How to Read The Bible — 2 Timothy 1

0:00 Hey, good morning. Good morning. Pleasure to be with you. This morning we're going to talk about how to read the bible on your own. I was asked to talk about this this week.

0:14 This is a subject I think is so important for us as believers. One of the reasons is, and you know how sometimes you have something that just gets stuck in your brain, like a quote or a line from a movie or something and it's always there. There's a quote from a book I read a long time ago. And it describes a guy named I Howard Marshall says this about Jesus that all throughout his life, Jesus has a mind that was nurtured on the word of God. Jesus had a mind that was nurtured on the word of God.

0:58 And just think about that for a moment. Jesus did not have a copy of the scriptures himself. He did not have regular access to the written text like we do. And yet his mind was consistently oriented to the word of God, to scripture. When he's in the wilderness and he's tempted by Satan, what does he say?

1:25 It is written. It is written. That's right. Yes. Very good.

1:28 Yeah. It is written. He, and then he quotes from what does he quote from? Deuteronomy, I think. You can fact check me on that one.

1:36 Thank you. Thank you. I'm seeing some of it. As soon as I said it, I was like, I don't feel confident now. So I'm going to be the expert that tells you what the bible says, apparently.

1:46 This is pathetic. But Jesus, you know, he immediately quotes from scripture. His mind doesn't go with like, okay, what's a clever way I can get out of this? He goes right to the very words of God. When he is hanging on the cross, he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

2:05 And those two are scripture. He's quoting directly from Psalm 22. We might go back and look at that a little bit of just of his expression of lament and trust in his father in the midst of his deep suffering and taking on of our sin. He has a mind that is focused on scripture. And if we are going to be his followers, to be his disciples in life, and we're going to follow his example, we too need to be followers and readers of this book.

2:44 I love that line that is used often of, especially ancient Christians, that they were people of the book. And so I wanna just start by asking you the question, are you a person of this book? Like, is this something that shapes you? That you go to? That you long for?

3:08 That finds its way? Its words finds its way, finds its home in your heart and in your mind. Now, of the things that can be difficult in our approach to this book is that it's an old book. And you read sections of it and you go like, oh, God bless us. I have no idea what that means.

3:31 It's a hard book to read sometimes. And so we need a bit of training. We need some tips and tricks to learn how to better understand what scripture says. So that we can be not only faithful readers of scripture, but that we would be faithful followers of Christ. So what I want to look at this morning is as we said, how to read the Bible on your own.

3:59 And so I want to just kind of give us a high level overview of some of the things that we need to pay attention to as well as some techniques, some things that we can utilize in our reading of scripture. The first thing I want to talk about here is how to bake a cake. Do we have any bakers here? People that like to bake? Good.

4:33 Anyways, there are three basic steps to baking a cake. You can come up with your own list if you'd like. But for me, there are three basic steps of baking a cake. Number one, you have to buy and gather all of the ingredients. If you don't have some of the ingredients, you don't have a cake.

4:55 Right? If you don't have sugar, it's not a cake. More sugar. Right? You need to gather the ingredients.

5:05 The second step in baking a cake is you need to then take those ingredients that you've gathered and you're going to combine them in the proper order. Right? You have to put them together in the right way. Because again, if you don't have the right thing or the right ratios, if you don't have enough sugar, it's funky. We don't want a funky cake.

5:27 Then the third step, two step process, but it's still three steps, is you're going to bake your cake in the oven. Then you're going to take it out. What do we do with it? You eat it. Right?

5:42 And I hate these, my daughter, she loves these baking shows where they make this like ginormous cake and then they're like, we'll have one little bite. That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in the world. This is just a picture of American decadence. I just like, you know, you make this cake and then you enjoy it. You eat it.

6:00 Right? This is the metaphor for how we can think about, how we can start to approach scripture. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to observe what scripture says. This is akin to gathering the ingredients. We're going to read what the text actually says.

6:19 Have you ever read a book, read the bible or other books and you read for five minutes, ten minutes and then you just go, I have no idea what I just read. Okay, I'm the only person that's a sinner here. Thank you. Okay Mason, yeah, thank you. I'm just going to pin it on you, Mason.

6:40 Yeah. Yeah, and we have this sometimes where we go like, oh, I'm not sure really what I just read here. Because we're not actively engaged in this process of reading. So in this step of observation, we're paying attention of who is saying this, right? If we look over to Acts chapter one, I know you're going through Acts and you're in like Acts chapter 20, but we're going go back to Acts chapter one.

7:03 Hopefully a familiar verse to you, but it's a cool little verse. Here in Acts chapter one, at least in my bible, it's in the red letters, which suggests what? Jesus spoke it. Right, very good. It's okay, you can talk a little bit in church, it's alright.

7:21 So notice here, this is the last words Jesus is about to say and he says this to his disciples and he says this, but you will receive power when the holy spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. So a couple of things that we can just like, here's what it looks like to observe. We're asking five basic, interrogatives. Right? Who, what, where, when, why, and how.

7:54 Six. There's six. So who's speaking? This is Jesus. He's speaking this.

7:59 When is he speaking this? Right before he's ascended up into heaven. The last words that he's about to say. Think about this, like the last words someone say to you. Those are important, aren't they?

8:11 And this is the last thing Jesus says to his disciples. He doesn't say, hey guys, it's been a great three years. Keep it going. He says, no, you will receive power. And then he says like, okay, what, when will they receive that power?

8:26 When the holy spirit comes on you. So there's a correlation, there's a connection between the power that they will receive and the coming of the holy spirit. And then, not only will they receive power, but they will also be what? They'll be witnesses. The second half of the verse, you will be my what?

8:47 My witnesses. Now we can ask the question of where? Where will they be the witnesses? Does it say everywhere though? No.

8:59 That's good though, right? It does say everywhere but it doesn't just say everywhere. So this is the important thing of observing is that he's kinda getting at this point of everywhere, but he lays this out in kind of a ripple effect, if you will. First, in Jerusalem, what type of location is Jerusalem? It's a city.

9:21 Right? Very good. And then it goes, and you will also be my witnesses in Judea and Samaria. Now we have to test our ancient geography skills here. What type of location is Judea and Samaria?

9:36 A region, right? We might think a state, kingdom, region, great. Something that akin to Michigan and Ohio. I'll leave it up to you to decide which one is Judea and which one is Samaria. And then he says, and to the ends of the earth.

10:01 Now we're getting at, like does he mean to the, there's this end point and that's where the gospel gets to? Is that what he's getting at here? No. He's using a figure of speech to describe everywhere. Right?

10:12 So he goes from the smallest location of Jerusalem. He expands it further to the region that they're in, of Judea and Samaria. Then he expands that even further to our, to the rest of the world. Now, so this is, you know, asking these kind of simple questions gets us going and gathering these ingredients of scripture. So we can look on a very micro level of one verse, like here in Acts one eight, and we can expand this on more of a macro scale as well.

10:46 And so if we were paying greater attention to Acts, we'll see that this is actually Luke's internal outline for the book of Acts. Chapters one through seven is God's work through his disciples, through the apostles in chapters one through seven in Jerusalem. Chapters eight through 12, where they're in Judea and Samaria. And then 13 through the rest of the book is to the ends of the earth. So here, like Luke is describing this story, is describing these words, but he's also using it to frame the rest of his story.

11:48 Then the third step is application, where we seek to bring this into our own context. How does this passage work in our own lives? And this is both a two fold process like baking and eating the cake. Where we are, where when we apply scripture, we're seeking to see how is this relevant to me in my life? How does this fit into my own context?

12:18 And then the second part is like eating it, of going and doing it. Because this is the whole point of scripture. Is not that we would be super knowledgeable, that we would pass bible jeopardy. As Howard Hendricks says, it's not to make us smarter sinners, it's to make us like the savior. And many times, and even in the ancient church, the first Christians struggled this as as with this as well.

12:48 James chapter one, don't be hearers of the word only, but be doers of the word. So here, like, when we're thinking of this process, and I'm a nerdy person, as you probably already know. I love all the nerdy stuff. I like being specific. I like all the different aspects here.

13:07 All of that does not matter Unless we are willing and by the power of the spirit, we understand what it says and we do it. So when we're going through this process, this is not just an intellectual process that we're going to. That it's not only an intellectual process. It is a spiritual one. It is a relational one with our savior.

13:37 And so he is inviting us with these words. He is inviting us into this relationship of trust with him. So when we look at this passage in acts one eight. Here Jesus is talking to his disciples and he's comforting them. They're kind of freaking out that Jesus is going to leave.

13:59 They have a certain expectation about what Jesus' kingdom is going to look like. And he's going, your expectation is wrong again. And he reorients them, but he comforts them and says, you're gonna receive power. The Holy Spirit's gonna come to you and you're gonna be my witnesses. And by extension, by here, when we're thinking of this, the same thing applies to us as believers.

14:27 Many times we feel afraid. We feel as if the Lord has left us. But the Lord is comforting us with these words. He gives us power with the person of himself, the Holy Spirit. He empowers us to be witnesses for him.

14:48 And then the question that is kind of Jesus is inviting his disciples into and Luke is inviting us in recording this for us. How will we embody this attitude? Will we move from a position of trust? Or be hindered with a position of fear? Will we move forward as followers and as witnesses of him, of our savior?

15:17 Or will we seclude ourselves to our own business, our own affairs? That's kind of what what Luke here is pressing against us in the very introduction to the book of Acts. And so here, what I'm trying to just lay out for us and illustrate just slightly here, is this is kind of the three basic step. A lot of times when we go to scripture, we read a passage and we go, I don't know what to do now. You got three things now.

15:44 Follow these three things. That gets us started. There's many, there's much more things that we can do here that we're going to talk about. But that's the central feature. Observation, interpretation, application.

15:56 Okay? All right. Couple of, we got a few more things. I got more time. We end at 12:45, right?

16:19 It's chief, whatever picture you want to use here. Context is king. What comes before? So when we're just looking at Psalm, or excuse me, Psalm. Acts one eight, we just looked at one verse, which is great.

16:34 But we also want to pay attention to what was said before and what is said after. That gives us the context. Context is king. We can make the bible, or really any form of communication, to mean whatever we want it to be without a context. Right?

16:55 So we can, we can, I mean, can show you verses that show that the bible tells us that there are zombies? The dead will rise. It's first Corinthians 15. But is that what he means? Like, oh, there will be zombies and it'll be the walking dead.

17:13 Get your, get your machetes out. Like, of course not. The context is clearly showing us the verses before, the verses after that we're not talking about zombies. That's nonsense. That's why it's a good laugh, Right?

17:25 But there are other ways that we can, you know, misunderstand or not look at the context and then we get like, oh, the bible says this. And we go, nope, that's not where it's going at all. So context is king. You always want to be looking at what's coming before, what's coming after. So many times we focus just on one verse, which is great.

17:48 But we also want to expand it to look on the verses before, the paragraphs before, the chapters before, and what comes after as well. Now, along with this, as we're thinking about this context, there's a variety of other ways, other things that we need to pay attention to. Part of the difficulty in reading the bible is that there's a variety of different gaps for us that hinder or make it difficult for us to read scripture. And there's different things that we have to pay attention to. So now we have our basics process of observation, interpretation and?

18:30 Application. Oh, very good, very good. Observation, interpretation and application. And then we also have, if we're going a little bit deeper, okay, now what are some more specific things that we need to be aware of and pay attention to? So here, there's five other additional things, other contexts, I think that's right, but it sounds weird.

18:55 We have to pay attention to the historical cultural context. We're going to talk about these briefly here in just a couple minutes. The literary context, the linguistic context, I'm so tired of saying context. Intertextual context, I'm subtly saying context is really important. And the reader's own context.

19:14 So we're going to pay attention to these, just in brief. We want to pay attention to each of these in, into greater and lesser degrees as we read. So here, with the historical cultural context, what we mean is what was life like in the ancient world? We have the ancient world has beliefs, practices, politics, technologies, cultural norms, daily life, all these things that in some ways are very similar to our own, and in other ways are very different than our own. And so, it's important for us to insert ourselves into the narrative or into the passage of scripture that we are looking at.

19:58 So when we're thinking of Paul being thrown in prison, you know, my conception of what prison is, is not Paul's conception of what prison is. Like when we read in second Timothy that Paul is in prison. Like I think of maximum security prison, that sounds pretty terrible. But maybe he's got a TV. Maybe he gets regular food.

20:23 Maybe it's not so good. Maybe the tormentors are are after him. But you know, not too bad. But an ancient prison is a horrible place. Like basically, if you are in an ancient prison like Paul was at the end of his life, as in second Timothy, they didn't really have guards.

20:45 They didn't really they didn't have the commissary with the the plates and the food. Like, it's basically a hole that they threw you in. And if you didn't have friends or family to come bring you food, to bring you some water, you basically were gonna die either from starvation or you're going to from disease. That's the type of place that Paul is writing from in second Timothy. And so when he says in second Timothy, turn with me to second Timothy because this is so, so powerful here.

21:30 He's writing from a place of extreme suffering and unjustly. He's been thrown in prison unjustly. And now here, in verse seven he writes, and most likely he's dictating this probably to a friend of his, who then is taking this off to Timothy. He's not probably sitting down with a pen and paper. He's telling someone to write this and then they're writing this down.

21:59 He says this to his his good friend, his son in the faith. He says for this this is second Timothy chapter one verse seven. Now remember, he's probably covered in some level of filth. There's probably rats crawling all around in this cell. Like, he's like, oh.

22:17 I'm so glad for my shower this morning. That's disgusting. Like that's the type of environment that he is for the sake of the gospel. And he says this to Timothy. Get me out of here.

22:29 It's awful. He doesn't say that. Notice what he says in verse seven. For the spirit of God does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self discipline. That's a guy who says that, who I would give him every right to say whatever the heck he wanted to say.

23:01 If he wanted to lament, where are you God? If he wanted to say horrible things, we would go, I understand it. I get it. And yet his response and his encouragement to his son in the faith is that God gives not a spirit of timidity, he gives power. He gives love.

23:22 He gives self control. Even in that midst, his mind and heart are being shaped by the character of Jesus. So this gives us like, he's not just going like, he's putting on spiritual airs. Timothy, suck it up. God helps you.

23:41 He's powerful. Rest in his power. And he's writing this from a place of deep distress. So the historical cultural context can really help us to better understand what the author is doing. One other example that I want to give for you, and I love this one, is in Mark chapter one.

24:00 If you want to turn with me to Mark chapter one. Notice verse one. There's a lot, I'm going try to hold myself back here because I really love the gospel of Mark. Mark's my buddy. But there's a lot that can be said here.

24:17 But in verse one, it says, the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the son of God. So according to this verse, who's the son of God? Good job. We're all in Sunday school. Jesus.

24:38 Yes. Yes. Jesus is son of God. And so this is a question I like to ask my students every now and again. It's the one trick question that I maybe play on them.

24:46 Is who was the most famous son of God in the Roman empire? Caesar. It's not Jesus. And so when Mark, maybe he's in Rome, but he definitely is aware of this in the Roman empire. When he's writing this and he's beginning to tell the very first written account of Jesus' life and how he wants his readers to understand who Jesus is.

25:12 He uses a term that is has tremendous power in the Roman Imperial religious iconography and just like of the language that is used for Caesar worship. He says, it's not Caesar. It's Jesus. And so he never mentions Caesar. He doesn't go like, hey, Caesar.

25:37 He's really not God. But he's implicitly suggesting by saying Jesus is the true son of God. He's saying Caesar is not. And so we can get part of the positive emphasis of what Mark is saying, yeah, Jesus is the son of God. He's the second person of the trinity.

25:59 And I think Mark means that. But he's also doing something additional to that by pinging off of these other terms and these other motifs of how great Caesar is and he's dismantling them. And he's challenging the believers that are reading this gospel. He's challenging where does their allegiance lie? Does it align with Jesus or with Caesar?

26:28 And so part of what Mark is doing here, part of his intended meaning and the response, the application that he wants his readers to get, is he wants them not only to be faithful followers, but to push this further and to press against that there are other ways of life in their surrounding culture that are calling for them, that are demanding their allegiance. He says, it's got to only be Jesus. And so he begins this kind of task. He does this all throughout the narrative of the Gospel of Mark. But he begins this right from the very first line.

27:04 And part of the way that we know this is, like this historical cultural context is found in text, it's found in images, artifacts. This term, son of God is used and the very language that is used here in verse one is like standard language of of Caesar adoration of that of like a of a text that was plastered all throughout the Roman Empire praising Caesar Augustus. The exact, like almost the exact same language. And so this is very clear to an ancient reader, to the early Christians. They would go like, woah, he's challenging Caesar here.

27:44 By elevating Jesus. But because of our lack of understanding of the historical cultural context, we go, yeah, he's the son of God. Great. And we're missing out on part of that subversive element that Mark is intending to push for us. So the historical cultural context is really, really important for us.

28:07 One of the best tools, well there's two tools that I want to mention that I think are really helpful in engaging with the historical cultural context. One would be the bible project. If you, If you're not familiar with the bible project, they post YouTube videos. They have a bunch of podcasts. They are really, really well done.

28:26 They help engage with the historical cultural context and just are great at presenting overarching pictures of scripture. They've got a video for each video or each book of the Bible and deeper topics, fabulous. Another tool is the cultural background study Bible. And this is just, it's a bible that's got extra notes on the sides and on the bottom that help explain some of these historical cultural items. Things that we're not used to.

29:00 It's relatively inexpensive. I think it's like $25 on Amazon, something like that. It's relatively inexpensive. These are helpful ways to begin to engage with the historical cultural context that we find in scripture. So that's our first one, our historic, yes?

29:17 What was the first one? The bible project. So number one is the bible project and that's all free. They have a website, they've got podcasts, videos, all sorts of great resources. They have lengthier classes that you can take.

29:34 Really great, really great resource. What's that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, got that. And then you have the cultural background study bible.

30:06 Right? So we're thinking of the literature, the the order and arrangement of this. But also in the literary context, we want to pay attention to the genre. And a genre acts as a contract between an author and a reader. So when you are, what what's a genre?

30:26 Do know what a genre is? Romance. Romance. That would be an example of a of a genre, right? So if you're watching Netflix and you click on the genre romance and you happen to put on, by accident, a war film, you're going to be like, this is not very romantic.

30:43 Or you put on a horror film and you're just like, I'm so afraid, I didn't think that was going to be the response here. Right? So like we have certain expectations, like a horror film should be scary. If it's not scary, then either you're messed up or it's not a very good horror film. Or if it's romantic and there's no love story, it's probably not a very good romance story.

31:05 Right? So there are certain expectations and it becomes a contract here. We have certain expectations of what's going to be here. And the genre shapes the readers or the viewers expectations. Now, I want to show you a very spiritual picture.

31:24 If you were to judge what genre, if it is just this picture in the beginning of the film, what pic, what genre is, would you say is this film? Science fiction. Science fiction. Okay, so why would we say science fiction? What what clues are keying you in?

31:43 Because we do this automatically. We don't even think about this a lot. So why would we say this is science fiction? It looks like there's like space travel. Space travel?

31:52 We have space travel today. Why is it not a historical film? Yeah, I know it's not Apollo 13 because that's not what the Apollo spaceships look like. It doesn't look like spaceships that we know. It's probably fake.

32:08 I don't know what these planets are, so probably not, probably not, it's probably sci fi, right? Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So this is the beginning of Star Wars Episode Four.

32:20 It is historical. It's happened a long, long time. Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good. That's the best thing I've heard all day.

32:28 That's awesome. That's awesome. Yes. So we have certain expectations when we when we see something like this. If we saw a green alien or a talking robot or a lightsaber or whatever, we don't think that's weird.

32:43 We go like, that's what you'd normally have in a science fiction film, right? If we're watching Pride and Prejudice and there's a green alien, we go. I am not against it, but why? Right? And it's just like, that's not that's not the expectations that we have for something like Pride and Prejudice or or Romance.

33:08 Like it's just, what are, what's going on here? We have certain expectations. Same when we come to scripture. When we come to the book of Proverbs, there's certain expectations that we should have that are different than what we have when we come to second Timothy. There are different expectations that we have when we come to the book of Acts than what we have with Genesis.

33:29 We have a basic way of how we interpret all of the bible, but different genres require different set of expectations, different set of rules. And when we're looking at these rules, these expectations, we want to make sure that we're following their expectations, not our own expectations. So for instance, when I read the gospels, when I read something like the gospel of Mark, it's a historical genre. It's an ancient biography. And I know something about biographies, I've read biographies.

34:04 One of my favorite was the biography of Harry S Truman, the president of The United States during the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. And what makes a good modern biography is you go into really good depth. And David McCullough, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the biography of Truman. And I was interested in the book because I was interested in World War II and the Cold War. And I read this book and I don't know how many pages, 75 pages?

34:41 I don't know how, 50 pages? Before Truman was even born. Here's his grandparents. Here's his parents, how they moved to Missouri. It's like, that's great, no offense to his grandparents.

34:52 Get a move on to the good stuff. Let's go. But that's what makes a really good, prize winning modern biography. When we look at an ancient biography, we don't have those same sort of expectations. Mark doesn't even tell us anything about Jesus' birth.

35:10 Of the four gospels, only two tell of his his birth and do so very briefly. Mark just starts us right at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry. And that's it. Different set of expectations than what we have. So as we're thinking through this literary context, some practices that we want to develop.

35:31 We're paying attention to context as we talked about. And in that, we're focusing in and we're focusing out. We're paying attention to small scale, one, two, three verses. And then we're zooming out and we're looking at many chapters together. Seeing those and the relationship of those.

35:49 We're also looking for things like repetition, emphasis, contrast, the placement of a text. Now, what's interesting, we talked about Mark chapter one. How is Jesus described in Mark chapter one? Quick test. He's the son of God.

36:05 And what's interesting, in the gospel of Mark, other gospels do this differently, but in the gospel of Mark, no human ever tells, never calls Jesus the son of God. It's the father, chapter one, chapter nine. You have several demons. Chapter five does this. Chapter one, I think, does this.

36:29 Chapter two does this. Where the demons say you are the son of the God. But no human does this. Matthew, everybody and their brother calls Jesus the son of God. But in Mark, only the spiritual realm.

36:41 Until we get to the very end of the book. In Mark chapter 15, take a look at this with me because this is so powerful. And remember who else is described as the son of God? Caesar. Jesus, in Mark chapter 15 at Jesus' crucifixion, verse 37, with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

37:16 The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion who stood there in front of Jesus saw how he died, He said, surely this man was the son of God. Let's do a couple of things here. Let's pay attention to the literary context. Let's pay attention to the historical cultural context.

37:39 Who's the centurion guy? Who does he show allegiance to? Caesar. He shows allegiance to Caesar. He's a Roman entity.

37:47 And how does he describe Jesus here? The son of God. He is explicitly saying, or maybe implicitly saying, he's saying, Caesar ain't it. It's Jesus. And Mark uses this as a literary device to begin and end his gospel.

38:11 He wants us to see Jesus and his way of life as one who is worthy of our allegiance. And so he begins this and ends this and he sprinkles this all the way through the gospel as well. But he frames the entirety of the gospel with the assertion, Jesus is the son of God. And then the most unlikeliest of all characters, this Roman centurion who has just crucified Jesus says, truly this man was the son of God. And he also says like, how does he make this declaration?

38:48 He sees the way in which he dies. A total inversion of the priorities and the way of life and the demand for honor that Caesar would have. Jesus takes on the shame of the world so that we may be free. So here he's playing with this, he's utilizing the framing of his gospel here to emphasize the message of Jesus is this one, this son of God, and he demands our allegiance. So you can see if like we have different spots of observation.

39:27 We're putting it together, and then this applies. How is God, how is Jesus demanding our allegiance in our own life? Because Caesar doesn't demand my allegiance today. No one's demanding that. But there are forces, there are views, there are actions, there are ways of life that demand our allegiance that are opposite than Christ.

39:54 And what Mark is doing and through the Holy Spirit is encoding in whatever culture we find ourselves in, is pushing back against those other allegiances. And he's emphasizing, make sure your allegiance is to the true son of God. And as evidence in his self sacrificial death on the cross. So this is where where I find like why this can be so powerful in this process. Because we see how beautiful of a story of what God is describing for us.

40:30 How it can push us, not of just like Jesus died on the cross. The guy said he's the son of God. That's also Caesar. Isn't that interesting? Like he's pushing and prodding to the very depths of of the things that allure us.

40:46 And he's emphasizing Christ is supreme. So here we've got the literary context and I'm just going to give you just quickly, because I know we are out of time here, this idea of the linguistic context. We have to pay attention to some degree to the ancient languages. Greek and Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic. Now we have very good translations.

41:11 We have awesome translations. But to some degree, like the Bible was not written in English. So our English translations do a very good job of reflecting what the ancient languages say. But if we're gonna do a deep, deep dive into what is the true meaning of this word, we have to pay attention and we need help with this with the ancient languages. And I will say that the NET Bible, the new English translation, is a fantastic resource for this.

41:42 It's a study bible. It's got like a zillion footnotes. You can access it for free online. And they have many different descriptions of meanings of words and the particulars of the language. I'm going to jump to the intertextual.

42:30 We're going to hold back because the last thing I want to just point here is readers context. I want to just kind of lay on the plane here. How the message of scripture is brought into our own context. And I want to just emphasize this idea. It can't mean something for us that it didn't mean for them.

42:51 So we can't have this experience with scripture and goes like, it's divorced of what scripture says to their ancient readers. So when we read of second Timothy, of Paul writing to Timothy, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of self control. We have to pay attention to, alright, what does the, what does love look like? What does self control look like? What does power look like?

43:20 And the fact that Paul's in prison, Timothy is struggling for the gospel in Ephesus. How does that relate to Timothy's life? And then that shapes of how it works in our own lives. It's not just like this nice little verse that we can hang up on our wall and it's a nice reminder, which is great. But it's much deeper than that.

43:43 The same that we had with the gospel of Mark, where it's emphasizing the threat for these believers to change their way of life to correspond with Caesar's way of life instead of Jesus's way of life. And we don't have Caesar, but we have these same temptations, these same pressures in our own lives and he's calling us to rest in him. So I wanna just leave us here as an encouragement that scripture is so wonderful and so powerful. I hope you know that. And this is such a gift from God that we have this book.

44:56 He's encouraging us. God is speaking to us. He is desiring that we would listen to him. Take up and read. Father, we thank you so much for your word.

45:10 We thank you for your graciousness and your mercy to speak to us that you're a God who speaks and a God who shows himself to us. We pray father that you would help us to be faithful followers of you. We pray that you'd help us to understand your word that we would be hungry for you to speak to us. I pray father that you would just minister to our hearts that you would make your word come alive that you would open our eyes to see wondrous things from your law. I pray that you'd bless my brothers and sisters that you'd encourage them.

45:43 And that you'd help us to continue to follow you to be loyal to you and to walk not in a place of fear, but in a place of power, love and self control. We love you Lord. We ask all these things in Jesus name. Amen.