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Study To Show Yourself Approved. 11 of 11

Steven Findley
05/25/25 - Sunday AM Bible Study

Series: An Eleven Part Series Aimed At Developing And Increasing Bible "Study" Skills.

I put together, you know, just basically talk about Bible study disciplines because, or Bible reading discipline actually is, you know, there's some, we've been kind of going over, you know, familiarity, asking all these questions.
How do we study the Bible? If you have a question, how do you answer it? How do you know what questions to ask? All these things, but there's a real simple thing we really haven't dealt much with.
And that is, what's it take to be consistent in reading my Bible?
So here's just a few statistics for you on the left side column on your handout.
Says the average person with an average reading speed would be able to read the entire Bible in around 74 hours and 28 minutes.
If one were to read the Bible for only 12 minutes a day, they would have finished the entire Bible in a year.
So that's a pretty good statistic, I think. You say, okay, well maybe I'm going to set aside 15 minutes a day.
That gives you time to getting your chair, take a couple of steps of coffee, think about something as you're reading it.
But, you know, 15, 20 minutes a day and you can read your whole entire Bible in a year.
And that's even reading the parts that I would probably recommend unless you're studying it to skip.
You don't need to know the genealogy in second Corinthians, which is verbatim repeated at the first chapter of Ezekiel.
So we don't need to know that stuff, we can skip some of it.
You go through Genesis, you have a genealogy every time the focus of the book changes.
And so you can probably skip over that, although it can be interesting and helpful to read that stuff.
Ask yourself, why are these guys in here? Why is this happening like this?
But that's your average, 12 minutes a day. Here's another one.
There are 11189 chapters in the Bible and 365 days in a year.
Therefore you would need to read roughly 3.25 chapters a day in order to make it all the way through.
So there's another, sounds easy, let's say that sounds easy.
But if you ever look at a chapter in Luke, it's got like 70 verses.
So reading 3 of those in a day may not work out.
But if you say, okay, maybe break it up into pages or some other way.
Because some Psalms are going to be really short, so you can make up some ground on that stuff.
Point is, it's not hard to read your Bible.
It's not hard to read it every year if you wanted to do that.
This is 365 days. I would say, at a few minutes, don't plan on doing it seven days a week
because that's probably a plan to fail. Do something that's, you know, the key to being successful
is setting attainable goals. And every day without fail generally isn't attainable,
but that's something we could do.
So let's go ahead and talk about this, you know, Bible study disciplines.
The first part of this discipline is going to be make a plan.
So, hang on a second.
Okay, there was something I was thinking I put in there and I didn't, wasn't seeing it,
so I wanted to make sure I had it.
Really easy. Set aside a specific time or daily routine for Bible reading and study.
Does anyone do this and what do they recommend? Let's just turn it down.
I mean, it's just like, make a plan. And so what kind of plans do we make?
And the thing is, if I say, here's a prescription, we think, okay, if I'm not following the prescription, I'm doing it wrong.
And so I don't want to do that. To me, it's not about a prescription, it's not about here's the right way to do it.
When I was a kid, I was, well, I was in preacher training. I wasn't too much of a kid.
I was probably my early 30s.
We were, with a, we were doing some training on counseling with this woman.
And, you know, my whole life, we're, and so part of counseling is she's going to cancel you in front of everyone who's taking, doing it with you.
And, and so we're talking about something and somehow it comes up that I told her I'm very disorganized.
And she says, well, what do you mean you're disorganized? And I said, well, all my stuff is out of order.
My office is a mess. And she says, okay, well, are you running a business?
Yeah. And she said, do you do a good job at it? Do you miss jobs or do you drop the ball on things?
I'm like, no, I, I can, I do my job well. And she's like, and your father, are you a good father?
I said, yeah. And she's like, and you're doing preacher training. Are you doing everything you need to do for your preacher training?
Yeah. And she's like, and you serve the church. I said, yeah. And she's like, you have to be very organized to be able to do that.
She's like, just because your organization is unconventional, it doesn't mean it's not organized.
Right? And so sometimes I think we get in our head, well, I have to do this Bible reading in a certain way in order for it to be counted
as Bible reading. But the reality is, is no, just do it in a way that fits you that helps you to know what's in the Bible.
Like, however you work that out, there's not a prescription. It's more a matter of planning for success, whatever that's going to look like.
So maybe you just want to binge once a week and read your 12 minutes a day in one setting.
Or maybe you want to spread it out and do, I like routines. I do routines every time.
Maybe you have a time of day you set, or maybe you have a triggering event like, okay, when I'm driving in my car or something like that.
You know, however we work it out, we just want what we want is success.
And so we want to be able to set something up. That's going to work for us that we're going to have some success with.
So Mike, what's your suggestion?
Okay, fine morning. When did you drive in one of my team's gear? And you did all the way around?
Did my call for the line? I said out and I, I found to listen to it audio wise, it looks better for me because I don't trip up all the time when I was named.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I usually try to listen to kid chat.
You know, I'm always thinking pointed out, I'm not getting out of the box.
And that's usually my only question.
And that is, it's relatively pretty what I've been talking about the last year.
Okay.
It's very effective for me and my lifestyle.
So, yeah, so Mike says he listens, which I think is a good suggestion.
Molly?
I did.
After I got baptized, it was very late at night.
I couldn't see the establishing reading, regularity, and praying about it one day, it made it very clear that I had to prioritize it.
And so, like Mike, I got it at the morning and that's the first thing I do.
My Bible reading is frequently flat by a devotional I read.
So, they'll be chat there or be verses that guess me as a Bible and then I read.
And sometimes it's like, oh, okay, sometimes it's going down the rabbit hole and I'll get, you know, I'll want to know more about a particular thing.
I'll go to my computer and read all the stuff about that.
So, but that's the, for me, the emphasis was to make it a priority to start my day there.
And yeah, something's like, you have to get the road running and don't get spend the time at the bottom.
And I can't say my day is sharp when I don't, but it feels better when I do.
Yeah.
So, Molly says that she has a time set aside in the morning, but something she said that I thought was worth exploring a little bit.
She says, I read my Bible, but a lot of times my Bible reading is prompted by a devotional reading.
So, what's the benefit of doing a devotional reading, Molly?
Like, what do you say? What would you say the benefit of that is?
For me, the devotional I use, I swear that the little devotional messages move around because so frequently the message that is presented speaks directly to my life at that moment.
And so, for me, the, it keeps it from feeling like a chore.
Yeah. Yeah. So, the devotional is like a teaching.
And a lot of times, it's in the application and in the understanding.
And so, even though you may not always agree with your devotional, like, I have a devotional that I've enjoyed.
It's called, it's by Chuck Smith. I can't remember what it's called.
Chuck Smith is the guy who started Calvary Chapel, so I don't agree with all his doctrines.
But his devotional are pretty spiritual and good application and I find them to be helpful.
If I disagree, I think about, that's part of the Bible study, right? Why do I disagree with this?
Why do I think, why would I rather say it a different way?
But, you know, Chuck Smith, he's not really Calvinistic and he's not like, to me, I feel like I have a hard time getting on the same page with Calvinist.
They just talk about things in a completely different way, like, application they can do fine.
But I just can't, I have, I just, I don't know, I'm turned off by that, you know, God makes me righteous without me being able to do anything.
Like, I don't have to make a choice at all. It's just, once the choice is made for me, then I can be.
Like, I've just, like, I struggle with that mentality.
But, you know, regardless is, you find it a devotional, that's the suggestion I put in there, but I'm glad you brought it up because that's super helpful.
Devotials are really nice and they also simplify things for you.
And also it depends on your goal because sometimes our goal isn't, I'm going to read the whole Bible in here.
Sometimes our goal should be really, I'm going to just read my Bible every morning regardless of what I read.
And so there's different, we might have a different goal than read, because I think reading the Bible in here is like, that's not something I think is very helpful.
And I mean, for familiarity, it's helpful.
But you're reading a lot of things that are, you're forcing yourself to read a lot of things that are less pertinent and spending very little time.
The Old Testament versus the New Testament is way longer, right?
And so you're spending a lot of time in things that are good and helpful and, like, I'm not, I wouldn't steer anyone away from the Old Testament, I think it's great.
But I think if you're a new Christian and you're trying to develop your righteous living, you're going to probably have a lot more pertinent information in the New Testament and the Apostles teaching in Jesus' teaching.
And then later, the Old Testament can play into that.
So building it in a proper, in a way, that's really going to help develop your maturity.
So I don't always think just through the Bible in a year is the best way or the only way.
Any other practices of Bible reading that someone would say, hey, this works well for me, Larry.
So when you do that, how long do you typically think that takes you to do your Bible reading and your devotional and then your book?
Like, is that an hour you spend, maybe?
I'm sitting there for an hour to an hour and a half, but, you know, it takes me a bit to wake up.
So maybe that's the first couple of problems.
And then, of course, you know, we actually never got any conversation on this slide.
But I don't know exactly how many minutes you've heard, but, you know, if I had to give a chapter or two on it, whatever book I'm using in the Bible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's good. Like, that is depending on where you're at, you know, is if you have the ability to say, okay, I'm just going to do it until I'm done drinking my coffee, however, whatever that looks like, and then I'm time to get cracking on my day.
But it's just a routine. It's just his way of doing it. It's a set time works for some people really well. I don't like set times.
Personally, if I said half our day, I would never do half our day. But if I say in this, this is the thing that I want to include this in my day, then I'm pretty good about including what I want to include in today.
So yeah, there's so Larry's is, but I also think it's interesting with Larry. He says, okay, I read the Bible. I do a Divo. I read some sort of a devotional.
And then I prepare for the classes I go to and I have books that I'm reading. And so that's, you know, you have wisdom seeking and reading books like that's seeking wisdom.
Reading a Divo is listening to someone teach, which is I think it is a biblical precedent to listen to teachers.
And so if you find a good teacher you like, then listen into that. Reading the Bible, you know, there's a biblical precedent for reading the Bible.
So I think, you know, and I like that it's are, you know, people who have been Christians for a while, they're saying, here's what works for me. I think that's some wisdom just in hearing those suggestions that they're coming up with. Any other things?
You know, get sports, sports, whatever you use, color and themes will have something on there. This morning, color and the gospel is found in Joe.
So he had a boat, there's a dissertation on Joe and the connection with spirits. That stuff's important, it's him lightly.
Yeah. I like Tim Keller. You're talking about Tim Keller, right? Yeah. So Tim Keller, he is a Calvinist actually.
But you know, for all I said, but I like him because he's good at thinking about the scripture and he's a guy who just has so familiar with the scripture, even if I disagree with some of his conclusions, his ability to just accurately talk about it is very helpful.
Yeah, from the mind. And so he's and he also brings in other sources like, you know, he quotes the S Lewis a lot and guys like him. So, yeah. So, but you know, you just see, okay, well, there's all these different ways.
Here's here something I had heard that were read and kind of stored away is if you're using social media, if something that has a scripture on it comes up, I read it.
Now, that's not a timeframe thing, right? But if you're scrolling and you tend to read those, you're going to have more of them come up to, right?
And so maybe that should be your thing is something about the Bible, something some scripture pops up in front of me. I, you know, maybe subscribe to emails or texts or whatever.
But just say, okay, no, I end up reading several scriptures a day, but it's in this format. And that might be a way to maintain some sort of connection with the scripture.
And maybe say, okay, if I'm interested in it, I'm going to read the context and just kind of add to yourself.
How many people read a paper Bible versus an app? Like if you prefer paper, raise your hand.
Okay, so maybe half the people in here. And so the rest of us I'm assuming use an app then. Okay, I basically only study digital nowadays.
So I use my tablet primarily for reading and then I use my computer if I'm going to study and do those other stuff.
I preach from a paper Bible because it's never going to turn off in the middle of the sermon.
So or I keep a handy at least, you know, when I'm doing classes, I don't, I don't do that as much.
But, you know, there's, there's benefits to each, right? Like to me, I like the paper Bible for a lot of reasons.
I like to feel of it. It's a little bit more nostalgic. I feel like I like the way when I'm preaching. It's a, it presents better.
I've been holding up a cell phone like that. So you write like if I got my cell phone, okay, guys.
You know, I just feel like the optics of that is not as good. So that's why I like it when I'm preaching.
But I think practically speaking my tablet, I have thousands of books in it, right? And so I can use all the reference on my stuff I know.
Yeah, that's really good because it's what they're doing, but you don't have to prepare anything, right?
You just like, okay, my app is helping me. And I think I have somewhere on here. If you're going to use a Bible app, take time to get to you.
Know it. And that's what Noah is saying is I've learned that this is useful in this. I like this app. I like how this app does this.
And I use it regularly. It reminds me to pray. It reminds me to read. I got some easy devotionals available.
To me, I think that's super helpful. That's a super helpful kind of thing to help you. And so you just learn to use what you have.
Find something that works well. Like I like logos. I use them. It works on my computer and my tablet. It's really good for highlighting and notating.
Like my goal is that when I die and my kids open up my computer program, they'll be able to scroll through and click on the little note that's pinned next to the verse and be able to know what a dad think about this verse.
Like I feel like I want to have kind of like an internet, like a basically making my own study Bible from, you know, that's digital. So it's going to be preserved over time. That's my goal.
But it's a great app and it's easy to use. And I know how to use it well, but I actually probably spent probably 30 or 40 hours just doing education on how to use the program so I can use it well.
So, you know, it's just part of you part of using it is educating yourself how to use a nut. Now I use it on a professional level. So that's why I invest that much time. But if you're using an app, you know, maybe watching a YouTube video and and that sort of a thing will help you use the tools that you have.
So, um, next point we are probably pretty good at covering this, but it says guard the time and keep your appointment.
So that that's an important thing. Just say, you know what? Once I set whatever I'm going to do, guard it.
So I have this. It says don't let how you feel. Determine if you read. So Jeremiah 179. Let me just read that I could like cite it to you. I couldn't really say verbatim. So I want to read it.
The heart is more deceitful than anything else and is desperately sick who can understand it when you say I'm not doing it because I don't feel like it.
That is a deception of some sort, right? Like how you feel about doing something is not going to get you to the finish line.
It's what you decide to do and follow through with, right? And so I mean, even just like what Larry said, reading one chapter of a book every day.
You could probably in 10 years have more knowledge than a PhD, like just because you're disciplined in taking an information on a regular basis.
But you would just being no so much information just from that daily practice of reading every day. And so if you don't feel like it, do it anyway, right?
If you if you feel comfortable, do it like say this is dedicated to the Lord. At least I wouldn't say indefinitely, but I would say at least for this period of time, I'm giving this over to the Lord.
And then you have something you gotta, you owe, right? And so you need to pay that. Now I wouldn't say do that flippantly, but there are ways you can commit to yourself or I think have a Bible reading buddy, someone who's reading or doing reading similarly to you.
So you can talk to them about it. You know, what did you think about that? Because sometimes that's helpful just having conversations about Bible reading.
Here's another one. Know what you're going to read next. However, you determine that whether you're like Nola, where you use an app to determine that or Molly, she has a devotional book, it's going to give you the date and you read the date.
You know, or whatever it is, maybe you have like, like what I like to do is I have a checklist with all the books or a mental checklist, at least, but has all the books to the Bible on it.
And then I go through and I say, okay, I've read that one. I've read that one and I just I don't read them in order. I read them in whatever's helpful to me.
And sometimes if I'm just say, like I haven't read Zephaniah for a while and I can't really remember what's in it. That's usually how I look at the book and if I can't remember, how does that book go then I'll read it.
Like that's kind of my method, but whatever it is, have a way to know what you're reading next, right?
Have a Bible that is easy, understandable and enjoyable to read. That's important. If it frustrates you, you won't do it.
So and that might mean, okay, well, I use this version of the Bible just for reading because there are some Bibles that are easier to read that use English language better or they use.
It's not coming to my head, but they use a translation style that instead of word-for-word, it's basically they translate sentences, which is probably in a lot of ways a better way to translate because meaning comes in sentences not word-for-word.
So New American Standard is difficult and clunky, but if you use to it and you like it, do that, but I would say maybe New King James or Christian Standard or NIV.
There's really ESV is pretty readable, but there's Bibles where you may be not studying, but you are just for ease of read and understand or familiarity that might be something to do.
But you're going to do things you like to do. So get something you like to do. Maybe you like get a journaling Bible, has room to write in or get a Bible with large print so you're not having to squint so hard when you're reading or whatever it is, but just take time to think about what's going to make this pleasant for me because you're going to do things you like to do.
Oh, however, there's a saying, don't put off running until you get a new pair of shoes. Don't say, I'll start reading my Bible when I get a new, better Bible I like, but I haven't had time to go get it, and so I'm not going to do it until I get it.
That's how you end up never running, right? They say, don't put off running until you get a new pair of shoes. Just start running and then get shoes when you're able to.
So that's a way to make it better, not a reason to start.
Okay, go the second page. That's about finding time, Bible study disciplines, like how am I going to do it every day?
So here's just about reading your Bible. Begin with a prayer. You're going to study your Bible, always begin with a prayer.
I like Psalm 119, 18, open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law, right? It's just as I read it, help me to see.
I think that's such an important practice to get into, and that's if you're reading your Bible, if you're reading a devotional.
If you're reading a book that has kind of teaching on how to apply the Bible to certain situations, pray for wisdom in that, because in James chapter 1 it says,
if you lack wisdom, ask the Lord, and he'll give it to you. And so that's, I think, overuse that promise.
It doesn't say he might, he says he will, and so overuse that and seek wisdom at all times.
Read what you plan to read. I think this is a really important thing, because a lot of people, they'll be like,
okay, I'm going to read like 50 chapters today. And then they just like, like I only planned, but I'm going to be ahead.
And then they burn themselves out and then they stop and they never finish reading the Bible ever because they didn't just stick to the plan.
So rather than overdoing it, underdoing it, just, okay, do what you plan to do. Don't lose steam, but stick to the time you set aside.
Here's another one. People, especially routine oriented people, be willing to slow down and consider what you're reading, even if it means you read less that day.
So sometimes if you're just reading to finish, you won't remember a thing you read. And so just saying, okay, look, it's okay for me to stop and consider.
You know, I decided one, like earlier this year, I didn't fall through with it, but I wanted to read Matthew and then just write notes on what I thought.
And I would get like two or three, like one little section a day, if that. And then I would like write pages, and I was thinking, this is not going to work well because I, but you know, he's just like, okay, that was too slow, but you know, just taking the time to read and just write down your thoughts on it.
Why is that important? How's that helped me? What could I say about that? Just being willing to do that because the goal is not to check the box I read my Bible.
The goal is to know what's inside of the Bible. And so sometimes that's going to mean slow down, consider what's being said, especially when you're reading prophets or Jesus or the epistles, like there's the prophets.
God speaks in such an interesting and insightful way. It's hard not to just stand and listen to that sometimes, like even what we read here in Jeremiah.
You know, this passage, I've been thinking about it this week because it has a might make appearance in my sermon this morning.
But in verse 10 says, either Lord searched the heart, I test the mind, even to give each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.
I just find out so fascinating is, okay, so what does searching the heart and testing the mind have to do with your deeds?
Giving according to your deeds. That's what I was kind of mulling over because it seems like you can have the best intentions and do nothing.
And who cares if he searched your mind? You're getting it according to your deeds.
But then you think, well, what if, you know, if you read just a few verses prior, it says, if you trust in man, you're going to have problems.
If you trust in God, you won't have problems. But what if your deeds seem as if they're righteous, but you are doing them because you trust in man?
That's it. That seems like a problem. Yeah, because you're going to get repaid according to your deeds, but the intention of your heart plays a role in your deeds where you're trusting in God and then your deeds are good.
Now God says, okay, you'll be repaid good for that. I was just thinking about that is thinking it's interesting.
In one sense, it has, it doesn't matter if you have great intentions, the best of intentions that do nothing.
God's searching your heart does not matter at all. But if you have, if you're putting your trust in idols and in man and your actions seem very righteous, your actions are done for evil motives.
And so that discount. So anyway, I just think that's it. But that's an, that's a, you might have to sit and think about. I had to sit and think about that for a while to decide, okay, what does this mean exactly?
Why is this important? Why, why doesn't he just look at what you do? But, you know, you might be reading through, you might see that, you might say, okay, I'm not finishing my reading this morning.
I'm going to think about this little part of your deeds.
So I have this, I have a lot of these suggestions. I don't want to go over all of them. We're running low on time.
And I want to spend a little time here talking about Jesus and his temptations.
But if you go through this, you know, what it says does include time to follow up on your curiosity. To me, reading your Bibles partly about becoming curious about things and then trying to figure out.
Answer your own questions and use cross draft for all the tools we use in this class. I would say do that.
And the other thing I'm trying to get across is don't try and conform to what works for somebody else. Find something that works for you.
Whatever it happens to be, however it comes, like just take some time to consider what works for me well.
Not what do my parents do or what did that guy I really respect tell me I should do it should look like or a lot of times the most outspoken people on how to do stuff are the routine oriented people.
And I am not a routine oriented person. And so you they give me that advice and it just does not work for me at all. And I know that.
So I have to do it a different way. And so just learn, OK, what am I like? What's going to work for me? The bottom line is do it. Let's let's make it happen.
So I want to spend a minute and ask this question. Look on the left side column on the back of your page. How do Jesus resist temptation?
So I don't want to take the time to read these, but you have the three temptations of Jesus. First is turn these rocks into bread.
Second is cast yourself from the pinnacle of the temple and the angels will bury you up.
And the third is all these things I will give to you if you bow down and worship me. So Satan says, worship me and I'll give you my I'll I'll transform my authority to you.
So as you read through that, let's just go by memory since we probably know. Turn these rocks into bread. What was Jesus's answer?
If you it's an open book test, if you want to get your Bible out, what was that?
Okay, Molly, Molly said the specific it is written. And then he says, man should not live by bread alone, but by everywhere that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Okay, cast yourself off. Here's the Bible verse. He will give his angels charge over you that if that he'll bury you up, lest you strike your foot against the stone.
If you want people to know you're the Christ, like the the pinnacle of the temple was basically there was a wall over the Kidron Valley.
And it was the highest wall, but it was in a public area. So Satan's like jump off, float back up and let people know you're the Christ.
Right? Demonstrate yourself. Like give him irrefutable proof. What was Jesus's answer? It is written. Okay. What was written?
Don't put God to the test. Now all these, he showed them all the kingdoms of the world and all their glory. All these things I'll give to you.
If you bow down and worship me, what was Jesus's answer? What was his answer? It is written. And then he quotes scripture.
You should worship God and serve him only. Now here is bonus. You get an extra star, extra point on this if you're going to answer this.
Where did Jesus's quotations come from? There's three of them. Old Testament. Good. Good. He wasn't quoting the New Testament yet. Yeah. All right.
What was he quoting? No? No? No? No, it's all. It's interesting when you figure it out. You can look at your cross references if you want to cheat. I'll give you just a minute because we don't have a lot of time.
He said, okay, where did he quote? What? Nope. What did you say? I heard someone say it. Deuteronomy.
Three times Deuteronomy 6, 12, 6, 13, and 8, 3. Why is that significant?
It is the instruction of the law. If you wanted to cheat, you could look at your paperwork. But let's read Deuteronomy 17.
And we'll read 18 through 20. Now it shall come about when he sets on the throne. So basically most of us are saying one day Israel is going to get a king.
And he's going to sit on the throne. So that's what he's saying. Now it shall come about when he he the king sits on the throne of his kingdom. He shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priest.
It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by carefully observing the words of this law and these statutes.
So when it says the words of this law, I think he's specifically referencing Deuteronomy. He's saying, have your the king is going to have his own copy of Deuteronomy, which is a condensed version of all the laws that you read in Exodus and Leviticus and numbers.
Like it condenses it down. And the king is responsible to write himself a copy and to keep it with him and to read it all the days of his life.
Now what did Jesus do? He knew the text of Deuteronomy. Now how did Jesus write it down? He maybe didn't have a physical copy. Maybe he did. But how did Jesus know it?
Memorization. He could quote scripture. And he corrected Satan by saying, it is written, right? And so you say, okay, well, how did he know it was written?
Because he was familiar with it. I think it's more than he read it. You could read a bunch of stuff and forget it. But if you're familiar enough with it to be able to cite the scripture specifically that answers the problem you're having,
you all know the scripture, right? Jesus knew more scriptures than Deuteronomy because he quotes about many other. But I think it's a significant to see that Jesus followed the prescription of the law as to what a king should do and master and masters it. Now as children of God,
sons and daughters of the king, what should we be doing? We should have a copy and keep it with us. Now not everyone in history has been able to do that. But we are blessed and we need to use what we have available to us.
And so to me, I think it's important for us to keep it with us and read it all the days of our life. This is not what this, I'm going to cite it. I'm not going to get it right. This law is not a, what's he saying?
It's not, it's not a light matter. This is your life. But I can't remember where it says it exactly, but he's like, this is not a law you can cast off. This law is your life. And when we talk about learning the scripture, that's what we're saying. This is your life.
Now I want to say one more thing about this. So Jesus memorized scripture, Luke chapter 2, 46, 47, Jesus was 12 and he was able to challenge his teachers. Now maybe God gave him a special ability to memorize and know scripture. God gave him the tools he needed for the job that he sent him to do.
So I think, you know, God equipped Jesus the way he needed to be equipped. But if anyone says, if like if you're 12, you can follow Jesus as an example.
You can make your own decision to listen to teachers, to know scripture, to be able to ask and answer questions like 12 years old is not too young for that. And I think a lot of times we, we, we will not have high expectations. I heard someone say, they call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Because when you expect little of somebody, you're prejudging them based on characteristics that doesn't mean that doesn't apply, right? And so low expectations is a, for our children is a major problem.
We should, we should have high expectations of our children, expect them to live up to their, to, to high standards that they cannot obtain.
So here's our last little piece. We got like one minute left. This is the self reflection. I want you to spend some time thinking about this. All right.
The average smartphone user spends three and a half hours a day on their phone, looking at their phone screen.
Depending on the generation you end, that can be double or maybe an hour less, but usually three and a half, let's just say that's a good thing. So three and a half hours per day.
I want to ask this question. How much time do you spend just dedicated to attending church each week?
So you're here at this class and then you go to Sunday morning worship. You know what is that going to be?
Two hours an hour and a half for our Sunday morning worship and then 45 minutes for this class. So maybe two, two and a half hours.
So that's less than what the average person spends looking at their phone screen every day.
You say I'm going to add 15 minutes of reading a day to my church time allotment, my, my four god time allotment.
So 15 minutes a day. What is that? About a hundred and 105 minutes or something. So an hour and 40 minutes.
That would add about 50% or more time spent dedicated to God in your week.
If you just go to Sunday morning class, Sunday morning worship, you don't go to 10 church anymore and then you say, okay, now I'm going to start reading my Bible 15 minutes.
And if you did that, you would spend as much time in a week dedicated to worshiping and learning about God as you spend in a day dedicated to whatever you do on your smartphone on average.
Does that sound like a recipe for faithfulness?
That's, that's the thing is we need to stop and like sometimes doing doing some simple addition is going to help you put things into perspective.
Is that what God intended for us to, you know, to entertain ourselves as much in a day as we worship him in a week?
Is that God's intention for our life or and to put like it? So I would just say spend some time act and and we want to not know you can know your screen time.
Just take your phone out. Type in search for screen time. It's in an iPhone. It's in the settings. You know, just grow down. You can see how much time do I spend looking at my phone and if you have other Apple devices, you can see all of them.
How much time do I spend doing this each day versus how much time I spend dedicated to serving the Lord in a week and see where that pans out and I would just say, you know, likely a lot of the problem we see with people falling into sin and we're like,
well, how did they fall into sin? Like I thought they were faithful. If you actually just said, okay, well, what are they doing? How are we spending our time? Where are we dedicating ourselves? That may not always be the case.
There's other other mitigating reasons, but I would say, why don't we see growth here? Well, that might be the reason why and I just think, you know, we need to just realize this is important.
This is your life, right? So doing these things, knowing how to study your Bible, reading your Bible regularly, having teaching in your life, seeking wisdom, that's your life.
And, you know, you always say, okay, when I'm on my deathbed, am I going to say I should have worked more?
Am I going to say I should have posted one more time on Facebook? Well, maybe some people would say that.
That would be my first time maybe, like not everyone posts on Facebook. Okay, I wouldn't say that. But, you know, you say, what should I have done?
Well, I should have invested in my family. I should have invested in spiritually. I wish I'd have saved one more soul.
I wish I'd have shared the gospel when I had the opportunity, because now it's time to go get repaid for my deeds.
And what if God just has a scream for you? And it just has, you know, what they say, three hours a day turns into basically one day per week,
which means you spend 50, 24 hour days per year, staring at a scream.
Now, what if God took that? And then he just said, through your life, here's what you spent on entertainment.
Here's what you spent on knowing me. Here's what you spent on serving and worshiping me.
What if that was just, I'm going to, I'm going to repay you according to your deeds.
Would you be proud of that? No, those numbers. And he's like, and also I'm going to search your heart.
And I'm going to see what you really valued. What was really your love, the love of your heart.
I'm going to see what that looked like and see if it was me or if it was these other things.
You know, and so what we, you know, is we got to be looking at the end of the road and say, okay, is there value in knowing my Bible and knowing my Lord?
And is it worth my time today? So let's, let's go ahead and close with the word of prayer.