SPEAKER_00: Okay, how's everybody today?
SPEAKER_00: You guys doing well?
SPEAKER_00: We're good as long as we're in the air conditioning, right?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, some point the weather's got to break, right?
SPEAKER_00: I'm beginning to feel like we leave in we live in uh Exodus, Egypt, right?
SPEAKER_00: This is like some kind of a plague going on.
SPEAKER_00: All right, let me uh pray for us and we'll get rolling.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for today.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for a chance to uh come and uh be together, spend time together, fellowship together, study your word together, break bread together.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the folks that um made lunch for us today.
SPEAKER_00: We ask your blessings on them as they serve us and bless us.
SPEAKER_00: We ask that you be our teacher today and teach us from your word.
SPEAKER_00: Uh equip us to be able to share your word.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you most of all for the gift of salvation that comes through Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: In his name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: And everybody said, Amen.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I like this group because you guys, we can let our hair down in here because just us, right?
SPEAKER_00: I ignore the fact that this goes on the podcast and I just talk to us, right?
SPEAKER_00: So I got certain pet peeves as a pastor.
SPEAKER_00: There are just certain pet peeves I have in church, okay?
SPEAKER_00: One of those is everybody ought to have a quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: Like everybody's got to have a quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: Like we can't do anything if the church isn't having a quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: So you got to have a quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: So that's why we talk about it all the time and stuff like the chronological Bible this time and all that.
SPEAKER_00: Second pet peeve.
SPEAKER_00: Invite somebody to church, please.
SPEAKER_00: Church people don't invite people to church every week.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're supposed to invite people to church.
SPEAKER_00: It's amazing to me how many people don't invite people to church.
SPEAKER_00: It's just incredible.
SPEAKER_00: So, like, bring somebody to church.
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of how that works.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, another uh I have several other pet peeves, but um, you know, one of them is uh people come up and when they could ask a question, they give an accusation.
SPEAKER_00: You so-and-so, so-and-so.
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, I didn't.
SPEAKER_00: We didn't do it that way.
SPEAKER_00: This is what really happened.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, okay.
SPEAKER_00: Well, why didn't you just ask me instead of jumping on me like that, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a deal.
SPEAKER_00: And uh I had a uh after a business meeting at my church, first cabot lady came up who was a friend, who was a friend.
SPEAKER_00: We'd done ministry together, all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: So she comes up after after it's over.
SPEAKER_00: I said, Hey, how you doing?
SPEAKER_00: And she got, I mean, she got in my grill like nobody's business.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this was a total mama bear thing.
SPEAKER_00: You did this, you did that.
SPEAKER_00: She's pointing her finger at me.
SPEAKER_00: I'm getting this business right here.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, if you were a guy, this wouldn't go this way, right?
SPEAKER_00: And she's going on and on and on and on, and she, all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And then she says, and you know what?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I can't even talk to you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid to talk to you because every time I say something, you do that lawyer thing and you change it.
SPEAKER_00: And I all I could think to tell her was after that berating, I'm sure glad you're intimidated.
SPEAKER_00: What would that have been if you weren't afraid to talk to me, you know?
SPEAKER_00: But it's like, why don't you just ask a question first, right?
SPEAKER_00: And then here's my other pet peeve.
SPEAKER_00: We've been in church a long time.
SPEAKER_00: Most people in church, man, we've been in church a long time.
SPEAKER_00: Now we're, praise the Lord, we're reaching a lot of people who hadn't been in church, they hadn't been in church in a long time, all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the deal: this is one of my pet peeves.
SPEAKER_00: If you you only get 12 years in school and then you graduate from high school.
SPEAKER_00: And we got folks, they've been in church 70 years, and they come up and say, Well, Pastor, our teacher is retiring, and so you need to find us a teacher.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, y'all have been collectively in Sunday school for 1,276 years in your class.
SPEAKER_00: I am not finding you a teacher.
SPEAKER_00: At some point, graduate from Sunday school.
SPEAKER_00: Is that terrible?
SPEAKER_00: Like, graduate from Sunday school.
SPEAKER_00: Teach a lesson.
SPEAKER_00: My dad taught a Sunday school like that at our church.
SPEAKER_00: I've mentioned before, he taught 52 consecutive years.
SPEAKER_00: So uh they're in their married Sunday school class.
SPEAKER_00: He taught for 35 years, fifth and sixth grade boys.
SPEAKER_00: And if you survive that, like you have all kinds of crowns in heaven, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so he and mom literally joined, he retires because he had just retired professionally, they wanted to travel, and they do all kinds of ministry at church, so they're not retiring from ministry, they do all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: So they decided they would go to a married class together for a little while.
SPEAKER_00: So he resigned for the first time in 35 years.
SPEAKER_00: They went to a married class.
SPEAKER_00: Now he's you know 62 years old or something, and it's the first time they've been in a married class together.
SPEAKER_00: And uh so they go in there, and within three months, they've already had him substitute multiple times, and within four months, the teacher retired and dumped the class on my dad.
SPEAKER_00: So he taught another 17 years or something in this class.
SPEAKER_00: And so I was on staff at the church, that was before I moved to Arkansas for number those years, and so he would get bogged down with something where they would travel, and he'd call me and say, Son, I need you to come substitute my Sunday school class.
SPEAKER_00: I said, What do you mean substitute your Sunday school class?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I need a teacher because we're traveling, I'm taking your mom somewhere.
SPEAKER_00: And I said, first of all, I'm glad you're taking care of mom, but second of all, you got a hundred people in your Sunday school class, and most of them have been members at Bellevue since before I was born.
SPEAKER_00: Make them teach the class.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody's got to graduate from Sunday school.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody who is a Christian and has been a Christian for any normal amount of time needs to be able to teach a Sunday school class.
SPEAKER_00: Am I okay?
SPEAKER_00: Is that good?
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: So here's what we're gonna do.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna teach y'all how to write a Sunday school lesson.
SPEAKER_00: So here we go.
SPEAKER_00: I am going to use uh the sermon from Sunday, and I know some of you guys got good preaching at your home churches on Sunday, but it's a good classroom for us on how you come up with that lesson.
SPEAKER_00: So I've got more notes here than you're going to get.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I'm just gonna highlight some things that I that I see that are issues, and everybody ought to be able to teach a lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you don't want to teach and you think you can't, after this is over, you can repent and ask for forgiveness to Jesus because you can, number one.
SPEAKER_00: Number two, uh, hopefully this helps you in your study.
SPEAKER_00: This is a lot about how you study the Word of God and how you draw from it.
SPEAKER_00: And the next thing is you may not teach a lesson, but you got people in your life, they need an encouraging word from the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And you can give them an encouraging word from the Lord, and this is all profitable and valuable for that.
SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're gonna do, and we're gonna take that lesson and we're gonna break it apart.
SPEAKER_00: How to write a Bible lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so you have the um you have the uh text.
SPEAKER_00: Do you have the text?
SPEAKER_00: I thought she typed it on there.
SPEAKER_00: Let me read you the text.
SPEAKER_00: This is a pretty, alright, it's in there in your sheets, right?
SPEAKER_00: So you see that you can read the scripture with me.
SPEAKER_00: Um we're gonna do that just quickly so you know what we're doing, but then we're gonna talk about how to make a lesson out of that.
SPEAKER_00: So here's this is the story of Ezekiel and the dry bones.
SPEAKER_00: If you've been in church a long time, you've probably heard reference to this.
SPEAKER_00: We sing songs about these are the days of Ezekiel and all that.
SPEAKER_00: So here's the passage of that.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Ezekiel is a prophet in Israel, uh in Judah, actually.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's been a civil war, the nation's been divided into two countries.
SPEAKER_00: There's the two tribes, and then there's the ten tribes.
SPEAKER_00: The ten tribes have already been conquered by other people.
SPEAKER_00: Uh the two tribes, Judah, they've been walking away from the Lord a long time.
SPEAKER_00: He warned them through Jeremiah and everybody else, you're going to be conquered.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to have Babylon come conquer you.
SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, now Babylon has been conquering them.
SPEAKER_00: They several times would come in and do battle with Israelites.
SPEAKER_00: They would defeat them.
SPEAKER_00: They would take people in captivity off.
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel was taken in captivity off with people like Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
SPEAKER_00: So he is now a prophet in Babylon, speaking to the children of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: And so once they're defeated and all this is happening, he's recently had a guy come from another captive group who tells him the walls have been destroyed in Jerusalem, the temple has been destroyed, and it's been defiled, and it's all a mess and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: And so now the children of Israel are in this despondent state that we have been defeated and we have no more hope.
SPEAKER_00: And so God shows up into Ezekiel's life and he is going to give him a message here.
SPEAKER_00: And so the way that he shares with Ezekiel is important in this.
SPEAKER_00: So here's, we'll just read it, and then I'll talk to about, I'll talk about how to write a lesson out of it.
SPEAKER_00: But here's what he says, Ezekiel 37, verse 1 The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord, and he set me down in the middle of a valley.
SPEAKER_00: So this is that we most scholars think this is a vision that he's given him.
SPEAKER_00: It may have been a real valley, either way, it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_00: In the spirit, it's God putting him into a setting that God has created, and he is creating a movie here that he's going to unpack for Ezekiel to try to make a point to Ezekiel.
SPEAKER_00: And so he says, He led me around in this valley, it was full of bones.
SPEAKER_00: And he led me around them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.
SPEAKER_00: So you got to paint a picture of this.
SPEAKER_00: He's in this big valley, and it is just the aftermath of battle, if you want to look at it that way.
SPEAKER_00: It's just skeleton after skeleton, and they've been there so long that the bones have dried up.
SPEAKER_00: They're brittle.
SPEAKER_00: It's just this awful picture of desolation.
SPEAKER_00: So God has put him in this setting where he's thinking this is the worst, most desolate thing he's ever seen.
SPEAKER_00: God asks Ezekiel, son of man, can these bones live?
SPEAKER_00: And Ezekiel responds, O Lord God, only you know.
SPEAKER_00: Then God says to Ezekiel, Prophesy over these bones and say to them, in other words, preach to them.
SPEAKER_00: O Lord, uh, he says, uh, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So he is preaching to the bones now what God has said.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and then thus says the Lord God, to these bones, behold, I, God, will cause breath to enter you, the bones, and you the bones shall live, and I, God, will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and to cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So Ezekiel says, I prophesied as I was commanded.
SPEAKER_00: And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.
SPEAKER_00: Now get a picture here.
SPEAKER_00: This is a valley filled with dry bones.
SPEAKER_00: If bones are starting to come together, they're starting to come together all over this valley, and so this is a roar going on.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this sounds like a train wreck.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you got all these skeletons rattling and all these bones together coming, all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: It's this incredible picture and vision of what's happening.
SPEAKER_00: And then he says in verse 8, and I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come on them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them.
SPEAKER_00: So he watches literally they come back to life.
SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a virtual reality CSI show or something that you see where they take some skeleton and they run it through something and then they tell you what the person looked like.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's literally that kind of deal, but in real life.
SPEAKER_00: And so he said, but he says there's no breath in them.
SPEAKER_00: So God says to Ezekiel in verse 9, Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath.
SPEAKER_00: Now we're speaking, and he's talking about the four winds and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live.
SPEAKER_00: And this is a picture of speaking and calling out in prayer, basically, to the Holy Spirit to come and move.
SPEAKER_00: This four winds and the extent of the earth and all that is a picture of God as creator, and he's asking for God's breath to come and to breathe into them.
SPEAKER_00: So as I prophesied, as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine that picture.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 11, then God said to me, Son of man, these bones, and now he's going to explain what he's doing, these bones are the house of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: What you've looked at, this desolation, is what my people feel in captivity and in judgment and in destruction, and that's the spirit of the people that we see.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, they say, the people of Israel say, our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost or destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, We are indeed cut off.
SPEAKER_00: That is the spirit of the people, and God has illustrated the spirit of the Israelites and the hopelessness that they were feeling in this moment by this picture of these dry bones.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, prophesy and say to them, the people of Israel, thus says the Lord God, behold, I will open your graves, the children of Israel, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.
SPEAKER_00: I will bring you into the land of Israel, and you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.
SPEAKER_00: He keeps repeating, O my people, O my people.
SPEAKER_00: He is now speaking into this hopelessness.
SPEAKER_00: Their hope is lost.
SPEAKER_00: He wants Ezekiel to understand the extent of their hopelessness by this whole picture of dry bones and all this business.
SPEAKER_00: And when God reinvigorates them, he is now telling, that is what I'm going to do for Israel.
SPEAKER_00: And Ezekiel, I want that in your heart, and I want you to preach that message to my people, and I want you to preach it, believing in what you've just seen.
SPEAKER_00: And now he keeps saying, O my people, O my people, remind them that they are my people.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Um, I shall bring, I and you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.
SPEAKER_00: And I will put my spirit within you.
SPEAKER_00: Remember the breath coming into the dry bones and bringing them alive.
SPEAKER_00: And you shall live, and I will place you in your own land, and then you shall know that I am the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I have spoken and I will do it, declares the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And the way that Lord is typed right there, you know that that means Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: That's the covenant name of God.
SPEAKER_00: So he keeps repeating, O my people, O my people, O my people, and he reminds them and puts his thumbprint on this.
SPEAKER_00: This says the covenant-keeping God of Israel, that I will bring you back to your land and restore you.
SPEAKER_00: So this is a prophecy and a reiteration of a prophecy God has given that one day he will restore the nation of Israel, the people of Israel, to their land, and he will be faithful to those promises.
SPEAKER_00: And he is reminding him that he is the promise-keeping God.
SPEAKER_00: And so, in essence, what he's telling him is listen, I need you to reiterate to my people that they do not need to be hopeless because my promises are real, and I will affirm my promises in the same way I brought this valley of dry bones to life.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: So there's the lesson.
SPEAKER_00: As you continue to read through the chapter, there's more of those prophecies that affirm that.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the textbook we're going to use.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to show you just a couple of things in the process of how we do this, and the process of how I how I do that.
SPEAKER_00: Not that I'm the greatest preacher or Bible teacher, but everybody ought to be able to teach a lesson.
SPEAKER_00: You ought to be able to have a verse or a passage and be able to come up with a message that that person in your life needs or your grandkids need to hear or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: If somebody in your Sunday school class, if your teacher's not there, don't call a pastor asking for a Sunday school teacher.
SPEAKER_00: Go volunteer to be a substitute in your class, right?
SPEAKER_00: So here's the first thing I want you to see about it.
SPEAKER_00: When we're writing a Bible message, our first goal is to be clear with the message that God has written into that passage.
SPEAKER_00: It does not do any good to babble, to confuse people, to not have a point.
SPEAKER_00: We ought to have a clear, specific point that we are communicating.
SPEAKER_00: Now, all of us have been in sermons where we couldn't figure out what the person was trying to say, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so that experience that's not teaching that message.
SPEAKER_00: Because the whole point in teaching is to get a message from God's word that is clear and clearly impacts each person's life.
SPEAKER_00: And so the way that I teach that mechanism, I teach that with our staff, I teach that young preachers, remember talking to them or whatever, is what I want everybody to do before you speak, you need to be able to write your entire message, the four corners of your message, into 30 words or less.
SPEAKER_00: If it's not that plain and that clear, you are not ready to teach that lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's an exercise that's important because a passage like this, there's at least seven different sermons in here.
SPEAKER_00: And there's all kinds of illustrations that are incredible in this passage of scripture.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's an incredibly rich passage of scripture, but I feel like I say that about every chapter in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: It is all the living, powerful word of God, and it's all incredible.
SPEAKER_00: And so what you've got to do is go from here's something I want to say, or here's all this stuff in Scripture, and I'm trying to dump as much of that truckload of stuff from the Bible onto this as I can.
SPEAKER_00: That's not how it works.
SPEAKER_00: You want to get a clear word that this is what God is saying.
SPEAKER_00: This is one of the things God's saying, and this is what He's laid on my heart to say to you.
SPEAKER_00: So when you get that in your mind, that is 80% of the battle.
SPEAKER_00: If you get that word and you shape it down into that message, then the rest of it is just expounding on that message.
SPEAKER_00: It also keeps you from tacking on stuff that doesn't need to be there.
SPEAKER_00: It teaches you from it keeps you from chasing rabbits and everything else because you have the four corners of your message.
SPEAKER_00: So, like when I wrote this message, you'll see from the title, it was the God of Hope.
SPEAKER_00: And so this was only about God as the God of hope and how he brings hope.
SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of other themes in there, there's a bunch of other illustrations in there, but that was the message that God laid on my heart to bring.
SPEAKER_00: So now let me walk you through kind of a process.
SPEAKER_00: So, how do we get to that clear message?
SPEAKER_00: So, how do we get to that?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing is you have to read the Word of God and study the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: So, real simply, most of that's pretty easy.
SPEAKER_00: Study the passage, interpret the passage so you know what it's about.
SPEAKER_00: You're not just uh taking a verse and just hanging whatever your opinions are on some random verse you pulled out or whatever, and then you have to apply that truth.
SPEAKER_00: But the third bullet in there is what's important.
SPEAKER_00: When you're going to teach a lesson and you have to be clear as you're studying through that lesson, you have to learn to recognize this is what God wants me to teach.
SPEAKER_00: This is what God wants me to teach.
SPEAKER_00: Again, in Scripture, it's all filled with stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, God's word is incredible beyond anything we can imagine in the lessons of it.
SPEAKER_00: But if you're going to teach that lesson, you what is the 30-word clear message I have?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you are listening to the Lord to tell you which one it is.
SPEAKER_00: So when I'm reading chapter 37, because we're going through Chronological Bible, we're moving into Ezekiel, when I'm going through that passage, I'm listening for God to tell me which one it is.
SPEAKER_00: As I read this passage, I could not get past this particular verse where he says that their hope has perished.
SPEAKER_00: What's the verse here in the screen?
SPEAKER_00: Verse 11.
SPEAKER_00: He said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Look how they say, Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished.
SPEAKER_00: As I read through that, in fact, I sat down with one of the guys on staff and he asked me, What are you preaching this week?
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I'm preaching Ezekiel 37.
SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of going this with it.
SPEAKER_00: But the more I read, the more I kept hitting this as a speed bump in the whole passage.
SPEAKER_00: I could not get past it.
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times that's how God speaks to us.
SPEAKER_00: That's how he pulls out that scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So you were always listening as you're studying, as you're interpreting it, as you're you don't even want to get to the application because what are you going to apply if you don't have your 30 word deal?
SPEAKER_00: And so in this passage of scripture, with all of this stuff, I got stuck on that phrase.
SPEAKER_00: And he kept saying, Our hope has perished.
SPEAKER_00: And then he would talk to me about people need hope.
SPEAKER_00: People need hope.
SPEAKER_00: We have so many people going through so many things, and there's so many struggles in that, and you've got to.
SPEAKER_00: Remind them that we're a God of hope.
SPEAKER_00: And then I begin to think God here is speaking to his children, and they are hopeless.
SPEAKER_00: And this whole dry bone thing is illustrating to Ezekiel how hopeless they are.
SPEAKER_00: And as a prophet, he's trying to get them to understand I need to get my message of hope and faithfulness to my promises back in front of them because they are saying their hope has perished and it has not because I got and their hope, and you need to get this in front of them.
SPEAKER_00: And he even went, it was so important, he went through this whole rigmarole of this whole dry bone thing and everything else that he put in front of him because he's trying to get Ezekiel to understand.
SPEAKER_00: This is serious, Ezekiel.
SPEAKER_00: They feel that bad.
SPEAKER_00: That's that message.
SPEAKER_00: And so I kept getting it.
SPEAKER_00: So that became my hook, that became my anchor.
SPEAKER_00: That was the 30-word message.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense so far?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Alright.
SPEAKER_00: Now when you begin to get that, or if you're looking for that word, here's a help to you.
SPEAKER_00: As you work through those things, ask these questions of the passage.
SPEAKER_00: If you hadn't quite figured out what God is speaking to you about, or you hadn't figured out which one, you may have had two or three threads.
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times in my sermon notes, I just start making notes, and I'll have two or three columns of things that potentially are in that passage of Scripture that God wants to do.
SPEAKER_00: How do I narrow it down to the one?
SPEAKER_00: I look at these questions.
SPEAKER_00: What does it say about God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: And this passage, all of a sudden, it's what does it say about God?
SPEAKER_00: That he's the God of hope, that he loves his people, that he sees their despondency, that he steps into that, that he equips the preacher, the prophet, to be able to speak with a greater insight and passion about the hope that God brings when he speaks to them.
SPEAKER_00: Other things you might see, what is the primary truth in that passage?
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes God's beating you over the head with what that passage is about.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it is about how we respond to it.
SPEAKER_00: Is there a sin to confess or avoid, a promise to claim, a habit to create?
SPEAKER_00: And that deal, when it hits you, man, my people need to have a quiet time, or they need to have a greater love for the Lord, or they need to be in prayer, or they need to whatever.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's one of those things.
SPEAKER_00: But wherever it is, God is going to trip you through that, and He's going to keep making you trip over that one thing until you realize, okay, that's where I'm going to live.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I need to study.
SPEAKER_00: Then you draft your 30-word message.
SPEAKER_00: So I gave you my 30 words.
SPEAKER_00: I cheated, I think it's 33.
SPEAKER_00: I cheated for three.
SPEAKER_00: But here's what it says: God is always faithful to his promise, so there is always hope.
SPEAKER_00: God, creator of life and resurrection power, always keeps his promises.
SPEAKER_00: The source of our hope is that God keeps his promises.
SPEAKER_00: Another source of our hope is that if God can raise these dry bones and bring breathe life into them, there is nothing that can get in the way of him accomplishing his promise.
SPEAKER_00: So I chose those words.
SPEAKER_00: God reveals himself to remind us he is always the God of hope.
SPEAKER_00: And that's that whole picture of what God is doing and giving this illustration of all this, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so that's my 30-word deal.
SPEAKER_00: And that becomes the four walls of the box that is the perimeter of this message.
SPEAKER_00: And so everything else that I'm going to put in there has to be in the box, and anything that's outside of the box, I need to cut it out and leave it on the cutting room floor.
SPEAKER_00: Then you get structure.
SPEAKER_00: If you want to be clear and you don't want to make things confusing and wander around everything else, then you have to have some structure to what you're doing.
SPEAKER_00: And so after you've drafted your 30-word message, you begin to create this structure.
SPEAKER_00: The big things of it are open.
SPEAKER_00: The opening, why does this matter?
SPEAKER_00: Why does this matter?
SPEAKER_00: Then you read the scripture.
SPEAKER_00: You always read the scripture and you always come back to the scripture, and it's always about scripture.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not some Greg message, it's not your message, it's God's message.
SPEAKER_00: How often in this passage of Scripture does God say to Ezekiel, you prophesy to the bones what I said.
SPEAKER_00: You prophesy to the wind what I said.
SPEAKER_00: Then when he gives them the lesson, you go to my people and you tell them this lesson.
SPEAKER_00: And it's always the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: And you're going to come back to the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when you read the word of God, you need to do something to make it come alive, right?
SPEAKER_00: So I modeled some of that with you here.
SPEAKER_00: This is an easy passage of scripture to teach this from.
SPEAKER_00: How simple is this, these set of words?
SPEAKER_00: And he led me among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.
SPEAKER_00: Like that's kind of a boring sentence.
SPEAKER_00: Unless you spend a little time thinking through what's actually happening here.
SPEAKER_00: And then when you read later on that it says, those dry bones represent my people whose perspective of life is our hope has perished.
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, you get, this is way more than just a collection of bones, right?
SPEAKER_00: This is a major thing going on here.
SPEAKER_00: All this descriptiveness of the bones rattled and the sound and they stood up and then sinews and then skin, and then we had to go through another deal to the breath of life and all that.
SPEAKER_00: God is painting an incredible picture to Ezekiel.
SPEAKER_00: And there's power in that picture of all the ways that God could have explained to Ezekiel, he chose to do it this way.
SPEAKER_00: So make that scripture come alive.
SPEAKER_00: Help people understand this is what's happening in the scripture, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so you explain the scripture.
SPEAKER_00: You can amplify it.
SPEAKER_00: If it's a story, like I just did.
SPEAKER_00: You can give context so all of a sudden it makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: You can make the story come alive.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's picking on me about last week in the sermon when I was going, whoosh, throw it in the fire, who throw it in the fire.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's laughing about that.
SPEAKER_00: You remember it, right?
SPEAKER_00: Make the story come alive.
SPEAKER_00: Or you may have key words or concepts that are important.
SPEAKER_00: There's an illustration in here.
SPEAKER_00: When they say our hope is perished, the word hope, if you're defining that word, and I made this point on Sunday, the word hope is a confidence about what will happen in the future.
SPEAKER_00: It's not hope in the English sense that we hope something might happen, but it is a positive looking forward to what will happen.
SPEAKER_00: And it's that word in Hebrew, it's that word in Greek in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: And what they are literally saying is what we expected to happen because God promised it to happen, we have given up any belief that God will meet his promises, and we are therefore no longer expecting what God promised to happen.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: Man, all of a sudden, hopelessness begins to get a different definition when you start explaining that, right?
SPEAKER_00: So just a few things like that make that come alive.
SPEAKER_00: After you've explained the scripture, you want to illustrate it.
SPEAKER_00: You want to illustrate it.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of different ways to do it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going through all those, but one thing I want to tell you is there should always be a spiritual purpose to your illustration.
SPEAKER_00: You can tell a story, you can give an explanation, you can do some logic thing, but you but you you it's gotta fit the moment.
SPEAKER_00: It's gotta attach to a thing.
SPEAKER_00: As a young preacher, I was preaching on a Wednesday night at my home church, and man, I had this great story, and I couldn't wait to tell this story.
SPEAKER_00: It was a great story.
SPEAKER_00: I had gotten on an airplane, and I mean I could really build this story.
SPEAKER_00: I was practicing law.
SPEAKER_00: I was headed off to this deal.
SPEAKER_00: I was going to take depositions, and I was the lead attorney on a thing in Portland, Oregon, and I was so excited.
SPEAKER_00: I was a young lawyer, I was being the leader, I was building all this up.
SPEAKER_00: So I get to Portland and I fly.
SPEAKER_00: At that point, Northwest Airlines.
SPEAKER_00: Some of y'all remember Northwest.
SPEAKER_00: They hub was in Memphis.
SPEAKER_00: They you went to Minneapolis and then I went to Portland, right?
SPEAKER_00: So it's good.
SPEAKER_00: And so I took all these depositions and I discovered another witness we had not found, and I went and had this meeting with this other witness, and it made me late for my flight.
SPEAKER_00: So I finished this, but I've got this sense of accomplishment.
SPEAKER_00: I've done this thing.
SPEAKER_00: I go rushing back to the airport and I'm running through the airport and I'm trying to catch up to my flight, and I start telling go OJ Go jokes.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all remember that?
SPEAKER_00: It was be, you know, and all that, and everybody's laughing, and I got everybody on the edge of their seat, and I'm embellishing this story, and I'm going through this thing, and I get on this plane, and I sit down and I'm sweating through my suit, and because I've been running through the airport, and all this kind of a deal.
SPEAKER_00: And I kind of let back and kind of went to sleep a little bit, just kind of calming down.
SPEAKER_00: And I woke up in time.
SPEAKER_00: We had leveled out, and you know, the pilot comes on and we had leveled out, and the pilot says, Welcome to flight, so and so.
SPEAKER_00: So we've leveled out at 10,000 feet.
SPEAKER_00: We got an X number of hours, we'll be in the hour 40 in the air 45 minutes or so, and we'll be landing in Salt Lake City at so-and-so time.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm panicking.
SPEAKER_00: Salt Lake City, I fly through Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_00: How am I gonna get?
SPEAKER_00: I got on the wrong airplane.
SPEAKER_00: I'm running through the airport, I got on the wrong plane, and all this, you know, I got all this, we land, you know, there's a layover in Salt Lake, and I'm pacing around trying to figure out where I'm going, and I told the story even longer, and I'm telling it now.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm doing all this, and people are laughing, and they're all in this thing, and I got the crowd, it's awesome.
SPEAKER_00: And I finally go, I gotta figure out how to get home.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get in line, I go to the gate, I walk up there.
SPEAKER_00: The whole time I hadn't looked at my tickets.
SPEAKER_00: They're in the breast pocket of my jacket.
SPEAKER_00: I walk up, and the person right in front of me, I've been in line, six people in line.
SPEAKER_00: The person in front of me says, I'm on the flight to Memphis, Tennessee, and I know that we connect from here to Dallas.
SPEAKER_00: Can you tell me if we're gonna make that connection?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, and I pull out my tickets and I look at it, and I am on the right flight after all this panic, right?
SPEAKER_00: The whole place is roaring, everybody's laughing, and I've got this great illustration.
SPEAKER_00: And I say, listen, there's a long difference in truth between here and here.
SPEAKER_00: That was the whole application of this big old long story.
SPEAKER_00: After it's over for another week, every time I saw everybody in church, I bet it happened a hundred times, it happened once.
SPEAKER_00: Man, that's a great story, Greg.
SPEAKER_00: Man, that was such a great.
SPEAKER_00: We were laughing a lot.
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember what the point was, but that was a great story.
SPEAKER_00: 75 people in.
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember what the sermon was about, but that's a great story.
SPEAKER_00: That's a great story.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it.
SPEAKER_00: It's not about the story.
SPEAKER_00: And so we all have those moments we want to tell those stories, but it's not about our illustrations.
SPEAKER_00: And the application ought to be greater than the story.
SPEAKER_00: The application ought to have a point to it.
SPEAKER_00: The story is a distraction if they come up and say, I can't remember what the point was, but that was a great story.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: And so now I will actually have things I will cut out of my sermon because I am concerned that I will have that same experience.
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember what that was about, but it was a great story.
SPEAKER_00: And so, whatever your illustration is, however you do it, whatever it is, it is adding to the point of your 30 words.
SPEAKER_00: It is not distracting from the message that God has made you trip over and over and over to get to your point.
SPEAKER_00: And so the rest of those, I've just put those on there for you so you'll know they're there, so you have a complete kind of a sheet.
SPEAKER_00: The final thing is you're not done until you have given an application.
SPEAKER_00: You have got to tell people.
SPEAKER_00: If you open with why it matters, then you have got to either work through the structure or it's the point of the message, or at the end you give a how-to, how to do it.
SPEAKER_00: This is what I've started telling our staff, and I hear this all the time.
SPEAKER_00: I hear this all the time.
SPEAKER_00: People preach messages and they do all that, and it's great Bible truth, and that's all it is.
SPEAKER_00: Anytime we are giving the word of God to someone, we are not educating them like a professor or a class.
SPEAKER_00: We are encouraging their walk in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The reason God gave us his word is not to tickle our brains, even though it does.
SPEAKER_00: It is to help us to walk with him.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is why I started teaching it now.
SPEAKER_00: The Great Commission says, go therefore, and all the world teaching, you know, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Teaching them to observe whatever I've commanded.
SPEAKER_00: What he teaches us, what he tells us to do is teach them to observe.
SPEAKER_00: Observe.
SPEAKER_00: What are we observing?
SPEAKER_00: The commandments.
SPEAKER_00: But the instruction to us is to teach them to observe.
SPEAKER_00: Now you can't teach them to observe the commandments without teaching the commandments.
SPEAKER_00: But if you've only taught the commandments, you're not obedient to what God's instruction was.
SPEAKER_00: His instruction was teach them to observe.
SPEAKER_00: That's how to.
SPEAKER_00: That's teaching in a way that equips someone to walk with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And the way I work through it is, what are we called to do?
SPEAKER_00: What is clear in that passage?
SPEAKER_00: We're called to have hope.
SPEAKER_00: We're called to recognize the God of hope.
SPEAKER_00: We're called, as Ezekiel was, to have in our own life the hope that God brings and to give that hope and instruction to people.
SPEAKER_00: What are we called to do?
SPEAKER_00: Why are we called to do it?
SPEAKER_00: Because God is always faithful.
SPEAKER_00: When you get to the whole resurrection and the dry bones of all the ways he could have explained it, he explained it with his resurrection power.
SPEAKER_00: And so, why are we called to do it?
SPEAKER_00: Because we serve a risen Savior.
SPEAKER_00: Because God has conquered death and sin through Jesus' Son and accomplished the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why we have hope.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: And how are we equipped to do it?
SPEAKER_00: We are equipped with the promises of God.
SPEAKER_00: We are equipped to be in relationship with Him.
SPEAKER_00: We are to keep our eyes on Him.
SPEAKER_00: We are not to think that God is not faithful to our promises.
SPEAKER_00: We're to recognize that Jesus died on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: He conquered death and sin.
SPEAKER_00: He is faithful to his promises.
SPEAKER_00: And if we are lost hope that we think God's promises are not activated to us, then we got to get back to Jesus because He is always faithful to His promises.
SPEAKER_00: So that's enough of that.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that was helpful.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that sheet is helpful to y'all.
SPEAKER_00: Go volunteer to your Sunday school class to teach next week for them.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for today.
SPEAKER_00: I thank you that ministry, teaching scripture is not something that only degreed pastors do.
SPEAKER_00: It's something that all of us have the privilege and the opportunity to do.
SPEAKER_00: We have the opportunity to teach people around us encouragement, instruction, equipping from your word.
SPEAKER_00: And so, Father, I pray you'll bless these guys.
SPEAKER_00: I pray this will enhance their quiet times, this thought process on what does it say and what are the questions in it and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that they learn how to recognize this is what you want to teach them in that passage they're reading.
SPEAKER_00: But Father, I pray all of us you'll give us a greater passion to go out and tell other people the message of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: To walk in an equipped way where we can share the word of God to people who need the encouragement, the challenge, the conviction, and the equipping of your word.
SPEAKER_00: Bless them as they go out and bless others.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name, amen.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all have a great day.