There Is a Wrong Way to Read the Bible // Noah Schutte

Well good morning, church.

My name is Noah, my wife Abby and I.

We serve on the eldership team here at 614 Church.

And it is it is so good to be with you.

We've we've last week we were in Worthington, which God is doing amazing stuff there at the Worthington site.

And two weeks ago I kind of snuck in and out.

So it's been a little bit of a minute, but that was because our son was born about two weeks ago.

Little Isaac, he is amazing.

Here's some pictures of him, beautiful boy.

If you have a younger sister, your parents did put you in pink, fellas.

I'm sorry to inform you.

Baby clothes are expensive and they wear them for like six days when they're first born.

And that's my daughter Asa.

They're incredible.

He was nine and a half pounds.

Yeah.

And uh so my wife is a superhero, is what that means.

Um yeah.

Um she's amazing, feeding him in the back.

Hi, babe.

Um but yeah, so that's that's our family.

Um and it's it again, it's so so amazing to get to raise them in a church that loves Jesus and loves people.

Um but if you're new with us here today, we've we've been going through the Old Testament this year, learning um about what God's word and how it points us to Jesus.

And so we started in in the first part of the year looking at the very first couple chapters of Genesis, and then we spent uh the next part of the year looking at the patriarch, so going from Abraham all the way to when King Solomon was crowned.

Then we looked at the era of the kings, where we where the we see the nation of Israel gets established, but then there's this slow decline as they separate themselves from God, and that ultimately ends in them being exiled out of the promised land, into Babylon, into Persia, and we see that now there's this story of God drawing his people back in this hope of the Savior to come.

So, this series we in work we're in calling it the era of waiting, which is gonna end with Advent and the coming of Christ.

So, spoiler alert, um, but that's what we're waiting for.

Um and so we've seen two weeks ago we learned about how King Cyrus, this foreign king, was stirred by God to send the Jews back to rebuild the temple.

And then last week uh David preached about Nehemiah, who built the walls of Jerusalem and established God's kingdom amongst his people once again.

But in the midst of all this building that's going on, we see a lot of injustice and unrighteousness is still uh uh breaking out amongst the people, even though they're being drawn back to the promised land.

We see that they're marrying foreign women, which was they were they weren't supposed to do.

They were supposed to be a set-apart nation from all the other nations.

And we see that the the nobles and the rich people amongst them were charging interest on the loans they were giving to the people, which is another thing they weren't supposed to do.

So people were falling into kind of financial distress.

And and this shows us that you can have a place of worship, you can have this personal worship in your life, and you can even be building the kingdom, doing things in your life, but you still need the truth of God in your life.

You you still need a foundation for what is good in your life, what you ought to do.

It's not good enough to just be doing things and worshiping.

There also needs to be truth in your life.

And and so what is truth?

When I say that word, what what comes to mind?

It's what's real, what actually happened, what is right.

And and there's a couple of different ways that we we go about answering this question day to day.

Maybe you don't think about it a lot, um, and it's just kind of in the back of your mind, or maybe it's something that you think about all the time, but the most common thing we do is we just look at people we trust, maybe our family or maybe our favorite influencer online, and we say whatever they think is true, I'll think is true.

Right?

This is very common.

And and but this this this is pretty good for most of the time, but it breaks down as it's not actually a way we can decide what's true.

Think about things that have been widely accepted but were flatly wrong.

For example, there was people at one point thought if you tried to sail to America, you'd just fall off the edge of the earth.

You would just like you that wasn't possible.

Or for about a half century, lobotomies were like standard medical practice in our country.

That's where you just like scramble up someone's brain to make them feel better.

Um or or think about that the fact that the practice of slavery was common practice across nationalities, across d across countries worldwide for thousands of years.

It was just, yeah, if you're weak, you're gonna get enslaved by someone else, and that's just how it is.

Nowadays, all those things are are ludicrous, which which means probably that there's things we believe that are just as ludicrous.

Um we can't just trust what other people to tell say as truth.

So, but maybe if we can't trust tradition, maybe we can trust ourselves.

Maybe our own cleverness, our own rational thinking, our own experimentation could could lead us to truth.

And this was the thinking of the Enlightenment, uh, that where a scientific process and reasoning could bring us to a greater understanding of truth.

And I love reasoning.

I love science.

They they are great at answering questions of substance and and of process, like what's what makes up a water molecule?

Or how how many how many zebras are in the world?

You know, like stuff like that.

How does the human heart pump blood through our body?

But it it those things cannot answer the questions of meaning and of purpose, like why am I here?

Why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people?

Or or where did I come from?

Those are those are questions that are not going to be found under a microscope.

They're not gonna be found at the end of a logical syllogism, but they're the questions that we get faced with every day.

Is who am I?

What who am I supposed to be?

What am I supposed to do?

And it makes me think about this this illustration of imagine you were you were trying to learn about Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, but all you had was a Ford F-150 to learn about him.

You wouldn't know hardly anything about him.

Maybe you'd get his last name, but you wouldn't know who his wife is, who his kids are, where he went to school.

You would know nothing about him, even if you fully understood what he created.

Right?

You would you would be totally oblivious to what he is like.

So if we can't trust others and we can't trust ourselves to find out what truth is, maybe there is no truth ultimately.

And this is the trend of postmodernism in our modern time where people kind of reject the the notion of some greater truth, some greater story that's going on, and just say, hey, maybe we're just here by accident.

Maybe we're just molecules bumping into each other, and there's no real purpose for why we're here.

There's no real truth.

But you see, if that's the case, there's no such thing as right or wrong or meaning or purpose or love or connection.

Those are just reactions that have come about in total randomness and total meaninglessness.

You see, the ultimate, no ultimate truth is this bait and switch where it draws us in with freedom and inclusion, but leaves us with a life of meaninglessness and despair when we realize the logical conclusion of no ultimate truth.

So if there has to be logical truth and we can't trust others and we can't trust ourselves, what are we to do?

But if I go back to my Henry Ford illustration and imagine that as you're studying the car to try and figure out something about his life, you open the glove box, and in there is a handwritten letter from Henry Ford himself, explaining to you who he is, who his wife is, who his kids are, where he went to school, what he's like.

You see, now you can learn something about him because he chose to write himself into his creation.

And this is what we believe that the God of the universe has done.

He made you in this world incredibly intricate in a way that you could understand it and learn about it, but he also wrote himself into the story in a way that you could know him and know who he made you to be.

See, when we talk about the importance of the word of God, we we we truly mean it.

Without it, there is no established bedrock for the life that we live.

We are just kind of floating.

We don't have anything to build on when it comes to our meaning, our purpose, our morality.

And so if we don't have that, we're ultimately shaky in everything that we do.

But many people they live very nice lives, very, very functional lives, lives where they have a good impact on the world, but it's it's usually can be based on biblical values without the God of the Bible.

You know, we we want we want the morality of the Bible.

We want the meaning and the purpose that the Bible gives to every person, but we don't want the God that wrote it.

Right?

And this is ultimately where our Western secular culture has really brought from, is it started out as a Christian culture that that built up things like human rights and freedoms and all these things, but now the God that it was all based on is being largely forgotten.

And so we find people that if they have this very nice life, but it's on a foundation of sand.

It's shaky, there's no basis for what they actually believe.

And I hope today we can establish in our lives that we are built on a firm foundation.

And the man we're gonna learn from today, his name is Ezra.

Ezra was a man who understood the foundational nature of the word of God.

And so I know when you guys hear about Ezra, you probably think about the very handsome videographer that's a part of our church, as do I.

Um, but that's not who I'm talking about today.

Today I'm talking about a scribe and a priest who was uh in exile in Babylon and who was sent back uh to read the Word of God to the people.

And his role is laid out in Ezra 7.10.

It says this for Ezra had set in his heart to study the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach its statutes and rules in Israel.

He wants to learn what the law says, he wants to apply it in his own life, and then help others do the same.

So I hope that after today we can all take that calling upon ourselves and do it in our lives.

And so my main point is this reading the Word of God properly is essential to an abundant life with God.

The key word there is properly.

It is, there are many ways to read the word of God, but we must do it properly.

Firstly, we must revere the Word of God.

We must approach the Word of God with a proper posture to allow it to transform us.

We're gonna be in Nehemiah 8 today as our main scripture, and I'm I'm gonna skip to chap uh verse 4 because the first three verses are kind of like a summary of everything going on, and I want to go chronologically.

But I'll give you a second to flip to Nehemiah.

Sean's already there.

Look at this.

You are you're you're slick, man.

You're slick.

Nehemiah chapter 8, verse 4 through 6.

Nehemiah 8:4–6

And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that he had made for the purpose, and beside him stood Matalithia, Shema, Enaya, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Masaia on his right hand, and Padiah, Mishel, Malchikjah, Hashum, Hashbadanah, Zechariah, and Meshulam on his left hand.

Those were perfect pronunciations, so make sure you're writing those down.

Um we'll keep going.

And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people, and as he opened it, all the people stood, and Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, amen.

Lifting up their hands, they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.

So this is before the Word of God is read, and we see that the proper posture to receive it is communal worship.

So they build a wooden platform so that the word of God could be heard and seen by all, and literally raised above everybody else.

Next we see that there's these 13 community leaders that stand on Ezra's side to show that this isn't just his idea, but it's the entire community coming together to sit under the word of God.

And finally we see that worship breaks out amongst the people.

They lift their hands, they bow down.

And the English says they worshiped, but in the Hebrew that literally means they laid on their face.

Right?

There was this physical response in order to worship God, to be able to prepare their hearts to receive his word.

And I hope you can see that this is literally what we do every Sunday morning.

We built a wooden platform.

That was good.

Nice, nice job.

We we come together and we we bless the Lord and we all come in agreement and we we lift our hands and we we we kneel.

This isn't just good ideas that we've come up with.

This is a biblical pattern of what it looks like to receive the word of God.

And so I'm not saying this that we should just have blind faith in the Bible, right?

Like you, I'm just gonna, you have to believe it because I'm saying it.

You may not know anything about me.

I'm this that's another sermon for why we believe this is the word of God, but I'm I'm speaking to Christians who are trying to follow Jesus.

In order for the Bible to be able to shape you, we have to get to the point where we revere it in a way that we see it as the word of God.

Because if not, we're just we're not going to lie, it's not going to transform us.

It's going to be one voice in our life rather than the voice in our life.

Does that make sense?

So if you're if you're here and you have doubts about the scriptures, I'm not just trying to tell you to silence them.

Get those doubts answered, because there are answers.

Um we have to get to that point.

We can't allow ourselves to just kind of live forever not revering the word of God because it is the foundation of our faith.

And so my question for us to think about now and then discuss in life groups this week is what keeps you from revering the word of God?

Is it doubts?

Is it pride?

Is it ignorance?

Or something else?

Let's get to the point where we can revere the word of God and let's deal with the things that keep us from getting there.

So once we've revered the word of God, next step is to read it.

But we have to read it with the proper posture and in the proper way in order for it to transform us.

I'm going to go back to verse 1 through 3 in Nehemiah.

It says, And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the water gate, and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel.

So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard.

On the first day of the seventh month, and he read from it facing the square before the water gate, from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand.

And the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

So we see that they meet at the water gate.

And I'm not talking about the water gate you guys are thinking about right now.

I'm talking about a gate where there was water for the people to get.

Okay?

And think about how important the gate where the water was would have been for these people.

Think about how many times you turn on the faucet to take a shower or to get water.

It's constantly, right?

So they had to constantly go to this place to get water.

It would have been a communal space, a necessary space for them.

And this imagery is key here.

This is where they read the word of God.

The place where the community comes together to receive something that is vitally important to life itself.

And it says that all the people gathered to hear the word.

It wasn't just the rich people, it wasn't just the clergy, it wasn't just the educated, it was everyone.

All people to hear God's word.

Then we see, we're going to go to verses 7 and 8.

It says, also Jeshua, Bani, Sherubiah, Jameen, Akub, Shabbatai, Hodiah, Messiah, Khalita, Azariah, Josebad, Hanan, Peleiah, the Levites.

Help the people to understand the law.

While the people remained in their places, they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense so that the people understood the reading.

See, everyone read for understanding.

The Bible is meant to be understood, not just like ritualistically read for just because it's like good to read your Bible.

We should seek understanding whenever we read it.

2 Timothy 3.16 says, All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

The Bible is meant to shape us into who God made us to be.

Secondly, we see that there are teachers of the Word of God.

It's not just read, but it's explained.

It's taught.

These scriptures would have been written before these people's time in a different culture that they might not understand.

So there needed to be teachers to explain it to them in their day.

And this was done by the Levites, who were the priests at that time, and they were charged with teaching the Word of God under the old covenant.

And in the New Testament, elders are given to the church to teach the Word of God.

And so this when we when we come to the Scriptures, we're we're faced with many challenges, right?

Like this is a different culture that we don't understand, right?

It's written in a different language that I don't think any of us speak Hebrew.

Any Hebrew speakers?

One back there?

No?

Okay.

No Hebrew speakers.

There's difficult moral laws in the Bible, right?

Like challenging things that we're called to.

And ultimately, God is not like us.

He's bigger than us, he's more powerful than us.

So he is hard to understand inherently.

So because of this, we need to rely on the resources that God has given us to understand his word.

So that first looks like just the immediate community around you.

Your friends, your family, reading the Word of God together, trying to understand it.

Next, it looks like the elders of your church, myself and Danny and David and the other elders on the team, we will stand before God one day to answer for how we taught the Bible to you, how we led you, how we shepherded you, right?

So it is a very serious matter that I do it in a way that you can understand, that will actually build you up in who God has made you to be.

So my encouragement to you is to rely on the authority and the leadership that God has placed in your life, right?

This is a gift to you that people are charged with teaching the Word of God.

Secondly, is the broader church, right?

We exist in a church that has existed for a couple thousand years, right, with brilliant men and women who have studied the scriptures and come up with what it means.

And every offshoot from Christianity, whether it be the Latter-day Saints or the Jehovah's Witness or many others, they come, they often come when people think they have a new idea, right?

Like they've discovered something in the Bible that no one else has been able to see, this new revelation.

And it causes a drift from the scriptures.

And we have the same temptations, right?

When we come to the scriptures, we're tempted to read, read it in a way that we think.

Think it what it means, rather than allowing the authorities immediately around us in our local church and over broader church history to inform how we read the scriptures.

So we we we don't have any new ideas.

Nothing that we preach from the stage has not been preached by Christians for thousands of years.

If we are, we're probably in the wrong, right?

We are we exist in a tradition that is rich and full that has been trying to understand what is infallible, which is the scriptures, right?

Church tradition, fallible, but helpful to understand the infallible, perfect word of God.

Does that make sense?

Good.

So to illustrate a little bit of what not to do, I want to tell you about a uh the high school Noah, how he would try and read his Bible.

Uh the high school Noah was not in a church, but he knew he loved Jesus and that Christians were supposed to read their Bibles.

And so I would be staying up way too late at night, and as I'm like, my eyes are glazing over to go to bed, I would remember that I'm supposed to read my Bible.

So I would I would crack it open, try to get through a chapter, and oftentimes I would wake up with my Bible like on my chest because I fell asleep trying to read.

Um I didn't know anything about what a commentary was.

I didn't know I was supposed to ask other people questions or listen to a sermon about a passage, right?

I was totally trying to understand it on my own, way too late at night.

And what this led to was an example was baptism.

I I thought baptism was for kids and that I was too old to get baptized, so I didn't get baptized.

Or many of the like righteousness laws in the scriptures that we see, I would just explain them away as like, oh, that was for that time, but this is a different time, right?

But then when I got to college and I started getting around more Christians, these uh these thoughts that I had didn't quite hold up, right?

I was I was informed that no, baptism is for everybody.

Everybody is to get baptized.

These these righteous laws that Jesus is teaching, yeah, they're for you, buddy.

Um I I was trying to do it on my own, and and we're not supposed to do it on our own.

So I would never tell someone to not read your Bible by yourself.

But understand that that is a very modern thing, right?

People have only everyone that we now have like 20 Bibles in all of our homes, right?

That has not been the case for very long.

The the scriptures were a communal thing that people had to come together to read.

So it's it's beautiful for you to get alone and read your Bible.

That's amazing.

But don't try and understand it by yourself.

Bring other people into it and invite the Holy Spirit to come into it.

Always, but invite a friend to read the Bible with you.

What if you're reading something and it's confusing, don't just come up with an answer on your own.

Bring bring a leader, bring, bring it to life group.

Um, and ultimately come to church and hear the teaching of the word so that you can start to be able to understand it for yourself.

Good.

So, a couple questions to think about and then discuss in life group.

What challenges do you face when you try to read scripture?

And how have you found success?

How do you interpret scripture?

Who or what do you rely on to understand what the Bible is saying?

Okay, so we revere the Word of God, then we read it properly, and next step is to respond.

So this is what it says in verse 9 through 12.

And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people, said to all the people, This day is holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn or weep.

For all the people wept as they heard the words of the law.

And he said to them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink sweet wine, and send portions to any one who has nothing ready.

For this day is holy to our Lord, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

So the Levites calmed all the people, saying, Be quiet, for this day is holy, do not be grieved.

And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.

So we see that the people are tempted to mourn when they hear the scriptures read.

And we could we could understand why this might be the case.

They they're just coming out of exile, so they're realizing how far they've been from God, how how sinful they are, and how sinful their ancestors have been, and how broken the world around them is.

So you can understand how they might be feeling sad.

And I think we're tempted in much of the same way.

When we hear the scriptures, there's this temptation to just feel bad about ourselves, to feel bad about the state of the world that we're in.

And so our response is kind of just to like be sad, to be solemn.

But but that's not the that's not what they want, the the priests are encouraging them to respond.

I remember I led a high school ministry in college called Young Life, and we would do these camp trips, and one of the nights we would share the gospel by by telling the story of Jesus dying on the cross, right?

It was it was beautiful.

And and we would send the high schoolers out to kind of have a moment to process, and then they were going to come back for kind of like a life group style discussion.

And the hope would be that they would come back rejoicing that they've been set free from their sins and can live life with God, but they would always come back so sad.

Like that that the story was just sad that he had to die.

They were sad that they were sinful.

They were sad at the brokenness of the world, and I I understood it, but it was it was our job as leaders to show them that, guys, this is this, we should be like celebrating.

We should be throwing a party right now, that that sin is defeated, that Jesus died for you.

And it would take it would take a little while, but we would, I would, I would not end the night until people realize that this is a happy night.

This is uh this is a joyful night.

And and the Levites explain this this why we should have this proper response by firstly saying that whenever the word of God is read, that day is holy.

It's a set apart day where the where God has chosen to speak his word to us.

And then they say this phrase, the joy of the Lord is our strength.

And that that word joy is the Hebrew word Shiva.

And this this word is only used one other time in the entire Old Testament when David brings back the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.

And so the presence of God is returned, and he says this in verse 27.

It says, Splendor and majesty are before him, being God, strength and joy, Shadva, are in his place.

There's plenty of other Hebrew words that get translated joy in English.

They mean something like a great positive feeling, or jumping and spinning with excitement, or exuberant singing.

But Shadva is the type of joy that you find in the presence of God.

The eternal, the everlasting communal covenant joy that you find in the presence of God.

And the priests are telling them that's what happens when you read his word.

His presence is with you.

You are in covenantal communion with him.

And that should give you strength to rejoice, not to mourn.

You see, even when Scripture reveals to us that we're sinful, that we fall short, that the world around us is broken, we should rejoice that God told us about it and now gives us a way to life.

That he gives us a way to full, everlasting communion with him.

We repent and we we acknowledge the brokenness and we say, Man, I really messed up.

But it's a quick turn.

We don't stay there, right?

We we acknowledge it and we repent.

We say, I'm sinful, but I'm gonna rejoice because God has set me free.

He's chosen to come close rather than stay far off.

He has written himself into our story.

He's put the note in the glove box to show you who he is and how you ought to live so that you might know him.

And this should always lead us to rejoicing, not to being down on ourselves.

We see that the final proper response when the word of God is read is radical obedience.

The Israelites, and to finish out the chapter, they they they celebrate and then they come back the next day and want to read more.

And in that day, when they're reading, they discover that the festival of the ta of tabernacles was that week.

They were supposed to be celebrating it.

It was this festival where they had to build shelters and live outside to remember the Exodus.

And they don't pray about it, they don't check their calendars, they don't go to see if they can get time off work, they just do it.

They all build shelters and live outside for a week.

I I pray that that's the level of obedience that we would have as a church.

That when we open the scriptures and we read that we should all repent and be baptized, that we would all repent and be baptized.

What a testimony today.

I I pray that when we see that we're to be cheerful givers with our money, that we would cheerfully give as a response to that.

That when we're told to share the gospel and make disciples of all nations, that we would go do it, that we would be obedient to the word of God.

So some final questions for us to consider.

What leads you to mourning or despair rather than joyful celebration when you read God's word?

Secondly, do you experience intimate communion with the Lord through his word?

If not, what holds you back?

And thirdly, what does obedience to scripture look like in your life?

What are the obstacles that cross your mind before we decide to obey?

So Ezra, great guy.

He he brought the word of God and he was faithful in his moment.

But it it only resulted in a very momentary and partial obedience from the people.

They quickly fall into all other kinds of sin.

And by the time that that uh the New Testament comes, there's so much has been added to the Old Testament through various religious groups that it's kind of unrecognizable.

They miss it entirely, even though Ezra was faithful.

His temporary obedience results in almost immediate backsliding of the people.

But this shows us that he's just a foreshadowing.

He's just a look ahead for these people, that there is a true Savior coming.

It's not Ezra, but it is the greater, the more true Ezra.

His name is Jesus.

He doesn't just read the word of God to the people, he is the word of God for the people.

He he doesn't just momentarily read it, he gives it eternally forever.

And those who hear it and follow it do not backslide, but they are faithful to him forever.

To become children of God with pure righteousness.

And when when Jesus was on earth and he was speaking to his disciples, there's a there's a story where he says this in Matthew 13, 14 through 17.

It says this, indeed, in their case, the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says, You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see, but never perceive.

For this people's hearts has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and with their eyes they have closed, lest their lest they should see, and with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them.

This this prophecy from Isaiah is speaking to the Old Testament people who heard the word of God but couldn't understand it, they couldn't see it, they couldn't hear it, they couldn't receive it in their hearts.

And then Jesus says this to his disciples but blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears for they hear.

For truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people long to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

So he's saying that they have heard the word of God and responded to it.

But the kind of word of God that they've heard is altogether different than the kind that the people of the Old Testament heard, because Jesus is standing in front of them.

The word of God made flesh.

And so my prayer for us today is that we would have ears to hear, eyes to see, hearts to receive, not just a book, but a person.

Many people sadly, though, hear about Jesus or are presented with his gospel yet harden their hearts.

And my prayer is that that would not be the case today.

To believe in him as Lord and Savior, I want to give you a chance to respond.

Not asking you if you go to church or if you've been a Christian.

I'm asking you, what do you think about Jesus?

Do you think that he is Lord and Savior, the Word of God made for you?

And do you follow Him with your whole life?

If we could all close our eyes, and I know many in this room have answered the question before of, yes, you are my Lord, and I want to follow you, but I want you to think back to that first faith.

But if there's anyone here who wants to do this for the first time, I would love to pray with you, and we would love to have leaders around to help you take a next step.

But if that's you, we'd just love if you raised your hand so I can know who I'm praying with this morning.

So the rest of us have a response too.

Um the first one is I want this to be real quick, right?

I'm gonna talk about it quickly.

I want you to deal with it quickly because the next one is where I want to stay.

Are you have you had a low esteem of scripture?

Can you just repent of that and and and hold it in a high esteem in your life?

And secondly, is there something you know that the scriptures say that you're not walking in?

Can we deal with that quickly and just say, Lord, I'm sorry, I'll be obedient now.

And this is where I want to really land.

Is our response to the word of God being read should be worship.

And so that's what I want to do today is worship.

Worship the fact that the God of the universe has chosen to write himself into the story.

That he's chosen to put a letter in the glove box, to reveal himself to you with a how-to guide to life with him.

That his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, but he didn't stop with a book, he gave himself.

And so I'm gonna ask us to practice a little bit of sitting under the word of God.

What did they do?

They had the word of God, they came and they worshiped.

The word of God was read, and then they worshiped even more.

So, can we stand to our feet?

What they did is they stood, they blessed the Lord as one community.

It says that they lifted their hands, they they got on their knees, they laid on their face as a physical response to worship.

Then I'm gonna read a scripture, and then I'm gonna we're gonna carry on in worship as a as a response, just to practice this a little bit.

So take us away, Fabio, and I think you're beautiful I Savior on a tree for my iniquity now.

Words fall short to describe my stand in all, but now I see your magic.

And the word was with God, and the word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made through him, and without him, not anything was made that was made.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

This is our king, Jesus.

The word who was with God and who was God, who defeated darkness, and now we get to gather, hearts prepared, understanding that who he is truly, to worship him.

Let's worship together, church.