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Los Lunas Cornerstone

Church of the Nazarene

Come, Let Us Reason Together Part 1

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    One of the most common things I’ve heard from Christians when we talk about the Bible is that they just don’t know how to study the Bible, really study it. Hopefully we read it daily for devotion, and we should. If His Word is meant to be our daily bread, like we talked about last week, then we should be devouring it every single day. It should be what we crave and desire because it leads us to a relationship with God and helps us know Him and ourselves better. Because it is the means of communication that God has given us to know Him better, it means we should approach Scripture not only with the understanding that it is the Word of God, but with a desire to know everything that there is to know about what it says.
    In Matthew 22:37, Jesus says to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Have you ever thought that studying the Bible is a part of loving the Lord with all your mind? Because…it is!  God invites us to know Him, to come and reason with Him, and He has given us His Word to do that. What that means though, is that He desires for us to not just read it, but to dig into it, to study it, to think about it logically, to pull it apart and dissect it so we can get all the richness that He has put into His Word.
    Last week we talked about wrongful approaches to God’s Word, and reasons why God gave us His Word. Today, I want to talk about how to study God’s Word. I want us to work together to know how exactly to get the most out of Scripture so we understand what God is trying to communicate to us and what that means for us as Christ followers.
    Today, I want to go through 7 things we should strive to do and remember when we study the Bible so we can get as much out of it as we possibly can.
    Let’s look for a moment at Philippians 4:13. This is a verse that many people are familiar with, and many probably even know by heart. “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” Some translations say, “I can do all things through Christ Jesus who gives me strength.”
    We often see this verse attached to encouraging messages when we face difficult times. I’ve heard this verse used to encourage someone who was dealing with the consequence of their own sin, and they were told that they could endure the consequence because Christ would give them strength. It’s not untrue, but it grossly took this verse out of context.
    I’ve also seen this verse attached to encouragement for Christian athletes. Things like: I can be the best gymnast because Christ gives me strength; or I can run this race because of Him who strengthens me. Again, not necessarily untrue, but again, it grossly takes this verse out of context.
    See, context is important, and extremely so. If you’re studying the Bible and you want to make sure you get as much out of God’s Word as you can, you have to understand the context of what is being said. That means that more often than not, you can’t take one verse and understand the one verse all by itself. You have to read what comes before and after, usually for several verses, though sometimes for a whole chapter or more to truly understand what the context is.
    For example, the verse that I’ve read from Philippians 4 is amidst a conversation about the concern that the Philippian church had for Paul. They had shown him a tremendous amount of care. He was in prison facing death, and had been beaten and stoned. He tells them that he speaks from a place of contentment though, despite his circumstances. He had lived with plenty before, but he had also lived with just the bare essentials, and he had learned to be content, that he could do all things through Christ who gives him strength. That’s the context. This verse isn’t about sports, or many other things that we try to make it about. It’s about having strength in Christ to endure the changing nature of life, the up and down waves that we face day to day as Christ followers.
    But, if we don’t take the context into consideration, it’s easy to misunderstand what God’s Word is saying to us. We have to look at the context of any passage.
    The second thing I want you to consider is to know the difference between interpretation and application.
    Interpretation is what the text means, what was intended by the writers. Application is how we apply the interpretation to our lives. What does God want us to do with what He has said?
    Here’s the danger we can sometimes fall into as Christians: we’re in a Bible study group and everyone goes around and takes turns talking about what a certain passage means to them. Now, it’s okay for a passage to mean something special to us, that’s how it should be with God’s Word. We should cherish it and desire to know Him more through His Word. But we must be careful to make sure that when we look at how to apply His Word to our lives, we first know what it means.
    Look at Matthew 22:39 for an example, “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving our neighbor might look differently for each of us. Maybe for one person, you go out of your way to help your actual neighbor move. Maybe for another person, you’re prompted to bring an encouraging note to a co-worker who is going through a difficult time. The action of loving our neighbors may be applied in different ways with different people to different people in different situations. But, the meaning of the passage is the same: God calls us to love others in the same way that we love ourselves. The meaning doesn’t change just because we love differently than another person.
    The same is true for all the Bible. The intended meaning doesn’t change just because we might apply it differently, and it’s important for us to keep that in mind.
    The third thing I want you to consider about studying the Bible is to find the plain meaning. We bring a lot to the table when we study the Bible. We bring our own preconceived notions and ideas, we bring our own biases, and our own experiences. We must be careful not to let these things shadow our study of Scripture. Remember the second consideration, that the interpretation of any passage doesn’t change just because we apply it in different ways.
    If we seek to find the plain meaning of Scripture, it will serve us well. For example, in Luke 12:33, Jesus tells His disciples, “Sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves money belts which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near nor moth destroys.”
    We can sometimes be tempted to look at passages like this and say, “Surely Jesus doesn’t intend for me to sell my possessions and give to charity? That must mean…xyz…”
    But if we look at what the rest of the passage says, and we weigh that against Jesus’s words as a whole, we see that He actually does advocate for you to hold loosely to earthly possessions, He does say that we should sell what we have to give to those in need. The plain meaning for this passage and many others is the correct meaning. Now, again, how we apply that might look differently for different people, but that doesn’t negate what the passage means.
    Look at Romans 8:8 for another example. “and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” The plain meaning here is that those who live by the things of the flesh can’t please God. That might look differently for different people: for some it may be rage, for some pride, for others lust. But the plain meaning is that those who live by those things will find themselves incapable of being in a right relationship with God.
    The fourth point to consider when we study God’s Word is to take the Bible literally. This can sometimes be difficult to do, because the Bible isn’t always literal. Just think about the parables that Jesus gave to His disciples. Those aren’t literal, they’re metaphors and analogies told to teach us important truths about the Kingdom of God. So, we can’t take the metaphors and analogies themselves as literal truth, but we would be wise to take the truths they teach literally.
    Let’s look at another example in John 10:9, “I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” Obviously Jesus doesn’t mean that He is actually a door. He means that He is the only way to salvation, the only way to heaven. He means that if a person wants to be saved, wants to go to heaven, then they must do so through the means that Christ has provided: forgiveness through His shed blood on the cross.
    We are wise to understand the truth of what Jesus is saying. He is saying that there is no other way to heaven and eternal salvation except through Him. We need to take the truth of what He is saying literally.
    This, of course is not always an easy thing to do, especially when we’re dealing with the book of Revelation and the end times. However, we still should approach such passages with the understanding that what is being said is God’s Word and it is true, regardless of what that truth is.
    The fifth point I want us to remember when we study God’s Word is to consider the grammatical context. Think about the way that the words are being used. Answer a few key questions:
    Who is doing the action described?
    What action is being done?
    How are the person and the action described?
    When is this taking place?
When you start to answer those questions, we can often find that difficult passages become easier to break down and understand. Rather than skipping over difficult passages, we start to see that every part of God’s Word holds something for us, if we take the time and the effort to try to break it down, pull it apart, examine it, think about it, and try to understand what is being said.
    The sixth thing I want us to consider, and potentially one of the most important, is that we need to consider the historical context. I want us to look at Jeremiah 29:11 for this consideration: “For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”
    How many of you have ever read that verse and it has brought you hope and encouragement? Probably a good many of us. What would you say though, if I told you that that promise was not for you? It’s not for me? It’s not for any of us?! It was a promise given to the Israelites to hold on to when they were carried away into exile in Babylon for 70 years. It was God assuring them that He didn’t intend to destroy them, that He had planned for them a hope and a future.
    Now, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have a plan for us! That doesn’t mean that He doesn’t want to give us a future and a hope! And there are plenty of places throughout the Bible that affirm that message to us, but Jeremiah 29:11 is not one of them. Looking at this passage helps us understand that if we don’t understand what was happening historically for any passage, we run the very real risk of grossly misinterpreting and misunderstanding and therefore misapplying God’s Word.
    The final point I want you to remember when you’re studying God’s Word is to let go of your baggage. I said before that we come to God’s Word with our own experiences, our struggles and our pain, and our own hang-ups and misunderstandings, our own preconceived ideas and notions, our own biases. And that’s okay to bring that to God’s Word, He knows that we are always going to look at His Word through our own human filters and understandings. But, we need to be careful not to read things into Scripture that aren’t there simply because of our baggage.
    I want you to learn to let go of your baggage when it comes to reading and studying God’s Word, and let the Bible speak for itself. We need to let go of our assumptions, and ask the Holy Spirit to speak through His Word so we can experience true transformation of heart and mind.
    With that, I want to end with our three questions:


1. Think about the way you tend to study the Bible. Would you say that you make an effort to seek out what the Bible is actually saying? Do you pay attention to the context? If so, how has this helped you? If not, how do you think this might change the way you read the Bible?

2. In your own words, explain why paying attention to the grammatical and historical context is important. How should these ideas shape your study of the Bible?

3. What would it mean for you to read the Bible with an awareness of your own baggage and a willingness to get rid of those assumptions for the sake of understanding God’s truth more clearly?

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