, Ezra took so much time to create a beautiful psalm that people would recite and read to each other and memorize it, and I think this is a perfect place for us to go as we look at how do we get into the word?

Like, how do we know more about the word of God?

So we're gonna start with Psalm 119, 9.

How can a young man keep his way pure by living according to your word?

I seek you with all my heart.

Do not let me stray from your commands.

Friends, the first way that we can learn from Psalm 119 to engage with the word of God is that we pray the word of God.

We pray the word of God.

I love this, this cry of Ezra.

He's saying, Lord, I seek you.

I seek you with all of my heart.

This is his prayer to him.

Do not let me stray from your command.

Can you just hear him pouring that out to the Lord?

Lord, don't let me stray from you, fully seeking and searching and begging the Lord to keep his hands on him and to guide him on his path.

From the depths of our hearts, we pray.

Prayers come from the deepest part of us.

And sometimes those deepest parts, we don't even have words.

We don't even have words.

The Bible has the words.

The Psalms is full of beautiful prayers of lament, of grief, of even anger towards the Lord, and the beautiful Psalms of rejoicing and gratitude and thankfulness.

Friends, sometimes we just pray the word of God.

I say our prayer life and our word life are so interconnected and they're so beautiful.

The second way that we engage with the word of God is to study the scripture.

He goes on in verse 11 and 12 and he says this, I have hidden your words in my heart that I might not sin against you.

Praise be to you, Lord.

Teach me your decrees.

I love this.

I've hidden your word in my heart.

Friends, he knows the word so well.

He's put it in his mind, he's ingested it, it's in transformed his heart, it's hidden in his heart.

So he will not fall away from Jesus.

And then he says, Praise be to you, Lord.

And he says, Teach me your decrees.

This attitude, this heart of teachability, this desire to know the Lord.

Because, church, to fully understand a digestive scripture, we need to study it.

To know it so well that it can be hidden in our heart and to have the same posture of Ezra of like, Lord, just teach me.

I want to follow after you.

Sometimes to study the word, we might need some additional tools or we might need to learn how to study the word.

This is one of the things that the School of Faith class will be amazing for.

But one thing I love for studying the word, friends, this is my study Bible.

And if you don't have a study Bible, I just really encourage you to look into getting one.

Whether it's NIV or ESV, I use the Life application.

I've had this one for years.

But here's what's different about a study Bible over other Bibles.

The bottom part of it has notes that correspond with your verses.

So as I read this verse, and I'm like, well, what is he saying?

What does that mean?

The note on the bottom, it's gonna give you some historical context.

It's gonna help understand some of the language.

It might even throw you to another place in the Bible, like a cross-reference to help you understand.

Like maybe it's it's some a prophecy that's being fulfilled from the Old Testament, or maybe it's the same story that actually was told in another book, and you can understand more.

If you want to study the Bible, sometimes you need to get the right tools for it.

You know, one thing that we do here often, and you if you've been around, you've heard this before, you also get this in the class, but one way to study the Bible is the soap method.

I don't know if you've heard of this, I'm gonna throw it up here really quickly, but before I study the Word of God, you guys, I always pray first.

I always just say, Lord, I'm coming before you.

Please help me have knowledge and insight, please.

And then soap is this scripture.

You read it, you reread it, maybe you read it a third time, then you observe it.

The who, what, where, why, what is this genre I'm reading?

Am I reading poetry or am I reading instructions on how to live life?

It's very important.

And then the application process, when you ask yourself, what is this telling me to do?

What is this telling me about God?

How do I apply this directly to me?

And I want to just spend a second on this because application is so important.

Because, church, we don't want to read and then turn and forget, right?

We want the word of God to transform our lives.

I know I said earlier that if you're not a journaler, you have like, okay, don't you don't have to worry about journaling, right?

Some people love it.

But here's what I do think there needs to be a process by which we study and we apply, and then we remember what we apply.

For some people it's journaling, for other people it's other things.

But here's my question for you is when you need to remember something in life, like to get shampoo at Target, to pay a bill, to walk the dog, I don't know, what do you do to remember it?

Do you pop it in your planner?

Do you set a notification on your phone?

Do you put it into your calendar?

Like what do you do?

Do you write it on a post-it note?

Whatever it is that you do, church, I encourage you to do that with the word of God.

If it's posting stuff visibly in your house, if it's putting it in your phone, use your applications from scripture to transform your life so you don't just walk away and forget what you've done.

And then last is prayer.

And this is when you just say, Lord, please, please cement this in my heart.

Please help me.

Maybe you've read something that's just so challenging.

And you're like, Lord, there's just, there's no way I can do this.

Prayer is your time that you're like, Lord, help me.

Help me.

I don't know how to do this.

This is also where you say, Lord, maybe I'm, I don't understand what I've read.

Taking it back to the Lord.

So we pray the word, we study the word, and the next we memorize the word.

This is verses 13 and 14.

And Ezra says, With my lips I recount all the laws that come from my mouth.

I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.

With my lips I recount.

I know these things.

I know it so well because I've memorized it.

A line that Ryan has said so much through the years that I have like ground into my head is this meditation is for transformation, whereas memorization is for preparation.

We memorize scripture to prepare for life because life happens.

Am I right?

There are a few verses from my childhood that I memorize that just pop in my head right away.

Like uh Philippians 4, 6 through 7, do not be anxious for anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God.

And the peace of God that transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Friends, I've returned to that over and over and over and over.

Romans 8, 38 and 39, right?

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, no height, nor depth, nor anything else created will be able to separate me from the love of Christ, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Friends, I think I was 11 when I memorized both of those verses.

They are just in me, and I return to them because I've memorized them.

I hope the same for you.

Our staff memorizes verses, our protest memorize verses.

It's something that we do because it helps prepare us for life.

Next is meditation.

In verse 15, Ezra says, I meditate on your precepts and I consider your ways.

I meditate.

Spiritual meditation when it comes to the Bible is a little different than maybe what you've heard in meditation in other places.

In other places, I've heard meditation, it's more, it's like freeing your mind.

It's having an empty mind and sitting in that beautiful emptiness, right?

But when we meditate on the word of God, it's actually filling our minds.

It's reading a passage or something and chewing on it and chewing on it and praying on it.

That's the meditation.

And meditation is for transformation, right?

As we sit in a passage for a long time, kind of like our reset when we did our 21 days of prayer in January as a church, we sat in this passage for a whole month and we looked at it from this way and that way, and we prayed it and we applied it.

That's meditating on the scripture to get it deep into you.

And then lastly, church, we pray it, we study it, we memorize it, we meditate on it.

And last is we preach it.

And in verse 16, Ezra says, I delight in your decrees.

I will not neglect your word.

There's three ways we preach scripture.

The first is we sit underneath the preaching.

We sit underneath the preaching and the teaching of scripture.

And this is not just anyone that has something to say about something, right?

These are people that are trusted people in our lives that we believe are teaching the truth of God.

And we sit under that.

That could be sermons, that can be podcasts, that can be other people, their take on scripture that we listen to, right?

But that's not enough, right?

We don't just eat once a week.

We don't just eat Sunday morning and then, like, okay, we'll just be hungry all week, right?

Nope.

We got to get into it to ourselves.

Church, we preach the word to ourselves.

We preach the scripture to ourselves.

We read the word and then we speak it into our hearts and our minds throughout the day.

Today, the word that just kept coming back to me was I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

It was a day that felt rough, and I kept just being like, nope, Christina, no, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Lord Jesus, please be with me.

You preach the word to yourself until you believe it.

And then last friends, we preach the scripture with our lives.

We preach scripture with our lives.

Our understanding and our digestion of the word affects how we live and it affects what our lives look like.

Our lives become a beautiful sermon for the Lord when we are in the word.

And I I love when he says, I will not neglect your word.

He's saying, I won't forget what I've read, I will do it.

And my life is going to preach the good news of God because of that.

Church, that's just a few ways to pray.

Pray the scripture, study the scripture, memorize and meditate and preach the scripture.

Church, I recognize that the season we're in right now feels rough for a lot of people.

There's a lot of hope in 2021.

There's still a lot of people that are hurting and that are suffering.

And you know, as as a staff, we sat, a few of us to brainstorm this series.

Like, what does our church need right now?

And what we just keep coming back to is we we need the word of God.

We need our people to be in the word.

We need people to be developing their relationship by Jesus.

We need people to hear truth.

There's so much noise.

We need to hear truth.

So I want to leave you with this verse.

When life feels confusing, when it feels dark, when we feel like we're grieving and hitting obstacles just at every corner, I leave you with this verse.

This is Psalm 119, 105.

And it says this your word is a lamp for my feet and a light to my path.

Your word is a lamp for my feet.

So that as I'm going through life, I'm not stumbling and tripping and falling flat on my face.

It's a light to my path, the word of God lighting up our pathway so that we can see which way to go.

Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 tells us, trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Lean not on your own understanding.

In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will direct your path.

Friends, if you're needing direction, if you're needing hope, if you're needing light, if the world is feeling dark and confusing and noisy, may I suggest the word of God daily in your life.

Please pray with me.

Lord Jesus, it is my prayer for my brothers and sisters in our church that we are a people of the word.

Lord God, would you put inside each of us a hunger?

A hunger for your word.

That no dirt, that no mud, that no anything else other than you would satisfy.

And God, will you make us a people that eagerly search after you?

Thank you, Jesus.

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