SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_00: I'm Nate, and I'm glad to be with you today as we were uh worshiping in sort of an intentionally slower manner, different sort of way, because we're going to talk about this idea of meditating on God's word.
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about my years growing up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma at First Wesleyan Church, and my grandfather and his family and my family were part of the church, and my nuclear family, like my dad and all of us sat over here, my grandpa sat clear in the back.
SPEAKER_00: It was a pretty big sanctuary, about twice as big as this space.
SPEAKER_00: But I could always hear my grandfather singing because he had a very distinct voice.
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, if uh he's with Jesus now, and I think he would smile down upon this comment that I'm about to make.
SPEAKER_00: But my brothers and cousins and I will still occasionally lovingly imitate his voice when he sings.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to do it for you now, although I'm pretty good at it.
SPEAKER_00: Very distinct.
SPEAKER_00: And the most distinctive part of my grandfather's voice when he sang was he was half a beat slow.
SPEAKER_00: And he was loud.
SPEAKER_00: And we would be singing, and we would look at each other and say, Grandpa's here today.
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have to look back there, but he had that distinct half a beat slow voice, and we recognized it.
SPEAKER_00: And we've been talking in this series about the idea that we could recognize God's voice.
SPEAKER_00: And scripture not only says we can, it encourages us to listen and hear God speaking.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it kind of uh uh creates this idea that it's normal for God to speak to his people.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, on 15 separate occasions, Jesus said to his listeners have ears to hear, inviting them to hear.
SPEAKER_00: Now, in John chapter 10, he doesn't use that exact language, but it's sort of the key verse for this whole series when Jesus uses a metaphor of sheep and shepherd, and he says, My sheep listen to my voice.
SPEAKER_00: And I know them and they follow me.
SPEAKER_00: Now we we love to know God.
SPEAKER_00: We want to know God, right?
SPEAKER_00: And we want to follow God.
SPEAKER_00: That's why we gather here.
SPEAKER_00: Part of what we do when we gather here is to say God is knowable and God is followable, but it starts with listening.
SPEAKER_00: My sheep listen to my voice.
SPEAKER_00: And if we don't hear from God in some manner, we're kind of left to figure it out ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Because we all need some frame of reference for how to do life.
SPEAKER_00: And so if we don't have God speaking to us, we look inside and say, Well, let me frame my own journey.
SPEAKER_00: Let me be the captain of my faith.
SPEAKER_00: Let me figure it out.
SPEAKER_00: Don't, don't let anybody, or maybe we look around and say, how's everybody else doing?
SPEAKER_00: I'll do what they're doing.
SPEAKER_00: I'll try to figure out the newest trend, the cultural voice that I should be listening to right now, the greatest psychology or philosophy that's out there, and I'll model my life after that, and maybe we'll pursue it in a tribal sort of way towards a group of people here or an ideology there.
SPEAKER_00: But what if there was a voice that wanted to guide us?
SPEAKER_00: What if there was a voice of our shepherd that wanted to lead us?
SPEAKER_00: And we've been making that assumption that that's what scripture teaches.
SPEAKER_00: And in our effort to hear that voice in scripture, we've been introducing, or maybe reintroducing for many of you and talking about this ancient devotional pattern of Lectio Divina.
SPEAKER_00: And it's, I want to be clear, we've we're trying to be clear in this series.
SPEAKER_00: It's not the only way to like engage in scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: That's not the only way to hear God's voice by by far.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about some of those other ways today.
SPEAKER_00: But we're wondering if we would collectively uh at least create the opportunity for you to enter into this practice of holy reading, lectio divino, uh, holy reading of scripture.
SPEAKER_00: This approach to scripture emphasizes reading the scriptures prayerfully, slowly, and with imagination.
SPEAKER_00: And we were reminded last week, and I believe John mentioned that he heard this after his sermon in first service, that somebody somebody reminded him that the Celestio divina is not about overcoming God's reluctance to speak to us.
SPEAKER_00: Like we've already established God wants to speak to us.
SPEAKER_00: It's not about us figuring out how to unlock the mysterious voice of God, but rather it's us laying a hold of his willingness to do so.
SPEAKER_00: It's us finding space and finding a way and changing perhaps some patterns in our life so that we can hear the voice of our shepherd who's calling to us and says, have ears to hear.
SPEAKER_00: So we've given you some bookmarks.
SPEAKER_00: I think they were on the chairs last week.
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't here, but I believe you had them on the chairs.
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't have them on the chairs, uh they're not there today.
SPEAKER_00: If you didn't pick one up, there's some more in the lobby, the vestibule right outside before you go out into the lobby, and there's some also at the Welcome Center that you can pick up.
SPEAKER_00: And so we've been looking at that.
SPEAKER_00: And last week, John led us through that first step of the Lectio Divina.
SPEAKER_00: And you do these together, like they do all four of these in one sitting.
SPEAKER_00: But we looked at the lectio part, the reading, reading the passage out louder to yourself, just a few verses, 15 to 20 at the most.
SPEAKER_00: Read it slowly and prayerfully and reverently.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that John emphasized, and was also emphasized by Pete Gray, that I want to stay and establish and never forget throughout this series, is that we have to have a rigorous commitment to the text.
SPEAKER_00: All right?
SPEAKER_00: We can't just, this is not a journey to say, what does this text mean to me, regardless of what this text meant originally?
SPEAKER_00: When you're studying scripture, the first question is not what does the text mean to me, but the first question is, what does the text mean?
SPEAKER_00: What did it mean in its historical context?
SPEAKER_00: How do we interpret it in its literary context?
SPEAKER_00: Those things matter.
SPEAKER_00: So we're not leaving those behind, but we're building on this idea if there, if we have a rigorous commitment to the text, how do we move on from that?
SPEAKER_00: So let me just say it again.
SPEAKER_00: We we avoid heresy, we avoid getting out of bounds with God's word by staying committed to that logic of the text, the commitment to the logic of the text.
SPEAKER_00: I encourage you to listen to the last two sermons to sort of set the stage for that.
SPEAKER_00: So that was a lectio, reading the text slowly and carefully.
SPEAKER_00: Today we're gonna talk about the second step in the Lectio Divina, the medigato, meditatio, excuse me.
SPEAKER_00: Uh John uh I asked John how to pronounce these words and say, Well, how Latin do you want to be?
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, I'm from Oklahoma, so there's not a there's not a lot I can do with it, but that's meditatio, all right?
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna meditate.
SPEAKER_00: How's that?
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna meditate.
SPEAKER_00: And so this time when you're reading passage, uh the passage, you read it the second time, you read it slowly, and you identify as you're reading it the second time something to meditate on, a phrase or a word that jumps out to you.
SPEAKER_00: You embrace interruptions and you follow tangents, and you don't worry about maybe even getting back through the whole text again.
SPEAKER_00: You you're asking God to meditate.
SPEAKER_00: You're wanting to meditate on something in that text.
SPEAKER_00: And some Christians have concerns about the word meditate.
SPEAKER_00: And when I say meditate, maybe many of our minds go to perhaps Eastern mysticism or new age practices, and we're concerned that we'll get off, as Pete Gregg said, into some weird arena.
SPEAKER_00: And let's be honest, that can happen, but that's not at all what this meditation means.
SPEAKER_00: This is not about emptying our minds.
SPEAKER_00: This is about filling them with biblical truth.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to catch that.
SPEAKER_00: Christian meditation is not about emptying our minds.
SPEAKER_00: That's a dangerous place in my way of thinking to be, but it's about creating space and maybe emptying our minds of the things that are distracting us so that God can pour his truth into our lives.
SPEAKER_00: So it's that slowing down, engaging with biblical truth in that deep and abiding way.
SPEAKER_00: I had a friend named Brinda, not the Brenda that sometimes preaches here.
SPEAKER_00: This was a long time ago in our first building over on Madeline Street.
SPEAKER_00: And Brenda uh uh is now with Jesus, but she was a lady who struggled with life, to be honest.
SPEAKER_00: And she would talk to me a lot and come into my office and share.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the words I'll never forget that she would use with me was ruminating.
SPEAKER_00: She says, Pastor Nate, I've been ruminating on this.
SPEAKER_00: And so I would say, Well, stop ruminating on that.
SPEAKER_00: And then she would also flip the script on me and says, Pastor Nata, it seems like you're ruminating on this.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay, that feels different when you tell me I'm ruminating on it, right?
SPEAKER_00: But I but she was right.
SPEAKER_00: It depends on what we ruminate on, what we think about, what we turn over in our head.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot to what are you ruminating on?
SPEAKER_00: What are you thinking about?
SPEAKER_00: Meditation is this idea of ruminating on God's word.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe another sort of metaphor would be a cow chewing its cud.
SPEAKER_00: I did a little research on that and decided not to share those details with you.
SPEAKER_00: But you have you, we're from Kansas, right?
SPEAKER_00: We know what cows chewing on their cud.
SPEAKER_00: You know, they they swallow it and they bring it back up for uh, you know, for debate again, and then they talk up, and then they swallow it and chew it and swallow it in the four chambers and all of that, and saliva's involved, and but that's what it takes.
SPEAKER_00: It takes that constant ruminating on the food until it becomes a part of their system to give them nourishment.
SPEAKER_00: So we want you to ruminate on God's word.
SPEAKER_00: Meditate on God's word.
SPEAKER_00: That's what this is about.
SPEAKER_00: So let me let me just take you through some scriptures in Old Testament and New, where the scriptures not only say, hey, it's okay, they invite you to some level of eating or ruminating or meditating.
SPEAKER_00: Just listen to these words.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 19, 14.
SPEAKER_00: May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
SPEAKER_00: I thought of that words of my mouth, like I want my words to honor Jesus, but that meditation of my heart, that ruminating of my heart.
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel 3, the voice said to me, Son of man, eat what I'm giving you.
SPEAKER_00: Eat this scroll.
SPEAKER_00: Then go and give its message to the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: So I opened my mouth and he fed me the scroll.
SPEAKER_00: Fill your stomach with this, he said.
SPEAKER_00: And when I ate it, it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.
SPEAKER_00: You get the picture?
SPEAKER_00: Of ruminating, taking it in.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Ezekiel was asked by God to do some really hard things and to say some really hard things.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Before you say that, I want the word of God to be a part of you.
SPEAKER_00: As it were, I want you to chew the cud of the word of God until it becomes something inside of you.
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah 15, 16.
SPEAKER_00: When I discovered your words, I devoured them.
SPEAKER_00: They are my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God of heaven's armies.
SPEAKER_00: And Jeremiah talk about a tough life.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Before you go tell everybody this stuff, as you're telling them these hard things, I'm asking you to tell them about judgment coming and about the hope that's beyond the judgment.
SPEAKER_00: I want these words to be a part of you.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua 1.8, you know, Joshua was given the command of Israel from Moses.
SPEAKER_00: And in Joshua 1, there's these calls to courage.
SPEAKER_00: But listen to verse 1 8, chapter 1, verse 8, study this book of instruction continually, meditate on it day and night.
SPEAKER_00: So you will be sure to obey everything written in it.
SPEAKER_00: Only then will you prosper and succeed in all you do.
SPEAKER_00: So, so God's call to Joshua was be courageous, be courageous, be courageous, be courageous.
SPEAKER_00: But here's how you do it, Joshua.
SPEAKER_00: Let my word get deeply into you.
SPEAKER_00: And we've been looking at Luke chapter 24.
SPEAKER_00: It's been the text for this whole series.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to come back to it again today.
SPEAKER_00: And you remember that Jesus encountered on the road to Emmaus these two journeys who had been in Jerusalem and had heard all the events.
SPEAKER_00: I won't rehash everything we've talked about because it's been already well described.
SPEAKER_00: But as Jesus was walking with these two people, unbeknownst to them, they didn't know it was Jesus until he revealed himself at the meal when they got to his house.
SPEAKER_00: And when he revealed himself to his meal, but before that, you remember that it was this long Bible study as they went along where Jesus began to explain who he was from the Old Testament perspective, the old Hebrew stories perspective.
SPEAKER_00: They eat and Jesus leaves.
SPEAKER_00: And verse 32 says, They said to each other, Didn't our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?
SPEAKER_00: And then within the hour they were back on their way to Jerusalem where they found the disciples and said, Jesus is risen.
SPEAKER_00: And that was confirmed.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we know we've seen him.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm thinking now about the trip back to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: John mentioned this in his first sermon, but I just thinking, I think they were ruminating.
SPEAKER_00: I think they were it it burned on their hearts.
SPEAKER_00: I think as they were walking back, they were like, Oh yeah, remember what he said about Isaiah?
SPEAKER_00: Oh yes.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that makes sense now.
SPEAKER_00: Remember what he said about Joel?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: It's a three-hour, three-hour Bible study lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus went through.
SPEAKER_00: I think they were ruminating.
SPEAKER_00: I think it was getting deep into their hearts as they walked back on the road to Emmaus.
SPEAKER_00: This idea of the burning heart seems to me that there was significant engagement with the text.
SPEAKER_00: It was not just a logic a history lesson.
SPEAKER_00: It was on the way out, a history lesson on the way back.
SPEAKER_00: It was a meditation.
SPEAKER_00: And it never left them.
SPEAKER_00: This is how the New Testament was written, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people ruminating on what Jesus had said, tying the connections back to the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Many of the Bible, many of the authors, in fact, I think all of the authors at some point quote something from the Hebrew scriptures because they're pulling the story together.
SPEAKER_00: They've meditated on it.
SPEAKER_00: God's spoken to them these truths.
SPEAKER_00: I love what Pete Gregg said.
SPEAKER_00: Umara there on the on the video, said, you know, some people, when they talk about this idea of using your imagination to engage scripture, are going to feel excited and they're just going to be like permission given, and it's affirmation of how they are already wired, and some people are going to be, how did he say, This is going to be difficult for them?
SPEAKER_00: And when I watched it the first time, I didn't literally raise my hand, but I should have in my office, right?
SPEAKER_00: For some of us, this sounds scary.
SPEAKER_00: For some of us, we wonder where this might take us.
SPEAKER_00: But I loved how she reminded us, Dr.
SPEAKER_00: Klymitch reminded us of this idea of the limbic system, this emotional part of our brain where we have our emotional memories, where we get empathy, and where our imagination operates.
SPEAKER_00: And the part of our brain that engages with things like metaphor and symbolism.
SPEAKER_00: Part of our gay mind that when we go to a movie, Gibbs fully engaged in the plot line, and we think when we read a novel, we go deeper into it because our brain is engaging in that imagination piece.
SPEAKER_00: And then there's a logical part of our brain.
SPEAKER_00: The part I'm more comfortable with.
SPEAKER_00: The part that says, tell me the facts.
SPEAKER_00: Let me line it up.
SPEAKER_00: Let me put it in a Google Doc.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna go on vacation, some of you are having a good time.
SPEAKER_00: I'm planning.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: It's that logical piece.
SPEAKER_00: And I love how they go hand in hand.
unknown: Dr.
SPEAKER_00: Klimich said, our mind, will, emotions, and our body can also be ways of communicating with God to us in those as well.
SPEAKER_00: Logic and emotions are not mutually exclusively, they live together.
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
SPEAKER_00: This draws back a little bit if you were here when we did the renewed mind series.
SPEAKER_00: So this idea that when Jesus, uh when Paul talks about renewing our minds, he's not just talking about renewing the logical part of our brain, but all the parts of our brain that work consciously and subconsciously.
SPEAKER_00: And again, this can feel a little bit scary and weird to some of us.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm I I contend that not only does scripture say that we can do this, but scripture warns against not doing this.
SPEAKER_00: Now bear with me for a moment because I'm gonna take you to Isaiah 6.9.
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 6.9 is not quoted often by most of us, but it was by Jesus, John, and Paul.
SPEAKER_00: And Isaiah 6.9 says this.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Go and tell this people, be ever hearing but never understanding, be ever seeing, but not perceiving.
SPEAKER_00: Make the hearts of this people callous, make their ears dull and close their eyes.
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.
SPEAKER_00: So it seems like Isaiah is to go to the people of his day and say, Some of you aren't getting this.
SPEAKER_00: Judgment's coming, pay attention.
SPEAKER_00: And that was the message for then.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus picked this very passage up after he told the parable of the seed and the sower.
SPEAKER_00: Remember that parable?
SPEAKER_00: You'll cast seeds, some of the seeds will grow, most of it won't.
SPEAKER_00: The birds will take it away, the rocks will not allow it to grow, weeds will grow up.
SPEAKER_00: You know what Jesus could have said?
SPEAKER_00: He said, Some of you, when I tell you the truth, it's not gonna go very deep and you're gonna walk away.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you, when I tell you the truth, Satan's gonna come attack your mind.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you, when I tell you the truth, are gonna get preoccupied with money.
SPEAKER_00: He could have said that, but he didn't.
SPEAKER_00: He told a story about seeds and plants.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: So their imagination would be triggered.
SPEAKER_00: So they would think deeper than just the logic.
SPEAKER_00: The logic is still there, right?
SPEAKER_00: But the imagination, the limbic side of the brain is engaged.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus picks up Isaiah's words and says, I want you to engage with my word this way.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to think about seed, I want you to think about it going down into the ground and how for a while it might.
SPEAKER_00: I won't try to imagine this with you, but doesn't that isn't that what all the parables do?
SPEAKER_00: We're drawn into them in a different way.
SPEAKER_00: This is meditating on God's word, the limbic side of our brain, being engaged.
SPEAKER_00: That same passage, Isaiah 6.9, is picked up in John 12.
SPEAKER_00: In John 12, just after the triumphal entry.
SPEAKER_00: When everybody's cheering for him, but Jesus knows they're not getting it.
SPEAKER_00: And he quotes the same thing again.
SPEAKER_00: He could have said, You're not getting it, I'm gonna die on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Well, he actually did say that a few times, so he engaged logically, but here he shows this parable again.
SPEAKER_00: You're not getting it, it's not you're not perceiving it, you're not seeing it, you're hearing it, but you're not seeing it.
SPEAKER_00: And then Acts 28, Paul Paul, at the end of his life when he's in Rome, he gathers a few people around him, right?
SPEAKER_00: And some of them get it and some of them don't.
SPEAKER_00: And instead of saying some of them get it and some of them don't, Paul quotes this passage.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are seeing and hearing, and some of you are not are not listening or perceiving.
SPEAKER_00: So this idea of engaging our brains is not only encouraged by scripture, not only allowed by scripture, but I think it's encouraged.
SPEAKER_00: It also fits, it also fits theologically in a way to interpret scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So the Connect Church is a part of the Wesleyan Church, and so I'm going to show you a little Wesleyan theology.
SPEAKER_00: If you ever come to Wesleyan 101, you've seen this.
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't, I would love to have you join us someday.
SPEAKER_00: Though we have three or four of them a year, just watch the calendar.
SPEAKER_00: But I want you to notice this is John Wesley's way of thinking about how to engage with scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Wesley never created the Wesleyan quadrilateral, he never drew a chart like this.
SPEAKER_00: This is something that Albert Outler put together and other theologians.
SPEAKER_00: They've tried to say, ask the question they were asking is how did John Wesley interpret Scripture?
SPEAKER_00: How did he help him and his followers interpret scripture?
SPEAKER_00: And you can see here that there's four things, but you can also see scripture is in bold capital print, right?
SPEAKER_00: I prefer to put this as a baseball diamond.
SPEAKER_00: And it's really hard to talk about baseball after Thursday's game if you're a Royals fan.
SPEAKER_00: But anyway.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're not even paying attention anymore, Royals fans, are you?
SPEAKER_00: You just are giving up on them completely.
SPEAKER_00: But in a baseball diamond, you start at home base and you end at home base.
SPEAKER_00: You don't get you don't get points for being left on base.
SPEAKER_00: You don't start with experience, tradition, or reason.
SPEAKER_00: You start at home base and you end at home base.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture, the logic of scripture, matters the most.
SPEAKER_00: It is the thing that we're trying to find the truth in.
SPEAKER_00: But your experience matters.
SPEAKER_00: How you engage in the story matters.
SPEAKER_00: Where you are in life in that moment matters.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture comes alive because you're going through stuff, right?
SPEAKER_00: You've seen it work, you've seen God's word teach you something.
SPEAKER_00: And so your experience and reason, uh, tradition matters.
SPEAKER_00: It's not all about tradition, but there are people who have learned some stuff before, right?
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make sense for us to just ignore all the great theologians and historians and pastors and teachers and Sunday school class neighbors and people that have in the past have learned things about scripture that we can begin to build our own theology around.
SPEAKER_00: Tradition matters.
SPEAKER_00: It's not everything.
SPEAKER_00: And reason doesn't make sense, is it logical?
SPEAKER_00: But today we're focusing on that experience peace.
SPEAKER_00: So so this way of Wesley's interpreting scripture lines up with what Jesus said when he picked and quoted Acts or Isaiah 6, 9.
SPEAKER_00: It picks up what John was saying when he quoted it, and when and and when Paul quoted it, this idea that engaging Scripture in a way that is experiential is not only okay, but it's encouraged.
SPEAKER_00: So Peter Gregg offers three keys to biblical meditation.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: He alluded to them in the video.
SPEAKER_00: Let me just draw them out for you, and we're going to look at these and remember, remember, a rigorous commitment to the logic of Scripture will keep us out of heresy.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: That fence is set, but let's talk about interruption.
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about as we engage in this meditatio, this meditating on God's word, what would happen if we would slow down our intellectual metabolism a little bit when we're reading scripture and stop looking for quick and easy answers.
SPEAKER_00: So going back to the quadrilateral, like it is perfectly fine and wonderful and good to read devotionals or to engage, like our men's and women's Bible studies are going to be engaging with texts that have been written by others to learn from.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely fine.
SPEAKER_00: But what would happen if we would engage in scriptures ourselves and ask not for an easy answer for today, but to just let scriptures take us where they take us.
SPEAKER_00: So be patient, to slow down.
SPEAKER_00: And again, in this method, again, lots of ways to do this.
SPEAKER_00: In this Leccio Divina, it's taking 15 to 20 verses or so or fewer, and just reading that that second time and saying, I'm willing to be interrupted.
SPEAKER_00: I have a method of listening to the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: I I've been doing this now for I think four, maybe three or four years, I don't know, maybe longer.
SPEAKER_00: I just, whenever I'm in the car, instead of listening to Bob Fesco and sports radio, I listen to Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: And I found, now I've traveled a lot for the district when I went all over visiting churches.
SPEAKER_00: I found in that context I could leave, I could listen to the whole Bible five times a year, the New Testament 16 times a year.
SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to keep doing that, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: But there are many times I'm doing that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just driving along, I'm thinking about something else, I'm not even engaging in it, right?
SPEAKER_00: That can't be all I do.
SPEAKER_00: And I would rather you spend a little bit of time in a little bit of scripture than checking off a box saying, I read it today, let's move on.
SPEAKER_00: That's what this is calling us to, and a willingness to be interrupted.
SPEAKER_00: So I've been, and by the way, over the last four or five years, that's not been my only engagement with scripture.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm learning more and more as I get older, because I I have so so the way I'm wired is I I I've not been clinically uh diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure based on what everybody tells me, I I don't quite see it.
SPEAKER_00: But what everybody tells me, I have OCD-ish tendencies.
SPEAKER_00: And when you have OCD and OLD, you want to stand in your porch and yell at people to get off your lawn.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm kind of that's the stage of life I'm at, so I have to be very careful that I engage in ways that slow me down.
SPEAKER_00: Let's see a little humor in the middle because it felt like it was getting heavy, right?
SPEAKER_00: But engage in scriptures in a way that just allow me to be interrupted and allow me to say, I don't have to finish this whole passage if this is where I'm parking right now, right?
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: Second one is intuition.
SPEAKER_00: Explore the meaning of the text subjectively by exercising intuition.
SPEAKER_00: We can do this by exploring a single word or a phrase that captures our attention.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe ask questions like, why did this jump out to me?
SPEAKER_00: Why did this jump out to me right now?
SPEAKER_00: Why did this matter to me today?
SPEAKER_00: How might this thought transform me?
SPEAKER_00: How might me implementing what I'm seeing and hearing and learning here change my circumstances today?
SPEAKER_00: Where have I seen this in my life or in others' lives?
SPEAKER_00: This is the kind of thing we do in growth groups, not these exact questions, but we just try to engage the scriptures collectively, asking, what is this saying to me?
SPEAKER_00: Again, we already have a rigorous commitment to the text.
SPEAKER_00: So this is, we're not starting with what does this mean to me?
SPEAKER_00: We're asking, what does it mean?
SPEAKER_00: But now, now that we have some sense of what it means, what does this mean in my context?
SPEAKER_00: Intuitively, what is God saying to me?
SPEAKER_00: And then imagination.
SPEAKER_00: We've alluded to this, but just this idea of someone has called it mental playfulness.
SPEAKER_00: We we do this when you read novels, we do this when we watch movies or television shows.
SPEAKER_00: A good show will draw you in and not just tell you a bunch of facts, it'll draw you into a story.
SPEAKER_00: So, what would it feel like if we got drawn into some of the stories and ask ourselves the question what would it be like to be in Thessalonica under persecution?
SPEAKER_00: And Paul sends this letter to you to encourage you.
SPEAKER_00: What would it be like to be walking with Jesus on the Jericho Road?
SPEAKER_00: And then he tells you a story about, you know, the Good Samaritan or whatever it is, just putting ourselves in this story.
SPEAKER_00: I've long been enamored by the idea of a scratch and sniff Bible, right?
SPEAKER_00: So, but what if we just sort of had that approach?
SPEAKER_00: What did it smell like?
SPEAKER_00: What did it feel like?
SPEAKER_00: How, what was the temperature like?
SPEAKER_00: Just whatever.
SPEAKER_00: Like some of you are like, okay, this is a list of what I do.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, you're missing the point.
SPEAKER_00: Like, just engaging attacks imaginatively.
SPEAKER_00: Because if God spoke through a burning bush, a talking donkey and magical graffiti, then he can certainly speak to us in our own imaginations.
SPEAKER_00: I think to really find the truth in Scripture in all its fullness, we may need to engage in scripture more than just logically and linguistically.
SPEAKER_00: We may need to engage our limbic system that's responsible for memory and imagination.
SPEAKER_00: So we talk sometimes, John alluded to it a couple times, about the Damascus Road experience.
SPEAKER_00: Remember when Paul was knocked off his donkey by God and this great bolt of light came and spoke to him unexpectedly out of the blue?
SPEAKER_00: I've had that happen to me.
SPEAKER_00: Not that dramatically.
SPEAKER_00: I would not anywhere call it a conversion experience, but in my life there's been five times.
SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking a lot about this because I have OLD syndrome right now.
SPEAKER_00: And to reflect on your life, you begin to think five times when God, like out of the blue, just spoke to me.
SPEAKER_00: The first was my call to ministry in about 1979 in Saloon Springs, Arkansas.
SPEAKER_00: The second was on 9th in Madeline when God gave me a vision for our church at that time in its life.
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you right where I was standing when it happened.
SPEAKER_00: Another one was when I was running.
SPEAKER_00: I can take you right to the cul-de-sac near my house where I landed, stepped off the cul-de-sac onto the concrete, and God told me, your daughter is going to meet her husband this year.
SPEAKER_00: And he did.
SPEAKER_00: And there's another one that's too personal to share.
SPEAKER_00: And then when God told me to quit being district superintendent of Kansas and laid out for me clearly my call for retirement, that was at a beach.
SPEAKER_00: That's my favorite.
SPEAKER_00: I'm 64 years old.
SPEAKER_00: That means about once every 12.8 years, God spoke to me that way.
SPEAKER_00: How would you like to be in a relationship with someone that only speaks to you once every 12.8 years?
SPEAKER_00: It maybe has never happened to you.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe your list is longer or shorter.
SPEAKER_00: That's not the point.
SPEAKER_00: I set that up to make a better point.
SPEAKER_00: The better point is God may or may not give you a Damascus road experience, but he invites you to an Emmaus road experience every day.
SPEAKER_00: Or he walks with you through scripture and he speaks to you and he helps you imagine what it's like to hear his voice.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: That's available to all of us.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we've been talking about.
SPEAKER_00: Meditation is a part of this one method of engaging in scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're gonna do.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna jump right to that part.
SPEAKER_00: We're just gonna, like we did last week, I'm gonna read John 1, some passages there.
SPEAKER_00: John led us through this last week.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we read it slowly.
SPEAKER_00: Today we're gonna read it meditatively.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna we're gonna meditate on.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna allow God to interrupt us.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna we're gonna invite God to help us intuitively find what is there.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna imagine ourselves in the text.
SPEAKER_00: All I'm going to do next is read this text and invite you into this.
SPEAKER_00: Now, we know that in this sort of moment, in this reading of the text in these few moments, this is more of a sample of how to do it, but we also believe God can speak to you right now.
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna practice the meditatio part of the Leccio Divina, all right?
SPEAKER_00: So meditate on these words as I read them.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the word that had already existed.
SPEAKER_00: The word was with God, and the word was God.
SPEAKER_00: He existed in the beginning with God.
SPEAKER_00: God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him.
SPEAKER_00: The word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone.
SPEAKER_00: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.
SPEAKER_00: God sent a man, John the Baptist, to tell about the light so that everyone might believe because of his testimony.
SPEAKER_00: John himself was not the light, he was simply a witness to tell about the light.
SPEAKER_00: The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.
SPEAKER_00: He came into the very world he created, but the world didn't recognize him.
SPEAKER_00: He came to his own people, and even they rejected him.
SPEAKER_00: But to all who believed and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.
SPEAKER_00: They are reborn.
SPEAKER_00: Not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God.
SPEAKER_00: So the word became human and made his home among us.
SPEAKER_00: He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: And we have seen his glory.
SPEAKER_00: The glory of the Father's one and only Son.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Would you stand and let us worship?