Most Christians Read the Bible Wrong

In this episode of The Fifth Gospel, the hosts explore how to study the Bible for transformation—not just information.
They discuss how Scripture is living, unified, and continually revealing truth through the Holy Spirit, while offering a practical framework for deeper Bible study, meditation, and spiritual growth.

Topics include:
* Why the Bible is spiritually alive
* Rhema vs intellectual reading
* How posture affects Bible study
* Studying Scripture through reverence and hunger
* Spiritual distractions and disciplined consistency
* Neuroscience, focus, dopamine, and transformation
* A 3-level Bible study framework explained
* Using Bible Hub, study tools, and AI carefully
* Meditation and visualization through Scripture
* Living intentionally from the cross

If you’ve ever struggled with consistency, understanding the Bible deeply, or feeling spiritually disconnected while reading Scripture, this conversation offers practical and biblical guidance for renewed intimacy with God’s Word.



TIMESTAMPS
01:35 What Is Fifth Gospel
02:27 Living From The Cross
06:24 Study For Transformation
11:14 Dimensions Of Scripture
18:24 Posture And Reverence
21:50 Excitement Rewires The Mind
30:57 Discipline And Preparation
33:22 Three Posture Points
36:44 Posture for Reading
37:33 Hard Old Testament Questions
39:05 Framework Setup
40:54 Paddleboard Level One
43:08 Choosing a Passage
45:54 Group Study Basics
48:02 Paddleboard Level Two
52:06 Paddleboard Level Three
53:26 Tools for Going Deeper
55:37 Holy Spirit Leads
57:41 Meditating on Scripture
58:54 Visualization and Practice
01:06:26 AI and Bible Study
01:07:44 Call to Action and Prayer

Transcript

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No important matter of the Bible can be disproven in any way, shape, or form. It was written over the course of 1600 years by 40 different authors across many continents in three different languages, and yet it all comes together and builds this uh conducive story that doesn't violate itself in any way. These spiritual truths that we're talking about, God already orchestrated all of this and programmed it into our neurology, into our physiology, into our spirit, into our body. All of it is working cohesively. It's orchestrated in a really beautiful way. That's what the Word of God is meant to be. It's meant to be a diving into the living water that is God. There is nothing that is going to truly impact us more than being immersed in who God is. When you're meditating on these things and going deeper into that and asking yourself, okay, well, how does this scripture apply to my life and see it in your mind, see how your life plays out differently? What is that problem that you have with? What is that struggle that you're having with your business? But then there is this moment where we start to read the Bible and we start to there is something hidden in here every single time I go to it. It cannot be depleted. It literally is like the only thing that every time I go back to it, there is more. You don't have to run a group of 30, 40 people, and you don't have to be a pastor to do this, start a conversation about a specific passage and let the Holy Spirit lead it. If someone were just tuning in for the first time, they never heard of the fifth gospel podcast, or maybe they are here, maybe they've listened to some episodes already. If we had a proclamation to that person about being the fifth gospel, what would you say to them? From the moment that we become aware of the fact that I have the choice to live my life in a way that is either going to make an impact in the world that I live in, or I could just kind of do what everybody else is doing. That's the moment where I realize, okay, purpose matters. I don't want to just live life. I don't want to just be here. I don't just want to exist. I want to do something that brings definition and brings clarity to why I am. And this is the question people ask: like, why am I here? What was I born for? What was I made for? And when I recognize that Jesus Himself thought enough of my life to give his very life for me in the most gruesome, sacrificial way possible, then I realize that even if I don't see value in my life, he did. And when I see that he has incredible value for my life, then my response to his gift of life should be that I live my life in a way that's on purpose. That I live my life in a way that is intentionally pursuing him, which means he's created me for something. And now I get to discover what it is. I get to discover why I'm here. I get to discover why I think the way that I think and why I am passionate about the things that I'm passionate about. And then I get to put it into action in a way that reveals him so that other people would see and know, oh, he died for me too. He loves me as well. He gave his life for me as well. Now I get to do the same. And we get to do this continuously for our whole lives until we stand before him. So the fifth gospel, it's in response to what he's done. And that's the way that I want to live my life. I truly want to live my life from the cross. The cross is what he did, and now from that point, I get to live out of the reality of what he did for me. And the more that I realize what that means, the more I understand the significance of it, the more I start to make decisions that are based out of that truth. Because there's a lot of other truth, there's a lot of other thoughts. We've had them, I'm sure that me and you, if we sat here and we just wrote down an account of all the things we thought about ourselves this week, they probably would not be very high. It would not be very like, I am the best. They're more like, oh, like I'm still dealing with this thing, I'm still struggling with this thing. And yet, when we when we read the words that say it's no longer I that live, but Christ that lives within me, I recognize that because of what he did and because of how he sees me, my life gets to be completely different than it would have been before. So it doesn't matter what the other voices say, doesn't matter what the other thoughts say, doesn't matter what the person in my life that rejected me says. That's not the reality. I can live from the place of his love and his purpose for my life. Amen. Yeah, you said the word purpose a couple of times there. It's interesting. I was golfing the other day with a buddy of mine, and while I was golfing, I was thinking back to our last one of our last episodes, and I wanted to practice what I preach here, right? And I had suggested to people that you find someone who's open already spiritually. They may not be a believer, but you have rapport with them and they're open to having those sort of deep conversations. And something just prompted me on the golf course. I asked him while we were in the golf cart, I said, What's the most challenging part of life for you? Yeah. And he said, purpose. And I said, Oh, that's the easiest part for me. Yeah. And he stopped. He's like, Wait, what do you mean? That's I'm like, Yeah, I I believe in Jesus and I know that my purpose is to go and make disciples and spread the good news, spread the gospel. Yeah. And you could see his gears turning a little bit. And he was curious, but he also had a little bit of that worldly um resistance, you know. But it opened up this conversation about like the the power and the purpose that we have in Jesus to be his disciples and to go and make more disciples. Yeah. Where he is seemingly floundering in life. He's has all these worldly accomplishments and he has the career, has the house, has the wife, but he still struggles with like this torment of like, what's my what's my purpose? Yeah. And that's why I'm so empowered when we show up here to record these episodes, is because on my mind is always empowering a disciple to go make more disciples and to be confident in sharing the good news of Jesus and living that out. Yeah. And that's why today we're going to talk about uh how to actually study the Bible. Because I think people get this wrong, and I admittedly get it get it wrong too. And I'm kind of projecting here because I mentioned this a couple episodes ago. It took me almost 10 years to actually read the Bible cover to cover. And not that I think that's necessarily the metric as far as like speed or like how fast it how or how fast it goes. Um, but I want to talk about like what does it actually look like to consume this word not just for information but for transformation. Because I think far too often we can get caught up with like, oh, I gotta get this Bible reading in today, I gotta read this many pages, I gotta follow this reading plan. And I think that's where people go wrong, accidentally, of course. Um so today, let's help the listener actually study scripture, quote unquote, the right way. Yeah. Okay. All right. I love it. Um for me, I'm just gonna be very honest and transparent. Like being a Christian my whole life, um, I always knew the significance of reading the Bible. Probably it wasn't until my early 20s that I started to actually read it intentionally, and then maybe closer to my 30s before I started really studying out the Bible. Um, I would read the Bible, like I became a youth pastor in my early 20s and I would read the Bible, but I would probably only read certain sections, certain portions that I really knew. I would do a reading plan and I would read through, but it really wasn't to be able to receive from it. It was more, let me just read the Bible, let me go through Genesis through Malachi and make sure I just check all those boxes. There became a point, though, for me where something shifted, and I believe it centers around this word and this concept of revelation, because revelation is when you're reading, let's say, in this context, the scripture, and something that is words on a on a page that was written a couple thousand years ago, and we could talk about the stats behind it. It was written um over the course of 1600 years by 40 different authors across many continents and three different languages, um, and yet it all comes together and builds this uh conducive story that doesn't like it doesn't violate itself in any way. No important matter of the Bible can be disproven in any way, shape, or form. And so when we're reading these words, we're like, well, these words have been here forever. There's a Bible, and at least there used to be in every hotel room. Like, what's the significance of this? It's hard to understand. I don't get it. But then there is this moment where we start to read the Bible and it starts to speak to us. The the Bible itself says that it is uh the living word of God, it's living and it's active. Is it is this the is this the word Rhema, if I'm if I remember correctly? Remah, yeah. Yeah, so it's it's not just words on a page like any other book we'd pick off the shelf, because it is inspired by God Himself, it is continually speaking. And so when we read it, and I like to say it this way, reading it with the author, he has the ability to bring truth out of it that we wouldn't have seen if we're just approaching it like a history document. And so our approach to the word is the first step in all of this. How do we come to the Bible? How do we come to a time of reading? What is our intention behind it? For some, they just might want to discover and they're just trying to like check it out. I don't think that's a bad thing initially, but if a year later, five years later, 10 years later, we've put our faith in Christ and we're still approaching it like this kind of secondary study instead of the word of God, then we're gonna continue to get very little out of it. We might quote verses that we know really well, John 3.16, we might be able to quote Jeremiah 29.11. We might be able to speak these things and to think that there's significance in it. But when we get into it and we invest in it, the words of God start to speak to us and they start to feed us. And for me, when I read the Bible with God, and I'll we'll talk about how to do that, it becomes something that I feel like I'm being fed. And it's at that moment that I'm always like, oh, I need to do this more. Like I wish I was doing this all the time. I wish I was spending time in the Word all the time. And we can't practically always do that, but we can do it a lot more than we tend to do it on a regular basis. Yeah, and that's what I want to leave people here with after listening to this episode is a repeatable framework for actually studying scripture and in a way that produces fruit in their life and leads to that continuous transformation and sanctification. There's layers to this, and one of the things that got God has put on my heart, maybe we can tease this out in real time, is like the dimensions of scripture. Yeah. And it might be, it probably is infinite number of dimensions or layers to scripture understanding, Rhema, you know. Um, but I think in like traditional dimensions, like 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D. Okay. And I like I said, help me tease this out here because to me, it's like the first dimension is like literally just the words on the page. I can look at this, I can read it, have no understanding. Yeah, it's ink and paper. It's ink and paper. Second dimension is like, okay, I'm starting to understand it a little bit. You know, I I get it. It's like you know, the stories, I can understand the players involved and some of the context maybe. And then like 3D is like where it becomes starts to become real, right? Like it inspires me. It inspires me, encourages me. Yep. There's something about it that even brings some comfort. Yeah. Yeah. The next thing is the fourth dimension of it. Yeah. That's the one I'm trying to figure out what the fourth even the spiritual dimension of it is, because I know one, when I read this book, it's like it shows me all my imperfections, you know. And not in a bad way, but in like a convicting way. Yeah. And there's also the understanding between the lines, and I think that's going back to that word Rhema. It's that, it's that revelation that God will often give to me. But that's constantly changing. It's like I can read the same verse every single day, and it's gonna have a different meaning to me in that moment based on the context and lens from that particular moment in my life. So when you hear this idea of dimensions of scripture, yeah, what does that what does that mean to you? Am I you am I on the right page? No pun intended. I mean, I think there's there there is a practicality to it. Yeah. Um, I use water a lot in these analogies, but if if the first dimension is looking at the ocean and being like, oh, that's that's pretty. Like I could have a picture of the ocean in my office. The second dimension actually going and like standing in the the water and letting it wash on your feet and feeling it. The third dimension is going out like to a place where I can feel it and experience it, but I'm safe. Like my feet are still in the sand, and if a big wave is coming, I can run. And like the fourth is running and jumping in, and like going out into places of depth and going in it and being submerged in it. That's what the word of God is meant to be. It's meant to be a diving into the living water that is God. And so there is nothing that is going to truly impact us more than being immersed in who God is, and he's given us his word as an invitation to be immersed in him, in what he has said, in what he has done, and what he's continuing to do, at least through our understanding of it here on earth. And so people will, in many facets of Christianity, they'll dabble, they'll they'll get a little bit close, maybe they'll attend a church service, maybe they'll say a prayer, but then when it doesn't change their reality, then they're very quick to move on to something else and to say, Well, that didn't work. And yeah, I went to church. Maybe you'll you'll invite people to church or or to have a relationship with God. They're like, Oh yeah, I grew up in church. But did they grow up in the experience of who God was? Did they grow up in a reality of his goodness or did they just learn about him? And it's the same with scripture. We can get to a place where we can dabble in it, or we can actually accept the invitation and dive in. Yeah, because you're not you're not called just to read the word, you're called to become it. Yeah, right. Yeah. And the word Rama keeps coming up, this revelation. I is there any danger to that though? Because we have human imaginations, right? And sometimes if we read between the lines, we may glean something that may not be actually from God, first of all. Um, it may not be the right context or meaning. And there is obviously historical context in other verses. We have an entire uh Bible of Old Testament, New Testament teachings in scripture that we can uh refer back to. But I guess my my question is, you know, sometimes I put myself in the scripture and we're gonna talk about meditating on the word and also like I think seeing it in our minds. I mean, I remember one of the first times I did this, I did this with the crucifixion and I saw myself there. Yeah. And I saw him when he was being nailed to the cross, laying there, and he's just like looking sideways at me. And I I part of me knows that's my just my human imagination, but then there's also part of me like, did I just go, did I actually go back to the crucifixion in my mind? I know that sounds like a little woo-woo, but it was so real and so intense that I was actually able to live like the scripture in my imagination, and I'm able to glean different things and I have a different perspective actually experiencing it rather than just reading it. Does that make sense? I continue to maintain that the imagination is God given. It wasn't given as a potential danger to be able to escape from reality. That's more when our imagination is connected more to our emotions and not connected to God, right? That's the that's that side of it. But our imagination, when you know, sanctified is to be able to bring us to a place of meditating on the truth of the word and seeing ourselves in that reality. So there is absolutely nothing dangerous about that. The danger that comes is cherry picking. The danger that comes is pulling a scripture out and then making it say what we want it to say, and you said this out of context, out of the original intention of it, and then taking that thing and using it to justify behavior. And that's what's happening all over the world. You can have any viewpoint from murder being abortion to homosexuality to I want to live together, I want to have sex before marriage, I want to do all these things. And we can find verses almost there, yeah. There's some of those are a stretch, but to justify anything that we want to do because we've pulled it out of this place and we've said, well, this is what this means. And so often that's not even close to what it means. So we have to read it in context, we have to read it in the understanding of what's actually being said and in community where we have people around us that know the truth of it and can help us discover what it's saying. Yeah, and I want to do a better job at the question I was kind of posing there because the thing that came to mind, I was thinking about the Protestant Reformation, their kind of slogan, part of it was uh sola scriptura, right? Where does that go beyond just the words on the page and the context? That's what I mean. Like I feel like yes, our imagination is God given, but I've imagined very sinful things in my life. You know what I mean? So how how do we have how do we have boundaries? If we're going, if we're gonna approach this topic of studying the Bible, I think one, it's like what are the boundaries? And also what is you mentioned this alluded to as like the posture. So, first, like, how do we have boundaries? And I think you already said like cherry picking is like a boundary, like if you're just cherry picking and it and it sounds good or feels good because it's aligned with what your fleshly desire is, you gotta question that. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like so, are there boundaries when we're studying scripture besides cherry picking? So there are boundaries in in really any part of our faith. And I what I mean by that is what is our intention? What's our motivation for going to God? What's our motivation for going to the Word? Am I going to God because it's going to improve my life? Am I going to God because it's going to improve the way I feel about myself? Is this self-help? Is this something that is more about me than anything else? Because my posture in approaching God is that he is God. My approach, my approach to coming to Jesus is that he is Lord and He is King. So He didn't come to this earth, die, give His life and be raised from the dead in order to improve my life, in order to add something to me as if He's my servant. He's God. So when I come to the Word and I come to the truth, I do so in an effort to be able to discover more about Him, not to be able to have some fantasy in which it makes my life appear better, feel better, where I find the code and I crack the formula to get my financial riches and or even just to punch my ticket to heaven. So that would be the boundary that I would set around it. But I we kind of go back to this often. And what I point to is the fact that we are tripart beings. So we are spirit, soul, and body. And so whatever we are submitted to is going to influence everything else. So my imagination, I see that as part of the soul. When my soul is following the lead of my spirit, which is the part of me that connects to God, and my spirit is engaged with God Himself, being the Holy Spirit, then even my imagination that could have been used for evil in the past is now submitted to him where he can speak through it. And I can see myself there at the foot of the cross, seeing my savior die for me. I can put myself in the creation account. What would it have looked like for there to be nothing? And then all of a sudden God says, let there be, and there's light and there's creation and man is formed. That's a beautiful uh reality of my imagination. So I don't like to approach it in terms of what's the bad that can happen out of this. I approach it from reverence and respect. It's God, it's his word, but I approach it with an excitement because the God of the universe has given me his word to be able to discover more about him. So I think there needs to be a respect, but also an excitement in the adventure. If you were to tell me percentage-wise, how many people approach their Bible with excitement, what do you think it would be? Just in a total context. Not very high, right? 10% exactly. Yeah. And even in devotions, it's like, oh, I woke up this morning and uh, all right, I guess I should read my Bible. Yeah. There should be an excitement about it. I believe it's Proverbs 25 that says it's the glory of God to conceal a matter and it's the glory of kings to seek it out. God has concealed things for us, for us, not from us, for us in his word, so that we would discover them. If we sat down with our Bible and we're like, I get to spend time with the Creator and I get to learn more about him, I get to read his word, I get to allow the Holy Spirit to speak to me. We wouldn't be so quick to put it down, and we also wouldn't be so quick to be hesitant to go to it in the first place. Man, you just set me up for something I wanted to talk about this episode, anyways, which is the idea of letting this word reprogram our minds. Yeah. You Know having that renewal of the mind, yeah, that Romans 12 2 talks about. Because I come from this neuroscience background, not a scientist, not a therapist, but I've done uh nearly a decade of research into the mind and how it works neurologically. Yeah, the conversation of dopamine always comes up. There's other neurochemicals that uh people don't hear about as often, like acetylcholine. And I'll I'll I'll I'll bring this up now, even though I was planning on bringing it up afterwards, but dopamine is not just a reward chemical when you accomplish something, it's also involved in the pursuit and it's triggered by excitement. Okay. It's triggered by novelty, it's trigger triggered by things that are interesting. It's part of the programming process for us. And so anything that is exciting, anything that we deem novel or new, the brain earmarks that more easily. Oh, okay. You can think about it like uh back in uh hunter-gatherer times, you know, in pursuit of the garden of berries, let's say there would be interest, there'd be novelty, there's also survival happening, but the brain is on high alert to seek and find berries and then to remember where they were. So along that path towards that garden of nourishment, the brain would release dopamine and tag different elements of the environment to make sure that it was easier to follow that path again. Then when they get to the berries, there'd be a bigger release of dopamine. That's often what we equate to like winning something or you know, it's that rush afterwards. What happens though is let's say that let's say that garden is gone because there was a uh wildfire. We get we go way below baseline of dopamine and it then programs our brain to avoid that area. So my point here is very simply is like these spiritual truths that we're talking about, God already orchestrated all of this and programmed it into our neurology, into our physiology, into our spirit, into our body, all of it's working uh cohesively, and it's orchestrated a really beautiful way. And on top of that, we're saying you're using words that whether or not dopamine was in the Bible, yeah, it's that excitement that keeps us coming back to the word and is literally programming our mind. Yeah. And that, and we'll I'll talk more about the neurochemicals after we get through this framework of studying the Bible. But this is that's the goal for me is when I read this, I'm supernaturally and practically reprogramming myself. I love when science is able to depict God-given realities. Yeah, because that's what science is in the first place. Science got hijacked. Science got hijacked to be able to explain things through an earthly understanding when science is meant to be the revelation of what God has already done. And it reminded me when you were speaking about this in Matthew chapter 13, the parable of the hidden treasure and the pearl. It says the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that is hidden in a field. So it doesn't say it was just laying out there, but it's hidden in a field. And when a man found it, he hid it again. And then in his joy, he went and sold all that he had to buy the field. So it was hidden, which means if it's hidden, he had to be searching, he had to be seeking. And when he found it, there was such joy that he was able to go give everything else because what this represented was everything that he wanted. It was worth everything that he had. And that should be the way that we approach the word of God. There is something hidden in here every single time I go to it. It cannot be depleted. It literally is like the only thing that every time I go back to it, there is more. And the more that I discover, and that dopamine, I'm sure, is part of it, like there's an excitement for it, the more that I can't wait to come in and discover more. And the more that I discover it, the more that it feeds me. And the more that it feeds me, it builds me into the person that I want to be. So that I keep coming back to it to discover over and over again. This is gonna blow your mind too. Um, when we talk about dopamine, it's not just a reaction neurochemically, we can also induce that subjectively. Okay. Like we can basically hype ourselves up while we're reading the Bible and talk ourselves into having some excitement towards it. We don't want to be artificial, but if we go into that with that posture of just intentionally being like, you know what, I'm gonna find something interesting in here tonight. Just having that mental cue alone is gonna release dopamine and make it easier for you to continue going back to the word. So, what I've what I've thought about often is okay, how do we set ourselves up for the next day? I can go to bed with all of the motivation that I'm gonna wake up at a certain time and I'm gonna do a certain thing. And I don't know if I'm just weak mentally, but my alarm goes off and I'm like, I have no desire to do that thing that I wanted to do in that exact moment, unless I recognize the reward in it. So I'll give you an example. I'll wake up on certain mornings and I'll say, okay, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow at 5:30 and I'm gonna do this, this, and this. I'm gonna get an early start on the day. And the alarm goes off and I'm like, snooze, snooze, snooze. But on the morning where I'm like, I'm gonna wake up early and play golf, my alarm goes off and I'm like on my feet, I'm getting ready. Um I'm on autopilot almost, but there is something motivating me to go do this. And so I wonder if before we went to bed, if we kind of set up that expectation for the next day, I get to read my Bible tomorrow. But not just do I get to read my Bible tomorrow and just thinking about that in a way to like hype myself up, but as I'm going to bed, I'm spending that time with God because I'm saying, God, I'm gonna, I'm just going to bed right now, but I want to prepare myself for what you have for me tomorrow. And I would even pray, God, as I'm going to sleep tonight, prepare my heart. Speak to me even when I'm sleeping. Prepare me for what it is that I get to discover when I wake up in the morning. And there should be an excitement, there should be an anticipation for what that's gonna look like. Yeah, you you should change your eye have to is to I get to. That's what I get to do this, you know. Um, and what I think of when I think about getting excited about the word, one of the things I pray for is alacrity. I don't know if you've heard the word alacrity before. I have, but I have no idea what it means. It means a cheerful readiness. Okay. It's that feeling when you have a vacation coming up tomorrow. Yeah. And even though you gotta fly for eight hours with your kids and you're only on two hours of sleep, you're still you got that cheerful readiness to do whatever it takes and you get it done. Okay. I pray that God gives me that on the ordinary days. Yeah. Right. He gives me that towards the word, he gives me that towards the things I have to be obedient in. Um, knowing that it's backed up by neuroscience too, is like you said, it's so beautiful because it's just proving what God has already designed into us. Yeah. And and real quick before we move on here, is the other neurochemical that I mentioned is acetylcholine. You mentioned in uh the story of the field, right? He's he had to seek it out. When we seek something, we have a release of uh this neurochemical called acetylcholine, it's the focus chemical. You can think about it if you were to go into a dark basement with the lights off. Acetylcholine is the flashlight. Okay. You turn your flashlight on and you see in the basement where you intend to look at, and it's telling your brain, oh, this is important. Yeah. The dopamine is responsible for then marking what is actually deemed important that you focused on. So it's like the acetylcholine is a flashlight. And imagine you were marking things for movers to come move from your basement. You put like little post-it notes on it. That's the dopamine. Then what happens is you have this process of neuroplasticity, which is just a fancy term for your brain's ability to learn, right? It's connecting these neural pathways that your brain has marked as important to use later. It's like the neuroplasticity is then the mover is moving what you focused on and what you deemed important. Yeah. That process is neuroplasticity. So when you go into this with a focus, you set time aside. Maybe you have a specific place in your house, you're intentional, you get an increase in this acetylcholine, which actually makes it easier to focus because focus begets focus. You go into it with that posture of curiosity and alacrity and excitement. Now you're getting dopamine. And what happens is you end up literally programming your mind at a neurological level to then act out what you're reading. Wow. And you're no longer conforming to the world, you're being transformed by the renewal of your mind. And then it continues because your action then convinces your brain that what you just programmed in is useful and important. That's so good. Yeah. That's so cool to be able to hear once again the scientific uh reality behind the way that God created us. If it's the glory of a king and he's speaking about us to seek things out, the fact that he created our mind, he created our physiological physiological self to be able to pursue these things and to be rewarded for it is really amazing. And I also want to point this out uh it's not always gonna feel that way. We can do all of the things to set ourselves up for there is an excitement, there is a thrill in this, and yet there's going to be times where we don't feel like it. And that's why it's called a discipline. Because we need to still be disciplined in the moments where it doesn't feel good and there isn't an excitement behind it because we know the value of what we're doing, because we know the one that we're going to spend time with is worthy of it. And so we shouldn't be discouraged in the moments where our emotions are not in agreement with it. We should be willing to say, even in those places, right, I want to be excited. And more often than not, I should be excited. But even when the other situations of my life are causing me to be run down and beat down, this is still worthwhile. Yeah. I keep saying this too. We're gonna have to talk about spiritual warfare at some point in an episode. But not only is the world uh making us distracted, right? Kind of these worldly mechanisms and systems, there's also the spiritual side, demonic forces at play, convincing us maybe not to read the word. They're making us tired, they're making us distracted. Then we have our own flesh that desires other things. There's just like life that's happening that makes us run down and tired at times that can distract us from getting into these things. But like you said, to emphasize your point, it's discipline. It's building these systems. It's, you know, one of the things I learned in business is like when you have momentum, go all in because you're not always gonna have momentum. So if you're on fire for the Lord right now, if you're like go all in, read it as much as possible because it's not always gonna be like that. And it's gonna get be hard at times. Um, but preparation, right? We talked about this previously. You mentioned preparation, like put your Bible out somewhere where you can easily access it in the morning. Yeah, like I said before, I I want the word to speak to me before the world speaks to me. So my Bible is closer to me on my nightstand than my phone is, right? Um, so with that, we mentioned posture. You know, I'm having trouble with my back recently because I unfortunately have bad physical posture. I know as if there first of all, is there any word other than posture that makes someone change their physiology more? No, as soon as you say posture, you see someone, right? Or if you see someone slouching, you sit up, right? Yeah. I I went to the chiropractor recently and I've done physical therapy and whatnot. And when we talk about posture, there's some mental cues, you know, of of different points that you should meet so that your entire posture for your body is in alignment. What I want to get at here with you is what are the posture points that we should get into before we open our Bible? Yeah. So if you could, if you could tell us maybe three posture points that we should get into spiritually, emotionally, mentally, maybe even physically, what does that look like for the for the believer? Yeah. If we know that we're going to spend time with God, which is what we're doing, having that understanding, then there should be an initial recognition of gratitude that I get to do this thing. I am such a huge proponent of worship in every area of my life. So the first thing before we come to the Bible is Lord God, thank you. Thank you that I get to spend this time with you. Thank you for the privilege of being able to explore with you and to be present with you. Uh that's the first thing. The second thing is, as I said, the reverence. I shouldn't treat this as just another thing or flippantly. I have the ability to sit down and to study out the words of God, which not for nothing, can get other people in the world we live in killed just for holding this book that I'm holding. So there should be a reverence and a gratitude. Like, I get to do this thing. So this is an amazing step. And then third, be come hungry. There is something that I'm gonna read that, even if I was reading the most boring passage in the book of Numbers, yeah, reading Leviticus and talking about like discharge and like uncleanliness and that kind of stuff. Or name after name after name, yeah. That, and I don't recommend having that be your sole passage if you're doing a yearly reading plan. Often they'll do this, but don't just read three chapters in in Numbers or Leviticus or you know, portion that out with I'm also gonna be reading from the gospels today. But I I in all in all honesty, like I remember getting to that point in like Leviticus and Numbers and asking God why. Yeah, why? Yeah, and really all he responded to me was like, because this is what you're supposed to do, be in it. It's part of the discipline of it. Like, and and there's something speaking to me in that moment spiritually that I may not understand yet, but like it was just the act of worship, of reverence, of being in the word. Yeah, and if it's endless pages of of of names and ancestry, great. Like that's where I'm supposed to be. Yeah, I'm not putting it down at all. I believe every word in the Bible is valuable and there's something in it, and there's something in the understanding of why God called him to do the things that he did and spoke to them and gave them the law and gave them the understanding that he did in terms of the tribes and how they were set up. Like, not putting down the that down at all. But yet there are certain passages that are not going to have as much edification on a spiritual level. And my brother would disagree with me probably on this because he he loves to be in those books. And I, like I said, I'm not putting them down at all, but as a practical um place of encouragement, read that alongside with something in the book of uh Matthew in the Gospels, or at the very least, find out the parallel where this passage in the Old Testament also is fulfilled in the life of Jesus. So give it a the full context of what it is that it's saying. Okay. Understood. I apologize for making it seem like Leviticus is the sleepy scripture. Don't read it before Ben. There is something in every every page of the Bible. I'm literally going through the Bible right now, and I've got the margins on either side, and I'm going through and I'm making notes on every every portion of scripture. Now that's a whole lot easier in the book of Romans than it is going to be in some of the books of the Old Testament, and yet still really valuable because the Holy Spirit is still present in that. Amen. And when I and when I when I think about posture, those are the things that I think about exactly what you're saying. It's it's an act of worship. It's that gratitude, it's the reverence slowing down. It's like despite how hectic life is, yeah, that can be tough. It's easier said than done. And then also like be curious. Yeah. You know, because some of this stuff isn't easy to read. Especially if you're if you're new to reading the Bible for the first time, there's gonna be some stories that seem hard to swallow at first, especially in the Old Testament. This is what a lot of unbelievers will bring to you as a disciple. They're gonna they're gonna challenge you and question about these things. Believers that come to me and they ask and question like, how could God call them to do this thing? Like, how could a loving God do this? And so having a better understanding, context, commentary is really important. Well, what I realized about the tragedy in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, well, specifically in the Old Testament, is it shows us the seriousness of sin, yeah, and the impact of sin and and uh how just God is, yeah, and how perfect he is. Yeah. And yes, it's a hard truth to swallow, but it's it's no less or no more serious than it's supposed to be. You're absolutely right. And everything, so Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 before the fall, like that was God's design. That was how he ordained it, that's how he he wrote it to be. Everything past that point, especially when we look up to the life of Jesus and the fulfillment, um, we see the results of sin. And sin is pervasive, sin is disgusting, sin is devastating. And everything that we see and everything that we try to understand through the lens of sin is going to be in some way distorted because it wasn't God's original design. Absolutely. And so having that understanding really matters. All right, so let's get into the repeatable framework. Okay. Uh, you shared a framework uh with our men's group recently that I think would be great for the listener here. And before we get into that, this would be a good time if you're listening, watching on YouTube specifically, uh, make sure you like and subscribe. It helps us obviously reach more people, but also actively engage in this. You know, uh what Pastor Sam's about to share is something that you should write down. This should be a framework that you use time and time again. And like I mentioned last time, the call to action was go out and actually reach out to somebody that you know who you can do this with. Yeah. And this will probably be a uh two-part episode for us. We're talking about how to study scripture, and then in the next episode, um, I want to get into actually putting this into practice on the parable of the sewer. So just you and I, as if there was no cameras, no microphones, yeah, so that someone else can maybe model it and use that with their friends. Yeah. So with that, let's get into that framework of what a Bible study should look like. Yeah. So what you just said is a really important part of it. The best Bible studies that I have. Um, and it's not to say that it's it's the only way, but I I love it because of the excitement that it creates around the word of God is when you do it in a group. So we did it in our men's cohort. We did it with probably seven or eight guys, and we sat down and we read through the Bible, we read through a passage, and then we discovered some things in it. And so that's what we're gonna talk about here today. But I first have to give credit to the person who taught this to me. I went to something called Preachers, um, which is by Nate Edwardson. He is the pastor of the stirring in uh it's in Reading, California. And he's an awesome guy, friend of mine. Um, and he taught us in the context of developing a message, his methodology in studying the scripture. And so he used the analogy of paddleboarding. Um, he said, I like the paddleboard. Somebody got me, you know, paddleboards as a gift. And so when you go out on a paddleboard, there are three different levels that you can experience once again, going back to the water. He said, When you're on the surface, when you're paddling on the paddleboard, which have you ever done it before? I'm like a newborn giraffe on a paddleboard. We're both old guys. I'm six's five. I think it's the height. Yeah, center of gravity is way different from that. I'm trying to stand on that paddleboard. It was not going well. And I like to think of myself as having decent balance and you know, pretty. No, I was I was going down and everyone around me is just paddling around. I finally got the hang of it. But I didn't get to enjoy what he was talking about on a paddle board, which is when you're on the surface, you can look down. But especially on a sunny day, you're going to be seeing the reflection of the water. You're not going to see in like really great depth if something's floating on the water, if something is just below the surface, maybe you can get a glimpse of it. And he said, this is the way that we should start to approach scripture in how we read it and how we study it, which is we shouldn't try to just dive right in immediately and go to the greatest depths of what's being said, because if we do, we can miss some of the detail and some of the surface truth that's there for us to see. And so, in seeing these things, it helps us to do two things, to ask the right questions. And then if we are to communicate that later on, we're able to communicate on a level that they would also understand whether or not they've never opened the Bible before or they have, because we're starting with the basic questions. Who is it talking about? Who is present in it? What are the obvious details of what I'm seeing here? And why are those things there? And so when we go to looking at a Bible, a passage of scripture, I would encourage everybody, don't try to take on even a whole chapter at once. Certainly don't try to take on a whole book at once. Find the specific passage, however long that is, and take that passage and read through it. Maybe read through it again and find some of the obvious details that are there. How do you get to that passage though? Let's let's go one step before that. Because I think some people, even myself included, I'm like, well, I don't even know. Do I just play Bible roulette and open up my Bible? Don't play Bible roulette. Like, what do I do? How do I get to that? How do I even get to that? Like, if I have a friend that I want to study uh a verse with or a passage with, how do I find that? Yeah. Do I pray on it? What do I do for you? So I think that definitely praying on it would be a really great approach, always. Um, with something like this, what I think is really fun is if you go to a passage that you know about already because you're going to go deeper into it. So let's say probably the most well known passage in scripture might be David and Goliath, because it's talked about in uh a secular context as well. Go to that passage, go to something that you know and read it as if you're reading it for the first time. That's one way of doing it, or go to the New Testament. Testament. Go to the gospels, find a story, find an account of Jesus, and and go there. So those would be two options. And you can't go wrong in either one. You're reading the word of God. Um, so that's what I would do is find a passage that you know about already. And that way, as you're doing this, you'll realize oh, there were details that I missed the first time around. But now I see that there's even more to this, which increases your hunger and creates a greater expectation the next time you go to a passage, even if you've never read it before or you've read it a hundred times. Well, I'll tell you, after we had our men's cohort, I had a Bible study that I ran on Wednesdays. What passage do you think I studied with my group on Wednesday? Was it Luke chapter eight? Yes. Because yes, it was a little repetitive for me, but it also made my understanding more robust and my ability to facilitate the Bible study that much more robust. Yeah, because now I was bringing in the perspectives I've I had from the night prior. Yeah. And I think that's the message here is like, don't worry about doing it more than once. It should be repetitive. The going back to like programming the mind, like you should be able to consume this as much as possible, look at it through different lenses and perspectives, and also be able to teach it. Once again, going back to this whole mission for you and I here, it's like equipping disciples. We don't want we want to teach you how to study the scripture for your sake, but we want to teach you how to study scripture so that you can then go teach someone to study scripture with you and then to multiply that. Yeah. Right. So, okay. So we got through how to like find the passage. Let's start with something that's maybe familiar, even secular, like David and Goliath. Um, and then the primary first step, like secularly used, secularly used, yeah, not secular passage. Um and then the primary first step is like, okay, let's go with the basic information. Uh was there anything else you need to add to this? So there's who, like, who are the who are the stakeholders? Who the who, what, where, when, why? Yeah. Well what was interesting to me when we were going through Luke with uh the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years and Jairus, who brought his daughter um to Jesus, or brought Jesus to his daughter, was you said to just look at Jesus' you we don't, we're not even assuming that he's God at that point. He's like just a guy, he's not just a guy, but that was as basic as we want to look at it, right? Yeah, surface, identify the key people. So when Nate was teaching this, he talked about a time that they were going through, and and the the ultimate thing was somebody in the back was getting something out of the passage, but they're like, I have a question, who the hell is Moses? And like everybody would just assume within a church context, we all know who Moses is, but if you have never read scripture before, and if you're communicating scripture and you just talk about somebody like everybody knows who they are, then they're gonna feel like, oh, I don't, I don't really have a connection point here. So we want to make sure that we're not uh going over the obvious things and losing sight of the significance of it, why they were there, who they were, et cetera. And and so it's literally going step by step, and we're gonna do this in the next episode when we talk about the parable of the sower and we do our own little Bible study on that. But it's go through all the not necessarily minutia, but what are those surface level facts that you can literally see in black and white on the page first? You're not bringing context into it at this point, right? Okay. And everybody who does this, they'll see different things. And that's the really cool thing about doing it in a group, is that you will identify different things. I'll see something different than you're gonna see. But whatever it is, and this is an important part too, journal it, write it down. Even if it's on your note, you know, app on your phone, just write down the initial things. Start with level one. What's going on here? What's the surface level? And I'll I'll put these steps in the show notes for people so they can look in the description. Um, because I know even if people are listening to this, maybe they're driving um or they're taking notes, there might be things that you miss. So we'll make sure we outline what uh Pastor Sam's talking about here. Uh okay, so we have the basic uh surface level facts and things that we can can just clearly see in in the scripture here. What's step two? What do we do next? All right. So for me, this was the most personal element of it when you fall off the paddleboard, or if you step off the paddleboard or you're going out. It's when you're in the water. Maybe the water is up to your waist. Okay, now you're experiencing it more than you did initially. And you can put your hands in the water, you can feel it, you can see with greater clarity because you're a little bit closer than you were. And so now as you're reading the Bible in the second level, you're asking more questions about the things that you observed in level one. So you want to ask what stands out, what questions is are are being raised in the text, what's the author doing here? Um, I also think that you can be taking the time to really understand, and this is maybe more of a level one thing, but also important to point out what kind of book of the Bible am I reading here? Uh, note the genre of what you're looking at. Matthew through John are going to be the gospels, their historical accounts. If you do this in the book of Revelation, it's still valuable, but it's going to be different because it's going to be talking about more of a, there's more representation taking place in there. There's more things that are prophetic in nature. Um, if you're doing this in the book of Psalms, if you're doing it in some of the literature books, it's going to look different. Prophetic books in the Old Testament. So, so pay attention. And this is where in most Bibles, when you open up that book originally, most study Bibles, I should say, it's going to give you some context. It's going to give you some understanding of who is this book being written to, why did it exist, who's the author, etc. That's also helpful as you're asking these questions now. So you want to go deeper, ask some questions about what you're reading. And this is a really cool one. When you're reading any of the gospels, you're reading accounts of scripture that include somebody. For us, we were reading about Jairus and his daughter, the woman with the issue of blood. We start to look at the fact that these were real people. This is not an illustration. This specifically was not a parable. This really happened. And so as you're reading it, you can start to sense some of the emotion that would have been present in those people. So they come to Jesus, two different people. One asks for healing, the other one comes and grabs the hem of his garment. But there's emotion in both because there's a desperation. For Jairis, my daughter is dying. Can you come? And for the woman with the issue of blood, she goes and she grabs through the throngs of people and she grabs the hem of his garment. What is the emotion she would have been feeling? What would I have felt if I was in that situation? How would I have approached Jesus if I was the woman and he turns to me and I'm no longer hidden? And what's my emotions if I am the man who's asking for my daughter to be healed? And now they come and they say, uh, don't bother him anymore. She's already dead. What am I feeling in those moments? Have I experienced that in my life? Do I know what that feels like to experience the hope and the desperation and then the disappointment? And then finally, at the end of that account, where Jesus comes and he brings her back to life and he raises her from the dead. What is the emotion in that moment? And why does Jesus say in that moment, don't tell anyone? Why is he concealing this? These are questions that we're asking that are bringing us deeper in the text. They're not 2D, they're not just something that we're observing, but we're starting to give have a more of a connection to. And this is a really important element. And then that leads us to level three, which is greater depth. So this is this is level two. We're beginning to assess motive, uh, perspectives from each stakeholder, and then our own perspective of like what if we were in their shoes? Yep. And we're still staying within most of the context of that story. Level one, we're just staying in that in that specific passage. Level two, we're starting to look and we're starting to explore what's going on there. We could start to bring in some understanding of who is being spoken about here. Um, and then level three is where we're gonna blow it open and we're gonna bring in everything that we know. All right, blow it open. Okay. So level three, you're off the paddle board, you're you've been on there, you've been working up the sweat, you dive into the water, and now all of a sudden you see with really great clarity because you're you're looking with your eyes, you can touch, you can uh experience the temperature of the water, and you're moving about freely in that. This is where you go into the depth of what scripture is saying. You can start to bring in the understanding, okay, Jesus is the one who was foretold through the whole Old Testament into the New Testament. Uh, you could start to think about their expectations as the Hebrew people, as he comes in and they say, Is this the one? He has great authority. He's speaking like none of the religious leaders do, but then they think, oh, well, he's just the son of a carpenter. He's from Nazareth. It can't be anything special. We see as he rides into Jerusalem and now they're they're worshiping this coming king, this Messiah, because they expect that he's going to conquer Rome and then the disappointment when he is crucified. We're bringing in all of the context of scripture. So this is where we're bringing in commentaries, we're bringing in other tools. We're starting to go deeper and deeper, depending on our experience with God up to that point. That might be limited. But um, a simple, a simple tool that you can use is just going on to um the the Bible project and just looking up every single book of the Bible. The Bible Project has a synopsis of that, of that book. And just go on YouTube, type in Bible Project, uh, the book of Luke. You'll find out about the author, you'll find out about more of the context, and then they do a breakdown, uh not verse by verse, but like major themes within it. And so that's that's a really good tool to use as you're doing it. So those are the those are the three levels. I think there's a fourth level that I want to end this episode with that we'll talk about, and that's that's actually meditating on scripture. Definitely. Um, but can you recap the those three levels for the listener so we have uh easy to follow uh step by step? Yep. So level one, look on the surface. What's it saying? What's it talking about? Really? We're just we're being a detective, we're inspecting the details of it. Level two, we're going deeper into it, we're asking questions, we're paying attention to tone, we're we're looking to see what was that person feeling, thinking, experiencing in that moment. Level three, now we're bringing in the entirety of scripture. And another part of that that I didn't get to mention was now we can start to look at even some of the words and the breakdown. We have great tools. If you want to find like the Greek meaning behind a specific word without feeling like you're going out of your depth, I would just type in in Google the the specific reference that you're looking for. I want to look for John 3.16. Okay, so I'm gonna type in John 3.16. Bible Hub is gonna be one of the top options you have coming up. Click on Bible Hub, and then on the right hand side, each word is gonna be a hyperlink. You can click on that word, uh, specifically on a computer. You can do it on a phone too. You just have to do some more scrolling. It will show you the Greek word, tell you every time it was used in scripture, and give you a definition. You can go really deep there. But I'm telling you, you could take a passage that is four scriptures deep and you could spend hours on it. And you know what? I encourage people to do that. Don't rush through this, go deeper uh before you ever get here. And I this was one of the posture points. Just say, Holy Spirit, will you reveal to me what you are saying right now? I don't want to bring all my own understanding in this. Will you reveal to me? And have that experience, have that time with him where he speaks to you through his word. Yeah, and what stood out to me about when you were facilitating the the men's group that we have, yes, you're the lead pastor of the church. So there's that natural authority, and you're sitting up in front of the group and you're facilitating that Bible study. But I think for the listener, when you're doing this, it's important to know that if you're doing this with someone else, the onus is not on you to teach the scripture. Yeah. The onus is on the Holy Spirit to reveal to you what's in scripture with that other person that you're studying it with. Yeah. So ask questions, talk to each other, communicate about it. Yeah. And it don't take on the responsibility where you feel like just because you're the one discipling someone, perhaps, it's good. You put it together that you have to be the one to reveal everything to the person that you're with. Yeah. Um, because that that made when I when I did my Bible study with my group of people after our men's cohort, that's the posture I took. And I'm like, yeah, oh my God, this is so much easier. Yeah. Thank God, because I don't want it to be on me. I want you can leave with questions. Yeah. You don't have to, you don't have to bring everything to its finality in that moment. Write down the questions and then go deeper on the questions. Yeah. There, you literally will not find a limit to the depth that you can go into. You can spend a year on a passage and you can keep discovering more and more and more. And you don't have to do that, but there should just be this. Oh, okay. So when he speaks here, when Jesus is speaking these words, he's actually speaking the words that David spoke prophetically, you know, however many years before. Let me go back and study that. Let me study the life of David. Let's recognize that David was the out of the line of Abraham. Let's talk about the significance of that. There, I get excited about this because there's just so much. And if we would spend more time on that and less time on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, it would be changing us and transforming us instead of allowing the world to transform us, like you said. Word before the world. Absolutely. Which brings me to level four. Let's hear it. Meditation. Meditation, meditating on scripture. Uh, we see this in Joshua 1.8. Meditate on it day and night. So you may be careful to do all that is written in it. Yeah. The first thing that comes to mind, once again, I'm a very practical neuroscience guy. I think about the studies they did with the basketball players, and they took three groups of basketball players and they made one group practice shooting free throws, they made another not physically practice, but visualize uh visualized shooting free throws, and then they took a third group who did nothing. Well, the group that actually practiced physically had only a 1% improvement in their performance compared to the group that only visualized shooting. And both of them had higher than 20% improvement than the group that did nothing. I should be much better at my golf game if it comes down to all the thinking I do about it. But but I think this is where I wanna I want to uh meditate on this for a moment, right? Because it's that pondering, it's that, it's that positive rumination, it's the chewing on, you know, it's it's it's literally means in in the Hebrew to turn over, right? To turn over these thoughts in the mind. When you're meditating on these things and going deeper into that and asking yourselves, okay, well, how does this scripture apply to my life and see it in your mind, see how your life plays out differently? What is that problem that you have with your spouse? What is that struggle that you're having with your business? And what does what you learned from that Bible study, how does that apply, but see it playing out in real time? Because what you're doing from a neurological standpoint is the same thing that happened in this, in these studies with the Bible. They've done it or with basketball, they did the same thing with piano playing. People who just visualize playing uh piano did better than or just as well as the people who practice actually playing piano. Like race car drivers will do it. Yeah. If they're doing like the downhill skiing in the Olympics, you'll see them eyes closed and they're seeing themselves go through it. There is something really powerful about that. The blue angels do this. Um, they visualize their flights before, and they're literally, I've seen videos of this. You can look this up on YouTube. They're closing their eyes, they're actually touching the controls in their minds, they're moving about, they're communicating with each other as though they're in the air. Yeah, there is power to this visualization and and meditating. And I don't want to make this woo-woo. It's it's it's it's one, it's commanded to us to meditate on this. And like I alluded to before and said, is the Bible didn't necessarily have these words that we talk about when we talk about like neuroplasticity and dopamine and acetylcholine, but we are leveraging those things. And if we know that, right, he says, My people perish for lack of knowledge. It's like when you listen to this episode and we're talking about one, the practical how-tos and then how it uh correlates with neuroscience and also how that reinforces the spiritual truth, like it's it's reinforcing your ability to actually take that practical information, have a supernatural spiritual experience and reprogram your mind, orientate it towards God, activate that mind of Christ, which I want to talk about too in the future. Um, but in doing so, having that deeper understanding and that knowledge is what allows you to engage with this text that much more profoundly. Right. So I want to end this episode on kind of driving this point home about level four, if you will, if if that's appropriate for you, uh, of meditation. So when you hear meditate on scripture, yeah, what does that mean to you? Yeah, I love that you mentioned Joshua 1.8, where it says, the book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night. And then he tells you why. And he says that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. So there is a reason for the meditation that as God's word is placed within us, and as we receive from it, it helps us to, and this is what Romans 12, 2 says, that we would be able to discern and to know what is the perfect will of God. So if we want to know more about what God is saying and what he's doing going forward, we have to know what he's already said. We have to eat from that meal, we have to receive from it. I also think about Abraham, where it says that he did not consider that his body was dead or consider the age of Sarah's womb, but he trusted in what God had said. He was meditating on the truth of what God had said, even when everything else around him was speaking to a different reality. And so that is that meditation. It's trusting in what God has said. And so I just wanted to give you this other practical element of this. It's probably not the best idea to do this as you're falling asleep, because if you do that, then you may not be remembering exactly what you're doing, but you may have something to say about that. I will say from a neurological standpoint, there actually is, I think it's yes, and it's it's don't just do it before nighttime when you're like just dozing off, but there actually is a lot of power in the in the neurological state right before we fall asleep at night and right when we wake up in the morning because of our brain waves. Yeah, they begin to slow down at nighttime and it gets us into that prime state where neuroplasticity it solidifies those neural connections much more easily and rapidly in that moment. It's like going to the gym. When you work out at the gym, you don't get bigger, faster, stronger when you're doing the workout. You're tearing down the muscle. The mind works the same way. When you're consuming scripture, it's having some effect on your brain as far as structurally, as it goes structurally. But what happens is the information doesn't get solidified until you're at rest. So right before you fall asleep at nighttime, yeah, if you're thinking about that scripture that you were studying the day before, yeah, great. Don't let that be the only time, but you're in that the the state, the way I would equate it, it's like when you pour concrete. When you're in the right state of mind, when you're meditating on scripture or when you're highly focused on what you're studying, it's like pouring concrete, but it's wet. And if you put your hand in it, it leaves an imprint. Yeah. But what happens? If it's not solidified, it goes back to leveling itself. Okay. So when you're in that state, whether it's right before bed, prayer, meditation, reading the word, it's like having wet concrete. How do we solidify that though? Yeah. It's through living it out. Yeah. And the action reinforces what you've learned. That's really good. Um, so live it out, put it into practice, ask yourself, and I want to emphasize this too. See it. Use your God-given imagination to literally picture these things in your mind. And now, some people always say, Well, Anthony, I can't see images. I have there's something called aphantasia, which is this inability to form mental images. Most people don't have that. It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to see it clearly. Get an idea with your eyes closed of like, what does it look at for me to actually live out these principles? And then also, like we were talking about when we were doing the study on Luke 8, right, with the woman who touched uh the hem of his garments. As you're talking about them, we're studying, I'm literally trying to put myself there. Like I'm in the crowd. I see this woman trying to hide behind other people. I see Jesus being like who touched me, and like he could feel his power. And I'm got and I'm getting the chills right now because it becomes so much more real when you put yourself there in your mind. Yeah, right. It does. And so I think that's the next level is see it in your mind. And the we talked about New Age last episode. These are all things that New Age and a cult they stole from the Bible. They're spiritual truths and technologies that were perverted. There's counterfeit versions, it they're real. Yeah. So why not leverage our imagination and our ability to visualize and and and leverage neuro neurological processes? Yeah. Um, and so all that to say, I think just as important as the structure of what we've talked about of studying scripture and how to study the Bible, is the practice of actually meditating on it. I couldn't agree more. I think that it's such uh an underutilized, can I use your your terminology, technology, to be able to take the time to allow it to sink in. Yeah. One of the things I want to do too is I I want to create, and maybe you can help me do this. And maybe if the listener is uh interested in this, leaving a comment on this video, is I would love to create some like uh pre recorded meditation, like actually read scripture in like a recorded way and guide someone through actually putting them. There, right? To build that muscle or to build that framework of what is actually what are the what are the questions to ask? What are the mental cues to follow? So that if you are bringing yourself back to David and Goliath and you're standing there and you're seeing Goliath on one side and you're seeing David on the other, and you're seeing him reach for a stone and put it in his sling, like how do you actually bring that up in your mind? How do you step there in the first person so that you can get the most out of it? As long as we don't use AI to do it. No AI. Real quick. Speaking of AI, you were mentioning looking things up. Yeah. Do you think that's a one of the good utilities of like AI? Is like instead of Google, maybe maybe I can go to ChatGPT and be like, hey, give me the original language of this passage. Yeah. Give me all the Hebrew and Greek. Yeah. It's a good tool. Yeah. I would say that shouldn't be your only one. Um, I know Bible software like Logos is using AI as well within their model. I would prefer that over Chat GPT. But I think that, excuse me, um, you can do you can use ChatGPT as an initial starting point. But I tend to, when I'm doing a word study, using that Bible hub app, using something that I just trust a little bit more, just because I know that there is a tendency of ChatGPT to tell you what you want to hear. And if it's learned you and it's learned your personality and it knows that you're kind of searching for this with a specific uh intention behind it, it might twist some things to be able to fit for your desired outcome. Um, so not saying by any means don't use it at all, but I would just say there's probably some better models out there. But uh AI in general, being able to have all of the words of the Bible and to be able to bring greater depth to it, I think it's it's a really helpful use of it. Absolutely. Well, I know we went a little longer than usual on this episode, but I I know that this is a very important topic, if not one of the most important topics, is like how do we actually engage with scripture so that it manifests tangibly in our lives as disciples? Um, because the Bible wasn't just meant to be read from, right? It was meant to be lived from. And so for those of you listening and you feel convicted to go live out what we're talking about here, I think the call to action for you is to go text somebody, like set up that Bible study. Just reach out to one other person who you think would be open to doing that and start there, right? Don't make it some big, you don't have to run a group of 30, 40 people. Um, you don't have to be a pastor to do this. Start a conversation about a specific passage and let the Holy Spirit lead it. Um, and also, um, once again, if you like this episode, make sure you subscribe, uh, like it, share it too. I would share it because this is useful information. And these are the things that I'm asking you as my pastor now and friend, um, are things that I know other people are questioning internally. So, with that, would you mind uh praying us out of here? Absolutely. I would love to. I want to read um as we're praying, and I find myself mentioning this a lot more lately out of the book of Ephesians, um, because when we're reading the Bible, we're looking for that revelation that comes from God. So, Lord Jesus, I just thank you for anybody who's listening, watching, who wants to know and read your word, to be able to discover what you've said and to be able to discover the truth of what you were revealing to us. And I pray that as Paul prayed, that the eyes of our hearts would be open, that we would be enlightened in that place, that we would know what is the hope to which you have called us, and what are the riches of your glorious inheritance in the saints, that as we read your word, that we would be able to see and discover what is the immeasurable greatness of your power towards us who believe, according to the working of your great might, that you worked in Christ when you raised him from the dead, and you seated him at your right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but in the one to come. And we thank you for all of this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen.