BROADCASTS.com

Welcome to Day 1474 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study – Discover The Meaning – Meditation MondayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1474 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind.  We are continuing our series this week on Meditation Monday as we focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Hebrew Scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser. Our current insights are focusing on study habits to build a strong foundation. Today let us meditate on: Bible Study – Discover The Meaning·      Insight Nineteen: Bible Study Is About Discovering the Meaning of the Text, Not Deciding How to Apply the TextDr. Heiser shares this personal story to help understand this insight. I spent two summers during college as a pastoral intern. I enjoyed it, though the experience contributed to the realization that I wasn’t cut out for pastoral ministry. I knew my calling was different. Something I did during that time also taught me a lot about what Bible study wasn’t—or at least shouldn’t be. One of the periodic tasks of pastoral interns was, unsurprisingly, preaching. We were allowed to pick pretty much any passage for a sermon and were given a generous amount of time to prepare. I had a couple of years of Bible college coursework under my belt, so I wasn’t new to Bible study. The only instruction that was given to me was that preaching wasn’t teaching. I understood the intent of the instruction: don’t turn the sermon into a classroom session. That’s good advice for several reasons. But it made the task incredibly difficult. I finally concluded that all I needed to do was go through the passage, make an observation here and there, and apply those observations to people’s spiritual lives—to our aspirations, failures, God’s forgiveness, and the need for consistency as followers of Jesus. The formula worked wonderfully. I got a lot of positive affirmation from the pastoral staff and people in the pew. A couple of days later, though, I had an epiphany that soured the experience but was just what I needed. I realized that I had preached a well-structured outline, not the text. Instead of really grappling with the meaning of the text, conveying that to people, and then drawing out lessons rooted in the text, I had used the Bible to make people feel a certain way. They’d been challenged spiritually but hadn’t learned a thing about the passage. I had manipulated my audience when my job was to help them understand Scripture and respond to it in their walk with God. Bible study shouldn’t be an exercise in being clever. When we look into Scripture only to jog our minds about what we’re doing right or wrong, or how someone else is pleasing God or not, we aren’t doing Bible study. Bible study should be about understanding what Scripture says and teaches. The Spirit will take the fruit of that labor and challenge...