Hey everybody, welcome back. We're on our 18th week together. Can you believe it? I'm really excited about what we're going to get into today because it's about the Bible. I know we've been opening the scriptures, we've been talking about various verses, we've studied some passages together, but I want to equip you today a little bit on how to get into the Bible for yourself, how to really study and learn and not have to wait until somebody preaches and teaches because, as I've shared with you, you have the Holy Spirit in you, and because of that, you can understand this Bible better than you think. Now, I know there's some sections of it that are a little weird, and look, I've been studying this thing for 35 years, there's some parts I have no idea what they mean yet, and that's fine, and that's because it's a book that was written over the course of 1600 years, it's got a lot in it, some of the things we may never really fully understand in our modern era, but the most important thing about studying the Bible, as we'll see today, is that it all points to Jesus, that every single verse from the beginning of Genesis, right through the last ending of the book of Revelation, all of it helps us to really understand what's already written on our heart, and that's the first thing I want to say about the Bible.
The reason why the Bible comes alive to us when we're in Christ is because the scripture, the Bible itself tells us that God's law is now written on our hearts, that's part of what it means to have the new heart that we talked about. The law is already there, so when we read the Bible, it's explaining something that our heart already knows, so that our mind can understand it. Is that mind-blowing? That just blows me away, that all that reading the scriptures does is clarifies for our mind what our heart already knows. So, it says in the book of Acts, describing the first church, now these were made up of people who met Jesus personally, and some people maybe who were from out of town, they never really met Jesus, but they were hearing about him from people who knew Jesus. The apostles were teaching, there were evangelists and pastors being raised up. It was a beautiful community there in Jerusalem, which is where the first church was, and it says some things that they did to make sure that they not only became believers, but became disciples of Jesus, just like the first were.
And it says that they continually devoted themselves to four practices, which we have mentioned before. The first was, they devoted themselves to the apostles' doctrine, to the breaking of bread, to the fellowship, and to prayer. Those four things they did, and that's how they built the church together. Those things have not changed. Those are still four essential things that have to happen over and over again. If any church wants to be strong, if you want to become strong in the Lord, those are four practices to engage in your life, not just on a personal level, but also with the body of Christ. And so we have the apostles' doctrine in written form.
It's the New Testament. The first believers could listen to John teach, you know, John meaning James and John, one of the original apostles. They could hear him tell the story. They could hear Peter describe, hey, what was it like to walk on water? They could hear from the first-hand account of those that were with Jesus, who commanded them to go and make disciples and teach them everything that Jesus taught to them. That's the Great Commission. So that's what the New Testament mainly is. And I'll break down the Bible for you shortly here of what all the sections are about and how to read them in their context and so on.
So the great thing about the Word of God, it says, John's Gospel says, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We saw his glory. Glory is the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. So Jesus is the embodiment of all truth. What Jesus said, what Jesus did, who Jesus was. Remember, he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. He didn't say, I came to show you the way and tell you the truth and give you life. He was the embodiment of those things. And so we can say that, yeah, Jesus is the Word made flesh.
And we can then say that the Bible is Jesus in print format. And that's what the Bible is. Yes, it's a little bit complicated because again, it was written, the most recent book was written more than 19 centuries ago. The oldest books were written nearly 3,000 years ago. And so some of them have to be studied in a certain way. And we'll get into that. So the whole Bible points to Jesus. Why do I say that? He doesn't show up until the last third, as far as Jesus of Nazareth goes.
But from the beginning of the Bible, the very first words that we hear God speaking to Adam and Eve after sin entered the world, when they ate from that tree, is a promise, a promise of one who would come. It says to the, he said to the serpent, you'll strike his heel, but he will crush your head. That's the first promise of Jesus that we have in the Bible. And it's right there in Genesis 3, 15. So here's how the Bible breaks down all of the books. And you have a handout that looks like this. It'll be there in the package on the website.
So make sure you download it, print it if you can, or look at it now if you want to, to follow along with me. The Bible's broken down. It may surprise you to find out that it's not in chronological order. In other words, just because one book shows up before another doesn't mean it happened before a book that shows up later on in the Bible. They were broken down for study purposes and broken down so that they would be together with maybe authors. Some of them are in chronological order, and I'll show you that in a moment. But the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, were all written by Moses.
Genesis was written by Moses to give Israel their history. And here's from the creation all the way through us into the promised land. This is who we are. This is why we're God's people. This is a record of the faithful ones who walked with God before there was a Bible. And then the other ones are books where Moses gives them the law. Some of those books include the history of Israel when they came out of Egypt and into the promised land, a 40-year time period where they lived in the wilderness for a while.
That's the first five books. They're also called the Pentateuch. If you ever hear somebody talking about it, that's what it means, the books of Moses, because he wrote the first five books. Then we have 12 books of history, beginning with Joshua. That's Israel coming into the promised land. And that ends in Esther, which happened while Israel was held captive and then in the Persian Empire. So those books are mostly in chronological order. First and second Kings, first and second Samuel, first and second Chronicles are kind of repeats in some ways of the same story told from different perspectives.
But those are all history books. So those ones, when you read those, it's just like reading any ancient history, except it has prophetic insight. So you'll find that kings are judged on whether they followed God or not. Those are prophetic insights into their reign that we can use to learn some things. The next five books are called poetry books or wisdom books. That's Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, which was written by Solomon, and the Song of Solomon, which is a love song, which is not rated G. We don't teach that in the children's ministry for the most part here.
And now you're going to want to go read that right away, aren't you? It's interesting. And it's a love story, not only about marital love or about, you know, sexual love, but also a parable, if you will, of God's love toward us. Beautiful, beautiful books. The Psalms are 150 songs written by several people, many of them by David himself, Proverbs. They're all just really, really fascinating books. Then we have a bunch of prophets. The first five, we call them the major prophets. It's not because they were more important than the other prophets.
It's because they have more prophecy than the other ones. That's it. That is literally the only reason why they're called major prophets. Now, we have Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. And then we have this little book in the middle called Lamentations. It was written by Jeremiah when he was in captivity with Israel and lamenting. And that's why it's called Lamentations about what it's like to live away from the temple and away from the promised land. But those prophets all contain prophecies of the Messiah. They contain the word of God to his chosen people, Israel at that time.
And they're in the context of a covenant keeping God who's promising a new covenant. That's always, you'll find, woven into all of them. Here's a covenant you have now, but there's a new covenant coming. More on that in just a moment. Then we have 12 minor prophets. Again, not because they weren't as important as the major prophets, but because their books are smaller. There's 12 of those from Hosea all the way through Malachi. And that closes out what we call the Old Testament or the Old Covenant scriptures. And all I want to say about that, those are the first 39 books of the Bible.
All I want to say at this point about that is to bear in mind when you read them that they were written to people who lived under an old covenant. That covenant, Moses' covenant, we talked about the law, we've talked about the different covenants before, but bear in mind when you read those, we're going to talk in a few moments about the importance of context. The context of all 39 of those books is the Old Covenant. So when we read those books, it's not a new covenant understanding. They didn't know who Jesus was going to be. They barely understood what the Messiah was supposed to be about. They only knew God through the lens of a covenant founded on Mount Sinai through Moses.
And so that colors things a little bit. It was a legalistic system. It was a system designed to repress sin rather than what we have in the new covenant, which is the last section of the Bible, the New Testament, where now we have Christ in us. We have the law in our hearts. We're not governed by external regulation anymore. We're governed by internal regulation. So in the New Testament, we have four gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what we call synoptic gospels. They basically tell the story of Jesus, like a history book would tell a story.
So they go from the beginning of his life. Some of them start earlier than others, and they tell it all the way through the cross, resurrection, and ascension. Then we have the gospel of John, which is a little bit different than the other gospels. His purpose was to prove some things about Jesus. So he tells seven miracles to illustrate that Jesus was in fact the son of God, both God and man incarnate. And he makes that the whole case for it. So he's kind of an evangelist to people that were being led astray, believing wrong things about Jesus.
And there are a lot of things in the gospel of John that don't show up in the other gospels. So those are eyewitness accounts, or in Luke's case, like a reporter, he interviewed people who were eyewitnesses, then wrote his account of what happened during Jesus' three and a half year life in ministry. Then we have a book called the book of Acts. Sometimes it's called the Acts of the Apostles. It's the Acts of the Early Church. It tells the story of how the church was founded in Jerusalem, and then how the gospel went to the ends of the earth as they knew it back then. Most of it is about Paul the Apostle and his travels and journeys.
And he shows up pretty significantly after the first three and a half years of the church, then becomes, actually, Paul wrote nearly half of the New Testament because he was a prolific writer. The next section, then, are letters to the churches, the first several of them, the nine letters that we have that Paul wrote to churches. They were all churches that he established that were struggling with some things. So Paul wrote to them answering questions, clarifying doctrine. Most of them are responses to issues the churches were having. Some of them were written to pastors or other apostles that he'd raised up, encouraging them in their ministry. Sometimes, like the book of Romans, he was just laying out, here it is, everybody.
It's like sometimes we call the book of Romans. You've noticed we've been in that book a lot. The Manifesto of Christianity. It really explains everything about the gospel of grace, how to live life in the church of Jesus Christ, and everything is really in there. So Paul's letters are in there. Do you know how Paul's letters are organized? Again, they're not organized by the order in which they were written or the order in which they happened in history. They're literally put in the order of how long they are, which is why Romans shows up first.
It was his longest letter, and then we end with Philemon, which is his shortest. So it's literally one page. It's very hard to find when you're new in the Bible. Remember, use your table of contents. Don't be ashamed of that. Then we have other letters that were written, some by other apostles. We have Peter wrote a couple of letters. James wrote. John wrote three letters. And we have Jude, who was Jesus' half-brother. He wrote a letter. And then we have Revelation, which rightfully shows up as a letter. It opens up with John writing seven letters to seven different churches, and then revealing to them things that were about to happen.
Everybody likes to start in the book of Revelation. I did not recommend it, and here's why. Not because it's not an interesting book. It's fascinating. It's made for all kinds of great movies, some of which rise to the level of pure fantasy, some of which are, I think, sincere efforts to try to show what it's going to be like in the last days. And most of them, I think, really don't do honor to what the book was about. It was given as God's encouragement to a church that was being persecuted intensely to let them know, hold on, stay faithful.
This gospel is true. Jesus is sitting on the throne, and in the end, the kingdom of heaven will cover the earth like the waters cover the seas. If you don't get that out of the book of Revelation, you read it wrong. If you don't, if you read the book of Revelation, you haven't read the rest of the Bible yet, it's not going to make any sense to you. It actually has more scripture quotes in it and more pictures out of the Bible than any other book in the Bible. And if you don't know those and understand their meaning yet, then Revelation is not going to make a whole lot of sense.
So the Bible, 40-something authors, 1600 years of time it took to put it together. It's written in three different languages, the Old Testament's in Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic. The New Testament's all written in Greek. So foreign ancient languages, when we read our Bible, we're reading a translation of it. So just know that the Bible is inspired 100% the Word of God. What you read, though, is a translation. That's men doing their best to try to sum up what the words mean and put them in a way that makes sense in modern English.
And I'll talk about translations in just a moment. But first, one more thing about the goal of reading the scriptures and why they're so important. We can't reason our way up toward God. In other words, we're created beings. If we can use our mental faculty to put together God in all of his glory, the creator of all things, the creator of the universe, if we're able to do that, then God's been diminished to being something that could be comprehended by the mind. He's far greater than that. What we're in need of is for God to reveal himself to us in a way that our minds will always grow into comprehending, but we can't reason our way up to heaven.
That became a philosophy in the church for a while. And it led to a lot of problems because what are we now doing? We are now able to remake God after our image, which is the root of all paganism. Paganism is simply people observing things in the world, whether through science, what we can see with our eyes, what we've experienced emotionally or in our lives. And now we're trying to piece together what we think God might be like. And that's how every pagan God has ever come into existence. And we're at risk of doing that if we don't let the word of God, the revelation of the scripture speak to us, transforming our understanding of what God's like, transforming our understanding of what the world is like.
So above everything else, what I want to urge you to do as you read the scriptures is to be teachable and be humble in it. Again, I've been studying this for 35 years and I learn something new every single time I open up the word and read it and I let it transform me. And I urge you to do the same. When it comes down to it, the devil knows the Bible better than you ever will, better than I ever will. The devil's been hearing this word as it's being written and studying it. So the goal of reading the Bible is not to just have our minds enlightened to some things. The goal of the Bible is to connect with its author.
The author and finisher of our faith, authored the word of God. And as we let it wash over us, we're transformed into the image of the God who authored the book. That's the purpose of it. Paul said it like this to Timothy, the goal of our instruction is love. That's our goal. To be remade into the image of God, you remember, is to be remade into the image of love. And so if we're becoming more like love incarnate, then the purpose of the Bible's being fulfilled. It's not a book so we could get into doctrinal arguments with one another.
It's not written so we could debate forever the nature of God and the attributes of God. All the discussions, all well and good. And it's important, I believe, to really get to understand what the scripture actually says. That is vital. And it's the entire purpose of Bible study, as we call it, is to make sure we got it right. But it's not there so we can argue over points of doctrine. It's there so we could be transformed into the image of love. The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from a sincere faith.
So read it honestly. Read it with integrity. In fact, I'm going to say this, like I say with every single Bible study class I teach, don't ever even take my word for what you hear me say. Go back to the scripture and see, is it true? Is that what it actually says in there? Because there is no other way to fully realize and know God except to confirm our heart's revelation with what's written on the page of these scriptures. So that's what I want to say about the Bible to get started.
And then I just want to give you some things. There is going to be a bonus, a couple of bonus teachings coming up this week. One of them will be to show you how to use my favorite Bible study tool, which is a free tool available online, or you can download it onto your laptop if you want to. There's going to be a little bit of a bonus on some other things about reading the scriptures. But I want to say this about studying the scripture, some ways that you can use the Bible to really grow. For one thing, continue to do what you've been doing. This whole curriculum was designed so that you have scripture every week, two or three scriptures, memorizing the scripture, meditating on the scripture.
I want to put this out there. There are some read the Bible in a year, Bibles out there that kind of put the Bible together and historic or, you know, some other kind of way to make it palatable so you could read it in a year. That may be good for some, but I don't recommend it for you if you're new in the Lord. The reason is because you're going to be now, like if you're goal oriented, especially if you are a type A personality, I'm pleading with you. I'd get down on my knees if it wouldn't disappear off the camera. I'm pleading with you. Don't try to do that because you're going to whip through, and you're going to miss some revelation that's going to change your heart because you're so goal oriented.
You got to get through that chapter and check the box. Don't worry about checking boxes your first year in Christ. Connect with Jesus. And if it takes, like I shared with you, you could chew on some scripture verses for a week, and that's all that you need to do. If you like fine dining, you know that you don't just pound, you know, filet mignon. You don't eat it like you eat a hamburger. You take a bite, and you savor it, and you let it sit in your mouth for a little bit.
And oh man, is that, the flavor comes out, and your body actually can digest it better the more you chew on your food. I don't know if you knew that or not, but your Bible, or your body rather, likes it when you chew your food. So anyway, you want to do that with the scriptures too. Take your time. Don't get so goal oriented that you feel like you got to read it fast. Hey, I read the Bible in a year. So some ways of studying the scripture. If you do want to go beyond what we're doing here in this class, and I hope you will.
I don't think it needs to necessarily take all week to do everything that we're doing together and the devotions that you've got. Try reading a book all the way through. Read it from beginning to end. Before you read it, use some of the study tools I'll introduce to you in the bonus teaching this week to learn the background, and the culture, and who received the letter, and why was it written, and you know, what are the things that are being addressed that maybe don't show up on the pages? Like was there a problem that was going on? Was there a heresy that's being confronted by this letter? Those kind of a thing you can learn through commentaries and Bible tools.
But read a book all the way through from beginning to end. I recommend if you haven't read through any gospels yet, maybe start with the gospel of Mark. It's real simple. It gets right to the point. It's just plain old storytelling, and it gets into the action. You're casting out demons before the first chapter is over. Really, really good gospel. Read the book of Acts to find out how did the first Christians do it? How did they hold? They were persecuted by everybody around. They were this ragtag bunch of about 120 people that met in an upper room.
The Holy Spirit fell on them, and all of a sudden they turned the world upside down in less than a generation. How did they do it? Read the book of Acts. Again, it's history. It's just plain storytelling, and you'll be inspired, and you'll probably leave hungry saying, I want that. I want to live like that too. Why did they have it like that then? And we don't have it like that now. It's always inspired like that. If you want to read through some letters, we've been in Romans so much, you may as well read it.
You've read most of it together with me already, but if you want simple explanations of the gospel, Ephesians is a great book to understand God's grand purpose and picture to know who you are in Christ, and how we fit in the big plan, and how to do church, how to just do some basic things like that. James is another very simple letter. James wrote to a group of believers to correct some things and to let them know. This is what's important. It's full of wisdom, and it's written in a very plain spoken. James actually sounds a lot like the way Jesus spoke. Very straight, in your face, truth, confrontational, but loving at the same time.
All great stuff. I do recommend, as some do, getting into the book of Proverbs and the book of Psalms, and some people do it like this. Read a Psalm and a Proverb every day, or one chapter of Proverbs, one chapter of Psalms every day, something like that. Maybe do half a chapter, but again, don't let the gold get in the way of chewing on what God's speaking to you. How I read the scripture is I'll read through a book, and I'll stop. As soon as something really begins to stir in me, I'll pause, and I'll sit and wait with the Lord. What are you trying to show me right now?
Why is my spirit responding to this right now? It might be a word I need to hear presently in my life circumstance. That's a great way to read the scriptures. Another study thing you can do is study the life of a Bible figure, a Bible character. David's got, I mean, if you want to read the life of David, you've got a lot of reading ahead of you, because we have more information about him than anybody else in the Bible, even Jesus, because David also wrote some Psalms. So you have not only the history of his life written in three different books, but you also have his journal, like his diary, his love songs to the Lord while he was going through some things.
So he's a fascinating study. You could pick Joseph. You could pick Moses. Just read their life story and take notes for yourself. Why did God see fit to use them? What was it about their life that made them so transforming of the world around them? A Bible figure is a great study, a topical study. Let's say you want to learn more about the Holy Spirit. You want to study and understand what does all the Bible say about the Holy Spirit. That's a study you can do. For that one, if you're new in the Bible, you're probably going to need some help to find all the passages of scripture where that subject is spoken of.
And I'll introduce you again. You're going to have to watch the bonus teaching this week to look at the tools that are available. But one of them is going to be a concordance by which you can also do what's called a word study. So let's say you want to learn more about light. You want to do a study on the word light and find out all what the Bible has to say about light. At the back of your Bible is what's called a concordance. It's a very basic one if it's in your Bible and it has words in it.
I think I may have showed you this in the first lesson. It's got words and where in the Bible that word shows up. Now the one in the back of your Bible is going to be very limited and only have the big major ones. There was a guy named Strong centuries ago who without the use of computers or the aid of a hundred monks at his side, single-handedly took every single word in the Bible and recorded every single instance where that word showed up. And it's called the Strong's concordance. It was a marvel of a work and there were very few errors in it. It's been updated over the centuries to include things he missed when he did it, but it's just amazing.
So he kind of set the standard for it, but there are all kinds of concordances out there. You want to find one that goes along with your Bible, with the particular translation you're using. So let me just say this about Bible translations before I give you some rules of the road and close out this teaching. There are a number of different translations, at least 50 different translations in English alone. Some of them, the philosophy of translating is to try to stay as close to the original language as possible and offer as little interpretation as you can. The New American Standard Bible is the one I use, and I use it for that reason, because I'd rather read the scripture as it was written, as close to it as possible anyway.
If you've taken a foreign language, you know that it can be tricky to render things from one language to another and keep the exact meaning of it. You have to interpret a little bit what that phrase means and what English word corresponds with that Greek word. So it's tricky to begin with, but I like the NASB personally because it offers very little rephrasing of things to try to make it make sense. Now there's value in that because there are some passages that are kind of clunky because of that, and as you read them, you go, say that again? Fortunately, you can. You can just read it again. It can be a little clunky.
In the middle of it is what's called dynamic equivalence. That's what the translators use. So if you use an NIV Bible, for example, what they do is they take thought for thought. So they'll take a sentence. They'll translate it into English. It's kind of clunky. So they'll rephrase it so it's a little bit smoother in the English language, and some Bibles will do that. On the other extreme are what we would call paraphrased Bibles. So if you have a message Bible, that's a really extreme paraphrase. It was written in the 70s, I think, so it sounds very 70s with the jargon that he uses in there.
It's kind of cool. When I was studying Romans for the first time, I was getting confused, but at that time I was still using a King James Bible, and I was so baffled. And I was an English major, and I was confused. So I read the message Bible translation of it, like, oh, that's what that means. So it helped out a lot. They're good for smooth reading, for modern reading. The problem with it is it's somebody's interpretation of the scripture. So somebody's already told you this is what that verse means.
If they're exactly right about that, wonderful. But if they're not, you've basically heard a teaching on that verse. You haven't really studied the verse itself yet. The Passion translation is similar to that, only what that translator did, Brian Simmons took the original language. He's an expert in both Greek and Hebrew. He took the original language and phrased it in English in a way that brings out the full meanings of the words, like the color of the word. So it's a little bit interpreted, but it's also, he aims to be true to the original meaning of the word.
Whereas a full paraphrase, it's like, let me take an English Bible and reword it in a way that would make sense to the audience I'm targeting. So just know that. Pick a Bible that you can study as a study tool. I recommend, and I still do this, use two or three different translations when you're studying a passage. See what they all do with the translation. Try to find ones that are a bit different from each other so you could see, all right, that group of scholars thought that that should translate this way. This one translates this way.
It'll help you study the word a little bit more comprehensively. All right. So, so that's that. Let me just give you some rules of the road and then set you off on your journey. I've, I've not in 35 years, I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what the scriptures mean. And I mean that. I went to seminary. I have studied the word because I love it. I love teaching the word. I love being in the word for a long time. All right. Let me just give you some rules of the road then before we part ways this week.
And this is just to help you get the most out of your study so that you really glean from the scripture and you don't take the scripture out of context, use it in a way that's not true to what God actually said. Remember the word of God is the full revelation from God. It was written by God himself. How we interpret it though, that's subject to us getting in the way of things. And so we always want to approach the scripture in a humble, teachable manner. So the first thing is we have this rule in theology and it says, context is king. The most important thing to start with when we're reading the scripture is to answer questions like who received this revelation from God in the first place?
What was their historic context? What was their culture context like? Did they understand God? Did they know the old covenant or were they strangers to the covenant? How did they receive it and how would they have understood this letter or this book, this song in the first place? That's the first thing to really understand. When we use the Bible as a collection of sound bites, which is what a lot of people do. In other words, we take a scripture, we pull it off the page and then we start dissecting it and treating it as if there's nothing else around it.
That's when we really run into trouble and there's some wacky things that people come to believe as a result of that. So always, if we're studying and we get on a particular verse and we want to really understand what does that verse mean? First thing is to know its context, what was said before that, what's said after it. You might need to read the whole passage, maybe the whole book, to really come to understand what does that verse actually say? What does it actually mean? Then, using some of the tools that I'll show you in the bonus material for this week, learn the cultural context. Find out what the people were like, what was going on in history at that time.
What would their world have been? So that you could try to put yourself in their shoes. Like for example, you're reading the letter to the Ephesians. Try to imagine yourself as a member of the church in Ephesus who just heard, hey, Paul sent us a letter and they're going to read it out loud in church. So you run, you gather. Paul the apostle, what does he have to say? And you're listening to it. First rule of context is try to put yourself in their shoes and understand it as they would have understood it.
And again, you'll need some help. We all need help with some tools, some history and culture kind of commentaries to help with that. That's all part of rule number two, which is to always remain humble and teachable. Never assume that just because you've read something before, you already understand it. As I shared earlier, there's some things that we'll understand at a certain level. But then as we grow in wisdom and we mature in Christ and our walk with Christ, now we're able to understand certain things at another level. I mean, think of it like when you were growing up.
There are certain things about life that when you were three years old, your mom and dad had to describe it to you a certain way because you weren't ready for the big picture. How do you explain to a three-year-old that there's a war going on without them having nightmares at night? So reading the Bible and growing in God is kind of like that. There's certain things when we're new in Christ that our soul, our mind is ready to comprehend. Then there are other things as we mature and we get more comfortable with the father as we really walk in relationship with him. Now we're ready for even more revelation. We understand, we grow in understanding as we mature.
So remain humble and remain teachable. Never assume. Like I've heard the prodigal son's story preached and I've taught it myself. I'm going to just take a rough guess at least 35 times in my walk with the Lord. I got saved hearing that parable. I've taught it, preached it, heard it, taught and preached. I've read it. But I still, when I go to read, when I get through and I'm reading through that passage, I'm asking now, now I have to ask for grace, but I'm asking and posturing my heart. I'm reading it for the first time.
I don't even know what Jesus is about to say. The more we can study the word that way, the more we're going to draw the life out of it, the life-changing life from the word of God. So I really urge you to do that. And especially, finally, I just want to remind you, remember the goal. The goal is to be transformed into the image of the author. The goal is to have our mind connect with what our inner man already knows to be true. And the Bible ought to remain an exciting thing.
So if you come across passages and you read it and you go, man, that doesn't even make sense to me. I have no idea what that guy's talking about right now. Then just read through it, move on, get to a part where you finally, you know, you're ready to understand it. There's some books of the Bible I don't recommend that, you know, people read at first, like Leviticus. I mean, it's, I love it. Understanding what the sacrifices and the priesthood are all about. But man, if you don't understand the heart of God behind the temple and the sacrifices, it could be a really dull book and a little freaky.
Revelation is the same way as I shared earlier. Not a great book to start with, because if you don't understand the rest of the scriptures, that book can mean a whole lot of different crazy things. So be patient with yourself. The goal is not that your mind can comprehend everything at first. The goal is that your heart could be transformed. Over the course of time, as you get more and more comfortable with the scriptures and you've read them, things will begin to come clear and make sense. I've been in the Bible for as long as I've been.
There's still some things I have no idea. If students ask in a class, what does this mean? I'll have to say, I have no idea what that means. And that's fine. I know Jesus and I know how to walk with him. And so do you. So just trust in the spirit of God in you to glean from the word, all of what you need to know and be patient with yourself as you go. All right. That's all. That's all I want to share for now. Enjoy your study in the scriptures.
I pray that God will meet you in powerful, profound ways as you glean all of the life out of this word. And it gives you life and that more abundantly. Feed on him daily and enjoy your daily bread.