Teaching | Read | Scripture E01

Hello and welcome to the John Mark Home of Teachings podcast. My name is Inka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space. Today we begin a four-part series of new teachings from John Mark on how to read Scripture as apprentices of Jesus. He talks about the essential role the Scripture plays in our formation.

and the importance to read formationally, not just informationally, with a posture to meet Jesus on the page. Here's John Mark. Good morning, everybody. It's been a while. Great to see all of you. Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 5. If you don't have a Bible with you, in theory, one should be in the seat in front of you. It's page 1032. And once you arrive, stand with me for the reading of Scripture. And before we read...

I would love just to give you a moment to quiet your heart before God. You can close your eyes if you want. You don't need to. And just take a moment. Breathe. Come back to... what Thomas Kelly used to call the holy center, just that place deep inside you where you are at peace in God, where your life is hidden in Christ with God, Colossians 3. And just let the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit love you for a moment. They never stop, but just open to the love of God.

And let's read together. Our text is Matthew chapter 5, verse 17 to 19. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished.

Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Take a seat.

On Thursday, I was in Cambridge, England. I was over visiting my son in London, who's on a gap year, and he had the day off. And so we took the train up to Cambridge to visit an old friend. And we're bumming around town. There's Jude and I punting on the road. River if you've been to Cambridge, right by King's College.

And we're walking around, and we're getting a guide from a Ph.D. student. And, you know, that's Isaac Newton's apple tree. And you're like, yeah, right it is. But okay, you're walking around. And I'm thinking about our time together in the back of my mind. And all of a sudden I realized, oh my gosh, this is where it all happened. This is where Tyndale was. William Tyndale is a name you may or may not know. He was a linguist at Cambridge University in the 16th century.

And he's called the father of modern English. Many kind of idioms and figures of speech that we take for granted are all from his first ever edition of the New Testament. And while a scholar at Cambridge, he became friends with another scholar you may know by the name of Erasmus, who was a Greek teacher. And he began to read scripture in the original languages of Greek and Hebrew for the first time. And he came to a conviction.

that at the time was radical, but you and I would just take for granted today, that is that every follower of Jesus should be able to read scripture in their own native language. Now, this was actually illegal in so-called Christian Europe and in 16th century England at the time. In fact, it was even illegal to read the scripture in your own language if you were training to... be a preacher.

The powers that be, both in the government and in the church, and there was a corruption and complicity here, did not want ordinary people reading scripture for themselves. They did not want them even hearing it. at length for themselves. Out of all sorts of fears, one of which was that it would upend the social order, which it eventually did. So Tyndale, facing persecution, escaped to exile in Germany and Brussels. From exile, he translated the first ever English edition of the New Testament.

With the help of a wealthy patron, they together smuggled around 18,000 Bibles across the English Channel back into so-called Christian Europe. Followers of Jesus would hold secret meetings in homes like by candles. reading or hearing scripture out loud for the first time. Henry VIII, the king of England, was enraged. Through a spy, he bought up 6,000 copies of Tyndale's New Testament.

And he had them burned on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. You ever been there? Ever been to St. Paul's? You're like, oh, look at this glorious Christian heritage. The Bishop of London and the King of England stood in front of that cathedral and burned six. thousand Bibles. He made passing out Bibles a capital crime. Eventually Tyndale was captured. There's a whole movie there waiting to be made. Just an idea for a few of you. And burned at the stake.

And witnesses to his execution, of course there was no camera there, but witnesses say his closing, his last words were a prayer. God, open the king of England's eyes. And God answered his prayer. Just three years after his martyrdom, the king changed his mind and not only said okay, but actually funded a full translation of the entire Bible. 80% of the New Testament in that Bible was completely...

just copy and paste from Tyndale's translation. We call it the King James Version of the Bible. As the saying goes, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Now here's a question for you this morning. What was it about people reading the Bible that so terrified the powers of the day? Like to a level where they were willing to ban or even burn every copy they could find.

And what was it about Scripture that so many people, and it wasn't just Tyndale, a number of luminary leaders in the English Reformation, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Bishop of London, all suffered the same fate and were burned alive. What was it about these men and women? some of the most brilliant minds of their era, that they were willing to suffer exile at best, if not torture, imprisonment, or even a brutal death, just to get that copy into the seat in front of you.

Whatever scripture is, it certainly is not ordinary. From the earliest days of the Jesus movement, all the way down through the best and worst moments of church history, Followers of Jesus have said in unison, Scripture is more than a well-curated collection of story and poetry and wisdom sayings. It's more like a map to another world.

what our Celtic Christian ancestors called a thin place, a place of overlap between heaven and earth, almost like a portal to the kingdom of God. And if you enter through this portal, it has the potential to change. change not only your life, but our world.

And yet, here we are, many years later, on the other side of Tyndale's martyrdom. And let's be honest, most of us have two or three different translations of the Bible lying around our house or apartment. that we don't even read.

In recent years, we've seen the rise of the post-Bible Christian in the language of John Collins, a modern Western kind of person who retains a thin vestige of Christian spirituality while attempting to kind of... any serious ties to Scripture and kind of move on in the kind of L.A. version of pseudo-enlightenment to a new plane.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, if not spiritually legitimate or emotionally, like very understandable. I have a lot of sympathy for. I mean, first off, we're all just really busy and it's hard to find the time and it's easier just to follow the Bible. on Instagram and get a line here or there.

The Bible is really complex and confusing. You will hear preachers tell you that it's simple and easy to understand. And I don't want to throw a shed on other preachers, but that's absolute BS. That's not true. It's very good. And to quote Tim Mackey from...

the bible project a dear friend of mine there's a talking snake on page three this is not easy stuff right we're all digitally distracted You know, our phones and the internet and our devices have miswired our brains, the kind of slow, attentive...

intuitive reading that scripture was designed for is the very capacity that literally at a neurobiological level is kind of missing from how we move through the world. Not to mention, without even touching, on the open wound for dozens of you likely in the room that the Bible has been used and abused. by people who look a lot like me, and a growing number of followers of Jesus have church hurt or even full-on trauma that is at least at an emotionally resonant level tied to Scripture.

So there's healing work that a lot of us need, but that means moving toward our pain. And our psyche is designed to move us in the opposite direction of our pain. And it's easier just to go watch a good show on Netflix. So a lot of us try to just set the Bible aside and just kind of move forward without it, only to find that we quickly lose our way. What is it that we are missing?

What did Tyndale and others see that we don't? The heart behind this practice and teaching series is just to help you follow after Jesus. And Jesus was a rabbi, which was an Aramaic word meaning teacher. Rabbis in Jesus' day and age were teachers of the spiritual life, but their textbook, so to say, was the scriptures. Like any first century rabbi, Jesus...

had most, if not all, of the Hebrew Bible, or what we now call the Old Testament, put to memory. His mind and imagination were steeped in Scripture. His identity itself and his vision of life in the kingdom of God were all extrapolated straight out of this library. Read Jesus teachings. They are full of quotes. And allusions and prayers and prophecies and promises that are right off the pages of the Bible. And Jesus' view of Scripture was incredibly high. He said things like, quote, Scripture...

cannot be broken. Or another way to translate that is, Scripture cannot be set aside, John 10. In Mark 12, he quoted Psalm 110, which is a Hebrew poem, by saying, Notice, speaking by the Holy Spirit declared, and then there's the quote of Psalm 110. Also in Mark 12, he rebuked the religious leaders by saying, are you not in error because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God? That's feisty language to say to another Bible teacher, right?

Luke 24, there's a story of Jesus teaching two disciples on the road to Emmaus how in the law and the prophets, the Messiah, quote, had to die. The disciples reflect, quote, burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us. To be a fly on the wall for that podcast, that would have been a good one. If we are going to apprentice under Jesus, we need to come to see Scripture through Jesus' eyes.

To that end, look with me again at our text in Matthew chapter 5. In context, this is from the beginning of what we call the Sermon on the Mount, which is Jesus' most famous teaching, or you could argue it's a kind of collection. of his most famous teachings all put together, Jesus frames the Sermon on the Mount with a word on Scripture. Look again at verse 17. Do not think...

that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Okay, let's piece this apart. The law and the prophets was a common way of referring to the Bible of Jesus' day. The law, or the Hebrew word is Torah, you may hear that language, the Torah, was the first five books of the Bible that are right in the first five of the one in front of you.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, not Deuteronomy. Did a pastor just say that? Jeff, did you just get that out of order? Are you not an error because you do not know this? I'm just kidding. I'm messing with you. So sorry. That was not the Spirit of God. I was not channeling the love of the Trinity right there. I was so sorry. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And then the prophets was a way of referring to everything else because writers of the Bible were called prophets.

Do not think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. The word abolish is katalusi, and it's used later by the writer Matthew for destroying a building or an institution. including the temple in Jerusalem. It was a technical term in Jesus' day that meant to disobey or dismiss or in kind of post-evangelical millennial language to deconstruct the Bible.

Apparently, Jesus was saying and doing things that were so radical, so out of step with the kind of religious sentiment of his time, that a lot of people were misreading Jesus and thought he had come to a... abolish the Bible of his day, to kind of throw it out and move forward. But he says, no, no, no, you misunderstand me. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Now, this word is a surprise to the ear, even in the English translation. What's the opposite of disobey?

To obey. So you would expect Jesus to say, don't think I've come to katalusi to disobey the Bible or to dismiss it. No, I've come to obey it. And then all the religious conservatives would take a nice deep breath and say, okay, good, we're on safe ground. But that's not what he says. He says, I have come to fulfill them.

In Greek, it's the word play rousia, which is used all through the book of Matthew for a prophecy from the Hebrew scriptures coming to pass in Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah or anointed king.

There's a lot here. First off, just notice that Jesus reads the Bible as a story, not as a theology textbook of timeless truths. not as an allegory, not as kind of just a collection of wisdom sayings. There's truth in all of those views, but all of them fall short. He reads it overall as a story in search of an ending. But also, notice that he sees this entire story of the Bible as all leading up to him, the climax of the plot line. And then he says this in verse 18.

For truly I tell you, it's a Jesus figure of speech. I really mean, listen carefully to what I'm about to say. Until heaven and earth disappear. That's a hyperbolic saying. Like until the end of time. Not the smallest. letter not the least stroke of a pen will by any means play on words disappear from the law until everything is accomplished.

Okay, follow me here. The word that is translated smallest letter, if you have the NIV translation, is referring to the Hebrew word yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It's literally the size of an apostrophe in English. And the word that is translated the least stroke of a pen is even smaller. It's referring to a little serif that is used to distinguish the Hebrew letter kaf from the letter resh. It's like a tiny little hook. Think of, in English, the difference.

between like a capital O and a capital Q. That tiny little line, it's about that size. Another way to translate that is, and here's Dale Bruner, a scholar on Matthew, not one dot of an I, not one cross of a T will drop. Jesus is saying that the Bible, down to its most minuscule details, will hold true.

Until the end of time, until everything is, quote, accomplished. Therefore, 19, in light of what he just said, anyone... who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly or to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

The word sets aside, again, we have really good translations, but everything, there is no such thing as a word for word, and a lot is lost.

That word sets aside is the same word that translated abolish the line before. Again, it means to disobey or to deconstruct. He's saying that anybody... who disobeys or deconstructs or dismisses the least of these commands, referring both to the commands in the Bible of his day and specifically to the commands that he is about to exegete in the Sermon on the Mount. Notice the wordplay here. The least of these commands will be called least.

But, here's the alternative, whoever practices, notice his language of practice, these commands that we're about to hear will be called great in the kingdom. Meaning,

If you and I do not disobey or dismiss or deconstruct the teachings of the Bible, but instead, and this doesn't mean you turn off your brain and you don't have questions and do all the hard work of interpretation, but instead... you take them really seriously. In particular, Jesus' teachings on the Bible. In fact, you devote your life to not just hearing them, but in the language of Jesus' brother James.

being hearers and doers of the words you read, putting them into... practice getting them out of your head and into the muscle memory of your body until they become what we call second nature, what scientists call the automatic responses of your body, where when you hit some kind of stimuli, just the way you naturally react. before you even think about it is just you live out the commands of Scripture. That's a lifetime of practice away from a lot of us.

But if you devote yourself to that, to practicing the commands of Scripture, and to teaching others to do the same, then your... heart, your life, you will grow, you will mature into one of the great ones, what previous generations called saints. One of those rare, bright, radiant souls. that just manifests the love and the light of God, the kingdom of God. Your body itself will become a thin place, a place of overlap between heaven and earth, what the Apostle Paul called a temple.

housing the presence and the peace and the power of God everywhere you go, on the streets of LA and far beyond. You could put it this way.

For Jesus, there is a reciprocal relationship between the value that we place on Scripture in our lives and the level of our formation and maturation and growth into kingdom people. This is why we read the Bible. Not because we have an odd penchant for ancient literature, or we just really like solving literary puzzles, or we love to Google Greek words and nerd out.

But because, you're not laughing because you're like, yeah, I don't, that's not my thing. I'm into other things. That's you do you, but okay. No, because we have come to love and follow Jesus. And at an intuitive level, even if you're new to following Jesus, even if you're not even sure how serious you are about it, even if you're not in touch, You know at some level, there's some part of you, even if it's underneath a lot of stuff, where you just know in your gut that following Jesus...

and regularly immersing your mind and imagination in this. Those two things are inseparable. You cannot pull or piece the two. But, and this is really important, especially for those of you who have trust issues with the Bible or with church or with people like me, and no shame at all on that. Jesus is the reason that we trust scripture, not the other way around. I love this from Andrew Wilson, the Reformed Bible teacher from London.

Ultimately, our trust in the Bible stems from our trust in Jesus Christ. I don't trust in Jesus because I trust the Bible. That's circular reasoning. I trust the Bible because I trust in Jesus. I love him. And I've decided to follow him. So if he talks and acts as if the Bible is trustworthy, authoritative, good, helpful, and powerful, I will too.

even if some of my questions remain unanswered or my answers remain unpopular. As followers, or I prefer the language of apprentices of Jesus, Our aim is to organize our entire life around a few simple goals. One, to be with Jesus. Two, to become like him. And three, to... Do as he did, to live as he would if he were in your body with your Myers-Briggs type or gender or ethnicity or job or backstory and trauma and family responsibilities or singleness or whatever.

live as Jesus would live if he were you. And scripture is essential to all three of those goals. To be with Jesus. As we read, we quickly discover that reading this is not like reading any ordinary book, that the author at some level is with you in the room. There's a way of reading this library that is simultaneously a way of opening your heart to Jesus. To become like him as we read scripture with Jesus, not just about him.

we begin to hear his voice and take his thoughts into our own mind. And they slowly but surely over many years begin to rewire our neural pathways, as a good therapist would say to you. And we begin to... think like him and feel like him and see the world the way he sees the world and live the way he lives. and do as he did, as we read scripture, and then go out in our own failing kind of way, attempt to put it into practice, to live out what we read, we find that it does a work on the interior.

of our being and we become increasingly people who live out the way of Jesus. My point is at every level, scripture is an essential aspect of our apprenticeship to Jesus. As Dallas Willard, the philosopher from here in LA once said, we come to scripture as a part of a conscious strategy to cooperate with God for the full redemption of our lives. Do you want that? The full redemption of your life. So many Christians I know are living with partial redemption.

Do you want the full redemption? I don't mean a zap from heaven. I mean a lifelong process of more and more and more of what the New Testament writers call the fullness. We come to Scripture as a part of a conscious strategy to say yes to that day after week after month after year after decade. But here's the key. This will require us...

to kind of relearn how to read. And I don't mean like actually like kindergarten. I mean, it will require us to read very differently, to develop a capacity to read very differently. from how you read a young adult novel like The Hunger Games. And listen, I'm a literary guy. I read fiction every single night. But don't knock The Hunger Games. It's good stuff. It's formulaic, but sometimes there's a reason for the formula. You're like, yeah, that just plays, girl. plays really well.

But it will require us to learn to read differently than the way we read any novel or certainly differently than how we read a school textbook or an encyclopedia or a website or Wikipedia or a news op-ed. caption on Instagram. Again, the digital age has miswired our brains to read. Our default setting now is to read in a way that is at cross purposes with the kind of slow

attentive, intuitive way of reading, mode of reading that scripture was designed for. We are used to scrolling and skimming to get the information as quick as we possibly can, you know, just scrolling through our news. app while we're waiting in line at the red light because, you know, you don't want to lose seven seconds. It's worth killing somebody just to make sure you don't miss the seven seconds or whatever. That's how we're used to reading, just to get it as...

quick as possible, or at least to just get a little entertainment. We have to learn how to read scripture, not just for information, but for formation. And that is the goal of this practice. Just to be really up front with you, this teaching series and this practice is not a course on hermeneutics. So don't feel bad if you don't know that word. Hermeneutics is the academic word for the art and science of biblical interpretation. It's where you learn how to read the...

various genres and literary types of the Bible and notice design patterns that repeat throughout the canon and so on. And it is very important. If you do not understand the text, if you don't understand what you are reading, how can it form you in the way that Jesus intended it to? In fact, if you misunderstand the text, even worse, it can malform you. You can think that you are doing the will of God when you are actually doing the will of your own heart or some preacher with an agenda.

or some confused stream of the church, or even worse, the evil one himself. That's why there are two basic skills we need to develop as apprentices of Jesus. One is biblical interpretation or hermeneutics. We need to learn how to study the Bible and understand what we're reading. To distinguish between what does the text say and what does the text mean. That's what conservative fundamentalists don't know how to do. They just lump those two things together. Well, the Bible says...

Well, yeah, an English translation says that, and you are completely misunderstanding it, right? So we have to learn to distinguish. Jesus said that to the scribe. What does it say? And then he said, how do you read it? Meaning, how are you reading this? What's your interpretation? And is it in line with God's intention or not? And the other skill that we need is spiritual reading.

Once you kind of get your head around the text and you get a basic grasp of what it means, you're not even halfway there. All you've done is set the table for the feast. We then need to learn how to read it, not just with our left brain or even with our right brain, but with our whole brain, with our whole person. Not just informationally, but formationally.

And these two skills, biblical interpretation and spiritual reading, rise or fall together. It's like they are tied together in this reciprocal relationship. If you only focus on one... Or the other, you will hit a cap. in your spiritual growth. It will put a ceiling on you. Both of these matter. Now, we'll do a little bit of hermeneutics work in a few weeks when we look at the discipline of study, but we're going to focus far more on...

spiritual reading. Because ultimately, the end goal is not just to know the Bible. This is a spiritual discipline. Like all spiritual disciplines, it is a means to an end. And the end is not, oh, I know the correct interpretation of the Greek in John chapter 5 verses whatever. The end interpret, the end goal is to become love through union with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. to live out what we read. Again,

until it becomes second nature. It's so deep in you. It's who you are. The end goal is to read the Bible in such a way that we meet Jesus himself on the page. And through time with him, spent sitting at his feet in the language of first century discipleship, we become like him and do as he did. It's to read scripture as a spiritual discipline. All I mean by that is as a way of opening to God and drawing on grace.

Now, over the next four weeks, our plan is to practice four different ways of engaging with Scripture. that all fall under this larger umbrella of reading scripture as a spiritual discipline. They are read, meditate, study, and memorize. And for this week to begin, the first step, our exercise for the week ahead, is just to begin reading scripture daily as an apprentice of Jesus.

Now, hopefully for a lot of you in the room, this is already part of your morning routine or your regular life with God, in which case this week, like it's really easy. Keep doing what you do. Just keep at it. But maybe bring a clear, if my kids were here, they would crucify me. So the problem is I'm in this thing right now where I try to slip in Gen Z language and pretend like I'm trying.

trying to be cool when I know I'm not cool, just so I can make my kids mortified to be related to me. But I forgot they're in youth group right now, so I just made a fool of myself. All right, back to what we're doing. and that's you, then just bring a clear intention of your heart.

But if not, if this is not a part of your regular life with God, or it's really hit or miss, and it's, man, not life-giving for you, please feel no shame at all. We want to help you change that. So let me offer you just a little bit of coaching, and some of this is very... pragmatic. First, find a good place that is quiet or at least distraction-free, and ideally a place where you are happy to be, where you enjoy being, where you enjoy being with God. This may be a...

quiet nook in your house or your backyard or a balcony in your apartment complex. It may be a trail up in the mountains. It may be a park near your house. It may be the ocean early in the morning while you're out surfing. That would be a little hard with scripture, but okay. I was thinking off the top of my head. But find a quiet place and then find a good time. The mornings are best for most people just because your mind is uncluttered.

the day's stress and strain and your body is not yet in the hurry of like just life in LA, but do whatever works best for you. You might be more nocturnal. You might have a two-year-old and 940 a.m. is, you know, nap time and that. It's your best window. Just find a good time. Then make a plan for what to read in that guide that is coming to you. We have a little summary of...

Four best practices from church history. There are other ways, but kind of the top four of Lectio Divina, the lectionary, read through the Bible plans, and hearing scripture read out loud in one sitting. But there is not a right way. Just read. I would say just follow your joy. Do whatever your heart is drawn to. Whatever sounds like, oh, that sounds like a good way to do it. Just do that.

That said, unless if you choose to listen to Scripture with an app like YouVersion, which, by the way, can be really helpful, in particular if you're more of an active personality or you're more calisthenic, if you're an S on the Myers-Briggs, if you have ADHD.

like myself and all sorts of us, you might find it really helpful to just put it in your earbuds and go for a walk somewhere beautiful and engage with it that way rather than trying to sit cross-legged on the floor, which is how I do it, and read in some quiet zone. You might find it easier to move your body. That's absolutely beautiful.

But unless if that is your plan, I would highly encourage you to not read on your phone and to put your phone in another room where you cannot see it and you cannot hear it. You have all read some. news article on the neuroscience of how it basically just ruins your life. So don't do that.

Just put it away and be present. If you don't have a Bible Bible, as in like a codex, I think they can take the one in front of them, right? Take the one in front of you home or get one for yourself. And then once you arrive, begin. by settling your body in God's presence.

You may find it helpful to avoid your bed or your couch. They are comfortable, but they will constrict your breathing and you might feel more anxious. And in particular, if you're distractible like I am, you will find the struggle with distraction will be even harder. You might want to find somewhere where you can just sit.

like upright and be at peace. So I sit cross-legged on the floor and I just take some really deep breaths to just settle myself, kind of relax my body, settle myself in God's presence. You might want to just start by taking some deep breaths. and just taking a few moments or longer, just quiet. Your mind, your heart. Imagine if there's like a lake on the inside of your being and most of the time it's just choppy under the wind. Just taking some time to let it.

Calm down and come to stillness in order to hear God's voice. And then just spend a few moments just before you even read a word.

Just soaking in the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And that might be kind of cheesy language for it. I don't know what the right words are. But just take a moment to become aware of God loving you all around you and welling up with love for you and love from him, for him, through you. Take a moment to just breathe in and out the love of God. And then when you're ready, with or without words, just express the desire of your heart to Jesus for him to come and speak to you.

And then read. And again, this is not rocket science. You probably know how to read. And it's okay if you don't. You can listen. But read slowly. Again, don't read it like you read the LA Times or you read TikTok. Is there even words on TikTok? Are there even words? I don't know. I'm so godly. I don't know. Don't read it that way. Read slowly. Read calmly. Read prayerfully. Read intuitively.

Listen to the text and to what it's saying. Don't turn your brain off, like engage your whole person, but also listen to what's coming up in your heart. That may be your own inner resistance that is just information for you to pray about. Or it may be the spirit of Jesus welling up inside of you, highlighting a word or a phrase or a sentence or an idea or a metaphor, even drawing on your memory banks.

past experience or present experience or a dream or desire for the future. Who knows what may come up, but that may be the Holy Spirit beginning to speak to you. And that's basically it. Just read scripture daily.

Now, a few other just really pragmatic things. I know this doesn't feel like a sermon, but I'm more interested in you actually changing than an amaletical smoothness. So just a few other things. My friends Tim Mackey and John Collins. run this nonprofit called The Bible Project. If you don't know about it, it's one of the best things going in the kingdom of God. It's basically world-class scholarship through like three-minute...

It's the best stuff ever. And they have a phenomenal series called How to Read the Bible that is all in hermeneutics that would normally take you about 20 hours of class time in a 400-page book. Or you can watch a couple of cartoons and you can get 80% of that. So there are four parts to it. And over the four weeks in that email that comes from the church, we'll just send you links. All the videos are two, three, four max minutes long.

I know that's time. I know it would involve you sitting down at your laptop and watching it. I'm telling you, if you do that a month from now, your grasp of what this is and how to read it will be 10x what it is right now. It is really worth your time if you want to watch that.

Then also, I did an interview, kind of a podcast series with Tim from Bible Project and the scholar team that you are welcome to listen to. I just find chatting to him fascinating. And finally, if you want recommended reading to go alongside this practice. we are reading Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson. All of this and much more is in the companion guide. Okay, to end. Final thought.

As you read this week, whether you sit down and you read through the entire gospel of Matthew in one sitting and then you memorize it, whatever, or you're like, Read one psalm every morning to begin your day. As you read, however long, remember that your rabbi, at some level, the author himself, is in the room with you. You may want to imagine Jesus sitting next to you on the couch or the floor.

looking over your shoulder or sitting in the chair across from you. I imagine him just with a twinkle in his eye like, that line was good, huh? That was really good. You are not just reading about Jesus. You are reading with Jesus. And that means when we sit down to read, we need to come with a sense of faith, hope, and love in the language of the New Testament.

As Dallas Willard once said, come to your chosen passage as to a place where you will have a holy meeting with God. And as you learn... how to slow yourself down and read scripture more like how it was designed, more prayerfully, more intuitively. what you will find is that Jesus will come up to you and speak to you. I don't know how else to say it. Jesus will be there with you in the room.

And by His Spirit, He will speak over your life. And that will likely feel like just a certain word. Some people use the language of shimmering. We'll just kind of... I don't know, you'll just notice it more than another word or phrase or line or idea. You might just find a very soft, gentle quickening of your heart when you read a particular phrase.

Your mind might just immediately make this connection between so-and-so's experience and your experience right now. And that is likely, could look like a thousand different things. quiet, gentle whisper that feels like a quickening of the heart, that is likely Jesus speaking to you. I would say every morning, except I forgot to do it this morning because of jet lag and daylight savings. So by every morning, I mean about three days a week.

When I read scripture, I have a little scrap of paper next to me in a pen, and I will just write out any word or phrase that I felt was kind of under, was highlighted by the Holy Spirit for me. And then I'll just crumple it up and stick it in my... pocket and then I just have it with me and often at the end of the week I'll

pour out the papers and just journal them on the Sabbath or something. But I try to take them with me and remember, this is what God spoke to me this morning. I likely need to remember this. And I have a case of spiritual amnesia that is humiliating. It lasts with me for about 17 minutes and then it is gone. And so you may want to even write it down or journal or just find a way. Just get a tattoo, stick and poke real fast every morning, whatever. Just find a way to come back.

because this is what Jesus will do. He will come up to you and speak to you. He will love you and he will lead you. This is why reading the Bible as a spiritual discipline is more about posture than technique. And don't get me wrong, technique is important. We'll talk about different methods that people use to read scripture. Next week we'll talk about Lectio Divina and we'll use Latin words and you'll feel amazing or intimidated. All of that matters.

But you know what? Not that much. What matters so much more is to come to Scripture with the right heart, the heart of an apprentice of Jesus, just that heart that says, God, Here I am. Please speak to me. Whatever you want to say. And God often will not say to us things that he knows we are not willing to hear.

Now, he's gracious, so he still will. But often he will just quietly and patiently wait until you're ready to listen. So one of the first things you do is you just get your heart ready to listen. And even if your hermeneutics are off and you misunderstand a Greek word and you read a weird translation, God can use all that kind of stuff. If your heart...

is, God, I just want you to speak to me and love me and lead me. That beautiful, famous line from the young prophet Samuel, speak, your servant is listening. And if you just want to say that before you read every morning, that's a job well done. That's what matters most. So this week, every day, as you open the scripture and read, and again, this is all invitational. You don't have to do this. We invite you to do this. As you slow down.

As you breathe, as you become aware of the love of God, as you offer your heart and your listening ear to God, and pray for Jesus to meet you on the page, he will. E. Stanley Jones, the Methodist intellectual, spent most of his life in India a century ago, said this, and we'll end here. This was what he said about his daily practice of reading scripture. Every day...

I go to these words and I ask them, have you seen him whom my soul loves? And the words take me by the hand and lead me beyond the words to him.

who is the Word. Let's stand together and pray. To wrap up, we want to make space to process any invitations that you feel from the Spirit. or anything that you felt really landed in your heart from the teaching. So if you can, pause what you're doing and take a few deep breaths with me and become aware of God's presence. Bring your mind and heart to quiet and let this spirit impress on your mind and heart what he wants you to know or do. I'll leave a few seconds here for that.

What comes to mind for you? If your mind went blank, that's totally okay. But if you felt a specific invitation like beginning to read scripture daily or to read more prayerfully, Let's take a moment to prepare ourselves to practice that this week. Studies suggest that when we explicitly set our intentions, we're far more likely to follow through on an action. First,

Let's think about when you can put this into practice. It might be a certain time, like at the beginning or morning prayer, or it might be more situational and responsive, like when you notice you're feeling anxious. Take a moment here to think of a good prompt or even ask the spirit to help you decide.

And finally, when that time comes, what's the first step you want to take? Maybe the first step is checking what chapters are on your reading plan or something else. You don't need to plan everything. but it's helpful to define that first step. I'll leave a moment here for that. Father, thank you for how you come to us through the scriptures. As we read this week, would you encounter us with a deeper understanding of your love and intimacy with you. Amen.

Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. If you enjoy the show, consider leaving a rating or review. It helps others find us. We're a crowdfunded nonprofit where everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by The Circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Tedra from Austin, Texas.

Kent from Pleasanton, California. Hannah from Laramie, Wyoming. Mike and Cindy from Cottonwood, Arizona. And Sienna from Timmacula, California. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may you go in peace to love and serve the Lord.