All right. So we're going to start doing this in the second service. I think it helps us when we're not spread out over the entire auditorium to feel a little bit more of a group. And I think it'll help with Interaction, because again, this is not like a sermon, okay? I'm not just giving you a lecture. We're going to do a lot of stuff together in coming weeks. There's going to be hands out. This is a workshop, which means that you will be doing work, okay? Today is kind of an introduction, so there won't be as much of that, but we are going to start with some discussion. I'm going to start with a question, a question that I think we often fail to ask ourselves. What does God command us? Underline the word command. What does God command us to do with his word? Where do you find that? Study. It's in the New Testament. You're correct. Acts 17, 11, describing the Bereans. These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica in that they received the word with all readiness and searched the scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. It doesn't actually use the word study, but that word search is an interesting word. It's a word that's used most often in a legal sense. So if a policeman thinks that you've done a crime, what does that policeman do? He may search your home. He may search you. But he also will do what else? He will cross-examine you. He will question you. And often that word is used in that way. So we're to search the scriptures, we're to cross-examine the scriptures, we're to ask ourselves questions about the scriptures. That's part of what it means to study the scriptures. I think that King James Version may use the word study. No, there's another one. Study to show yourself approved of God, a workman who needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, which is found in 2 Timothy. Okay, so study, search, study. What else? What else are we commanded to do? Delight. Where do you find that? Psalm 19 verses 7 through 9. Okay, there's another one that says it more often than Psalm 19. Psalm 119. Let's turn to Psalm 119. What verse? No, you got it wrong. Psalm 119. Psalm 119. I want you to tell me what verbs this tells us to do with the Word. According to this Psalm, which stretches to like 176 verses, what are we supposed to do with the Word? Meditate. Keep. Declare. Fix our eyes on it. Heed. Thy word have I hidden in my heart. Learn. I have rejoiced in the way of your testimony. So that comes close to delight. Longing. Trust your word. Meditate. Verse 31, I cling to your testimonies. Revive me in your ways. Make me walk in the path of your commandments for I delight in it. Hope. What? It's a lamp. Take comfort. Not forgotten. I remember. Remember the word. Consider. Which word is missing from that list? No? Hide your word in my heart. The word read. Another great passage, Joshua 1, 7 and 8, only be strong and very courageous that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses, my servant, commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left that you may prosper wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall Meditate in it day and night. Why? That you may observe to do according to all that is written in it for then you will make your way prosperous and then you'll have good success. So I'm trying to make a point that I think we overlook. Now I think you can find a verse, I think there's a verse in Revelation chapter 1 that says we're supposed to read the Word. So yes, I think every believer ought to read through the Bible in a year. You ought to do it every now and again if you've done it before. But that's just a starting point. We're supposed to do so much more with the word. That's what these workshops are about. to teach us how to dig deeper, to teach us how to search, how to meditate, how to delight in the word, how to get to the point to where all of those things that we find in Psalm 118 are happening in our lives. So this isn't just something I'm making up. This is something that God, this is what he tells us we're supposed to do with his word, okay? We need to learn to dig deeper. So there's a label for the kind of Bible study that I'm going to teach you. It's called inductive Bible study. You've probably heard the word before and it's the opposite of, inductive is the opposite of deductive. Can somebody tell me the difference between inductive and deductive? Okay. He said inductive makes a conclusion from a lot of different points and deductive does what? He said just the opposite but that doesn't really make sense. It extrapolates from one point to many points. It takes a basic truth and then reaches a point based off an existing thought. Oh, okay, so it takes a pre-existing or a preconception and reasons from that to a conclusion. Okay, all right. So, when we try to learn something, when we try to study something, even when we try to make a decision, we can do that in one of two ways. First of all, we can come with some kind of a preconceived notion, even a preconceived question, and we can try to prove whether that preconceived notion is true. That is deductive. We're starting with a preconceived notion. Or we can come at it from no preconceptions. and try to base our conclusions on a study of a lot of stuff, as much as we can find. So, somebody give me an example of deductive reasoning or deductive decision making. All men are mortal. Okay, so a syllogism is deductive. Let me illustrate this by talking about buying a car, okay? So you can do this one of two ways. I can start with a preconceived notion. I could ask myself, should I buy a 2005 Honda Civic? And Casey's already shaking his head back there. Okay? And I can try to answer that question. So if I ask that question, should I buy a 2005 Honda Civic, how would I go about answering that question? Oh, come on. You have to have some idea. Okay. So I would look up consumer reports. I would look up the 2005 Honda Civic in consumer reports. What else would I do? Test drive one? Talk to somebody that's had one? See how much it costs? Okay, so I'm doing all this research, but that research is what? It's very narrow. It's very focused. Or I can start with a completely different question, which says that out of the entire car market, which car should I buy? Which does preconceive that question, but go with it. Okay, so how would I answer that question? Okay, so I would look into consumer reports, but I wouldn't just look under a 2005 Honda Civic, would I? I'd have to do a whole lot more what? I'd have to do a whole lot more research, okay? I wouldn't just talk to people that had a 2005 Honda Civic. I'd have to talk to everybody. What kind of car do you have? Has it been a good car? Would you recommend that car? I'd have to have that conversation with everybody I know. And maybe a lot of people I don't know. I'd be looking online. I'd be Googling it. I'd be doing everything I can possibly find out. What are the top ten cars according to this magazine or that magazine or whatever? I'm trying to observe as much as I can globally in order to come to some kind of a conclusion. Two different ways of approaching this, okay? Now, the 2005 Honda Civic, what kind of study, what kind of research was that? I started with a preconceived question. That's deductive. When I started and said, I want to research the entire car market, what kind of reasoning is that? That's inductive. Now, there are pros and cons to both of these. This is not right or wrong. How many of you learned the scientific method in high school? How does the scientific method work? Somebody tell me. You develop a hypothesis. You develop an experiment to test the hypothesis. Yeah. Okay. So what kind of reasoning do you use if you use the scientific method? It's deductive. I'm starting with a preconceived idea. I'm testing that preconceived idea. Now, is that the only method that scientists use? Yeah, at times, particularly someone who is a naturalist, he may go out and try to study every pod of a certain type of whale on Earth. And if you watch nature shows like I do with my grandchildren, I mean, you know that they actually do this. They know like where every pod of killer whales on earth is. And they study them. And based on that observation, that global observation, they then come up with certain conclusions. Okay? Let me, you know, for instance, we could study all of the basketball players in the NBA. I don't know if that would be profitable, but I'm sure somebody does it. I'm sure somebody, you know, knows, you know, what the average player, how many points he makes, and what his salary, the average salary of an NBA basketball player is, and they're able to draw all kinds of different conclusions by studying all of the NBA basketball players. What kind of reasoning is that? That's inductive. Okay? Now, when I preach, which of those methods do I use? I normally use an inductive method because I want to let scripture say what scripture says. So I'm going to the scripture and I'm trying to observe as much about that scripture as I possibly can to come to the right conclusions about what that scripture says. Now, I don't always do that. Sometimes I come to the scripture with a question. Is gambling a sin? What do I do? Do I study the entire Bible? No, I try to find just those passages that would talk about gambling and would apply to it so that I would come up with an answer. So there's, again, it's neither right nor wrong. There are many preachers that all they do is preach topical sermons. They preach on topics. And that's not necessarily wrong. Sometimes I do that. But I believe that if you really, as I talked about last Sunday, you really want to hear from God, then you come with an inductive method. Now, by the way, this morning's message, which one would that have been? Yeah, it was way inductive. It was an inductive study of the entire book of Ephesians. Sit, walk, stand. It's more, in fact, more inductive than I often normally am. I'm normally contained in a very few verses. That was an inductive study of the entire book of Ephesians. So, inductive Bible study includes three big steps. And up till now probably didn't make any difference if you were taking notes, but if you want to take some notes now would be the time to start. Three big steps to inductive Bible study. The first is observation, observe. Second is interpretation. Third is application. Observe. interpret, apply. You want to say that with me? Observe, interpret, apply. Which of those do you think is the most difficult? I think applying is easy. Many preachers go straight from the text to application, they never do any observation or any interpretation. I believe observation is the most non-intuitive to us, the most difficult for us to do. It's the step that I think most of us short circuit. because we don't really observe what's right in front of us. This is where my favorite detective of all time can teach us. I've always loved Sherlock Holmes. I have read his story so many times that I can't read them anymore because basically I have them memorized. And when you meet Sherlock Holmes, you meet him, and somebody will walk in to 221B Baker Street, and he will tell that person, you've just come back from Afghanistan. You're obviously a military man, and this morning you had this for breakfast and you didn't sleep very well last night and all these things. And Watson will just be gushing about how accurate everything that Holmes said is. And Holmes would famously say something like this, you see but you do not observe. And so often we read and we do not observe. I'll begin next week with a story about this that I hope really grips you if you haven't read it before. So before we can undertake this, these three big steps, I think there are three basic truths about the Bible that I want you to get a hold of. And most of this you know, but again, if you're going to properly observe and properly interpret and properly apply, you have to keep these three big facts at the front of your mind. Okay? The first is that the Bible is an ancient book. Duh. Written thousands of years ago. in a very different time and place. But let me ask you, how many of you have ever read any book besides the Bible that was written thousands of years ago? Okay, what'd you read? You actually read it in Homer's, a translation directly from Homer? Okay. I mean, I read all kinds of, I read all kinds of mythology when I was a kid, but I wasn't actually reading Homer. You've read Homer? No, not in the Greek. You've read an English translation of Homer. Okay, good. So, a direct translation of those authors. Was there stuff you didn't understand? Yeah, lots of it. You see, when we read any other ancient book, we realize, hey, there's lots of stuff here I don't understand. We don't tend to do that with the Bible as much. Realize that there's probably a lot here that we're missing because of the fact that this was written in a completely different culture, different country, different language, different food, different housing, different jobs, different government. I mean, you name it, different clothing, everything they did was different. Now, to some degree, I think we can understand them because they were human beings, but so much was different. I told you that I love Sherlock Holmes. The last time I read Sherlock Holmes, I read an annotated Sherlock Holmes. It was a volume about that big. It was huge. And you read a Sherlock Holmes because I didn't grow up in London in the 1870s. And, you know, what reading that annotated version, you know, with all kinds of notes about allusions that are made in each of the stories is how much I didn't understand. And this is only, I'm only 100, 150 years removed. And I'm actually speaking the same language. And really we have very similar customs to a lot of what, you know, would have happened in that day. And yet a lot of it I didn't understand. Scripture is like that times 10. And we have to keep that in mind. Or we will make mistakes, not just in observation, but particularly in interpretation and application. Okay? Number two, if the Bible were published today, what would publishers call it? There are probably two or three correct answers to that. Yeah, what would a publisher call it if he was promoting it, if he was advertising it? What would he call it? History of the world. Yeah, maybe. What? An anthology. Might even call it an omnibus. Because it's not a book. It's 66 books written by 40 different authors over I think it's like a 1500 year period. There's no other book like that. And those 40 authors are so different from one another. Each of them writes in their own unique style. And there's like six or eight different genres, okay? There's history, the gospels you might call biography, but it's a specialized kind of biography. You have law. In the Pentateuch, you have prophecy. When you get to Psalms, you have poetry. When you get to Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, you have wisdom literature. Then you get into the prophets and you have prophecy. And then there are some prophets that go beyond prophecy into what's called apocalyptic literature, which means Yeah, we don't really understand what this means. You know, that's essentially what apocalyptic means. We don't get it. We don't understand. It's very difficult. It goes beyond even prophecy. And then in the New Testament, you primarily have letters, okay? So you got six or eight different kinds and you have to read each one of those differently. You don't read a proverb the way you read a letter from Paul. You don't read poetry like you do law from the Pentateuch. You have to keep in mind who wrote this and the genre in which they wrote it or you won't understand it and you won't apply it correctly. And so anytime you come to a passage of scripture, there ought to be certain questions you immediately ask yourself up front. And you don't really try to understand what you're reading. You can't really make accurate observations until you have those questions answered. Okay? And then finally, number three, and maybe this should have been number one. This is a theological book. This was a book written by God, about God, which makes it an extremely special book, a book unique among books. It's a book inspired by God. What does that mean? His words means breathed out. It means that the words that Paul wrote that ended up in the New Testament are actually the words of God, even though they came through the instrument named Paul. Which means that every word in scripture is worth studying. I think sometimes people may get a little may think that my preaching is a little pedantic because I stop and I talk about words. These are God's words. If there are any words in the world that are worth stopping to talk about and make sure that we understand, it's the words of scripture. And so finding out that this word was used 200 times in the Bible and normally it meant this, that's important stuff. These are God's words. Every one of those words is worth considering. And then when we say inspired, who is ultimately the author of this book? Holy Spirit. How do we know that? Where do we learn that? Okay. Second Timothy 316. Yes, but more in is it second Peter first Peter. I think it's first Peter chapter one where it says holy men of God spoke as they were. Moved and that word moved is a word that's used in the New Testament of wind in the sails of a boat. They were pushed along. They were moved by the Holy Spirit, and so we can say that the Holy Spirit is the author of this book. Now, if you wanted to really understand a book, if you had a problem understanding a book, and you really wanted to understand that book, who would you go to to find out what that book meant? You'd go to the author of that book. Well, what's interesting is that Scripture tells us that we have the author living inside of us. We need to look at a couple of passages of Scripture at this point. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 2. So this passage has a lot to say about about the Word of God, I'm not going to try to dive down into all of it. But notice verse 14, the natural man, that's an unregenerate man, does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things. or understands all things, or examines all things. What is he who is spiritual? Who's that talking about? That's just super Christians, right? Yeah, it just means one who is indwelt by the Spirit. A person who is unregenerate, who doesn't have the Holy Spirit in them, doesn't have the organ When I say organ, I'm talking about like an eye or an ear. It doesn't have the organ with which a person understands scripture. And then there's a similar verse in 1 John chapter 2. 1 John 2 and verse 20, but you have an anointing from the Holy One and you know all things. What is that anointing? That anointing is the Holy Spirit. And it says because of that, we can know all things. And I don't think that means that I actually have, you know, omniscience. That's not what it's talking about. I believe that it specifically has the idea that the Holy Spirit is able to teach me the things of God, things that worldlings can't understand. So the big thing is that when you come to the Word and you want to dig deeper, you have to do it while you're not just physically sitting, but spiritually you're sitting. You're depending on the Holy Spirit within you. You're trusting the Holy Spirit to guide you and teach you. And that ought to come out in prayer. That ought to come out in a spirit, an attitude of dependence. on the Holy Spirit. And I think it's really easy for us to rush in to Bible reading, especially if this is a checklist thing in our lives. We rush in, we open the Bible, I've got to get my Bible reading done today, and I rush in and there's no dependence on the Holy Spirit to teach me. There's no humility that I may not be able to understand this without the Holy Spirit. So there needs to be a dependence here. So I've said a lot. I have one other thing to show you as opposed to talk about, but do you have any questions at this point? I realize all of this is really introductory. Next week we will get beyond introductory. This idea of having a holy spirit in us makes me ask this question. A lot of folks in the world today, I know some of them personally, believe that they don't need to actually dig into the scriptures by reading others' comments or commentaries, if you will, but that they're just going to get on a mass of information that's going to be confusing. So they say, the Holy Spirit will teach me what I need to know. Are you going to be discussing that kind of thing as we go along? No. To some degree, I acknowledge what they're saying. I fall into this danger. I think it's easy for us to depend on the observations of others to let them do the hard work for us, when if we do the work ourselves, we will actually value and act on what we discover more. So I'm not saying, I think in my life if I'm doing this Bible study correctly and if I come up with a novel interpretation, if I come up with a novel interpretation then yeah, I'm going to go to a commentary or a study Bible because I'm wondering if I'm headed off on a tangent somewhere. You know, if something I'm thinking is contrary to sound doctrine, yeah, I'm going to take it to a commentary. And I think anybody ought to have the humility to be willing to do that. But I think oftentimes we are short-circuiting things because we don't want to do the hard work of observation and interpretation ourselves. Yeah, there's a danger on both sides. There's a balance here. But many people, all they do is go and get pre-digested stuff. They don't want to do the chewing themselves. They don't want to. I don't want to take grief again. I've had it. But what about those of us who haven't? Aren't we learning and believing in what you say from the pulpit? Yeah. But again, you can study a lot of words without knowing Greek. I don't depend a lot on my Greek when I say that this word's been used 200 times in Scripture and here's how it's normally used. I'm not getting in Greek. All I'm doing is going through a list of verses and seeing how that word is used in Scripture. Anybody can do that. That's that global You know, I'm looking globally through the entire Bible as to how this word's used in the entire Bible and drawing my own conclusions. Yeah, and actually that's part of what I want to show you if we end up having time here. You do need some tools to do this. You will need to be willing to use some computer tools. I know that scares some of you. and you're quaking in your boots, but. Any other questions? Okay, I'm gonna see if I can, I'm gonna see if I can put something on the screen here. And I am casting it, I am casting it to the screen. And I'm not sure that the display is still available because it's just... Yeah, yeah, computer application. All right, let me try it again. Trying it again. Okay, good. So, I'm going to bring up a browser and I'm going to go to e-sword. Okay? e-sword, free Bible study for PC. e-sword. Now, they do make this for phones. What did it cost you, four bucks or something? So it costs a little bit for a phone. I don't know about Apple. I don't know if they make this for Apple. Do they? Okay. So yeah, it costs a little bit for Apple. I don't think for any of this. This guy's not out to make money. He's been doing this for like 25 years. And he does at times ask for donations. So you want to go to a download. Right here, eSword, Free Bible Study for a PC. I believe if you hit this. It's going to go to download, and all it's going to say is, do you want to install? And I'm not going to install it because it's already installed on this computer. But if you hit that, it's going to take you, it's going to begin to install. See there up at the top? It's downloading an EXE. It's downloading a setup. And all you would do would be to run that, and it would install this. And it would do this relatively quickly. Okay? Any of you can get this free on your computer if you're on the internet. Okay? So let me bring it up. There it is. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. All right, so after you've done this, you'll notice that I have all kinds of versions here already. And I also have all kinds of stuff over here. When you download this yourself, it's going to have almost nothing here. You're going to have the King James Version and that's it. And I don't know, I think you'll have one or two things over here. But if you go up to this little download, you can download Bibles, you can download commentaries, you can download dictionaries, you can download devotions. Much of this stuff is free, some of this stuff isn't. So, Bibles. So, the American Standard Version, the Breen Study Bible, the Bible in Basic English, the Contemporary English Version, the stuff that's in black, I've already downloaded. The ESV in particular, a very good modern version is free. The God's Word version is a more modern version, a good version, and it's free. And then the one that's really important, and I'm not sure if it downloads this automatically or not, the King James Version with Strong's Numbers. That may be confusing to some of you, but originally, years ago, the only way to really study the words of scripture was with a Strong's Concordance, okay? It's about this thick, about this big. It's the kind of thing that, you know, you could use for a boat anchor. It had literally every word in the King James Version in it and where it was found. And it also had definitions for every Hebrew word and every Greek word. And every Hebrew word and Greek word were numbered. And so without knowing Greek, you can study Greek. Sounds weird, doesn't it? But it's the truth. So, all you have to do is hit one of these and it'll start installing this if it's a free version. Some of this stuff is not free. You get down here the new American Standard, the new international version, the new King James version. These will cost you. And some of it, it's too expensive for my taste. Some of this stuff I had before I would have had to pay for it. These are Bibles, okay? The commentaries are over here, so let's look at commentaries. So again, I have everything in black already downloaded. Albert Barnes, David Guzik's Enduring Word Commentary is really good. It's very brief. You know, a lot of commentaries, there's a lot of words. David Guzik's stuff is brief, it's very good. Alexander McLaren, one of the great preachers of yesteryear, anything that he has to say is worth reading. Jameson Fossett Brown, it's a pretty brief commentary. Caelan Dalich is probably not one that you want to download. It's all about Hebrew. And if you don't have anything to do with Hebrew, you probably don't want that. Matthew Henry is one of the greatest commentaries of all times. And so, that's a great commentary for, you know, for you to download. And then there are a couple of word studies. The word pictures in the New Testament and word studies in the New Testament, these have, these are predigested word studies that have already been done. And so if you're studying the words and in particular the Greek words, a lot of it is already here in those two commentaries. And normally they're fairly brief. You're not doing a lot of reading. The treasury of scripture knowledge is a vast storehouse of cross-references. So if you don't have a good cross-reference Bible, That's your cross-reference Bible right there. The treasury of scripture knowledge. So let me show you. You see it right here, TSK cross-references. So here on Ephesians 6.1, you have three different words with all kinds of cross-references. And what's beautiful about this is you don't have to flip in your Bible. All you do is put the cursor over it and there's the verse. Isn't that wonderful? You can read every cross-reference in just a minute or two. Now, I'll show you one last thing because we're already out of time. What does the word honor here mean? So, I'm going to click on that verse. Notice it turns a different color. And I'm gonna come up here to my King James Version plus Strong's Numbers. And you notice there's a number after the word honor, G5091. Well, I wanna see every place in the New Testament where that is. So I'm gonna come up here to this little binocular, that's the search tool. And it's gonna bring up a search and I'm gonna put in G5091. 5091 and I only want The New Testament Oops And I'm gonna hit my button and it's gonna tell me that It's used 21 times in the New Testament. That's every verse where that Greek word is used And so I can do a word study. I can study everywhere that that's used and how it's used. Notice here, it's used again in terms of honoring parents. This is used in terms of honoring God. Again, honoring father and mother. Here it has a different word in the King James Version. It's translated valued instead of honored. Isn't that interesting? And so as I work through this, especially if a certain meaning is repeated, I'm going to learn more about what that word means, how it's used. That's just one form of observation that many of us never do. Questions real quick. Yes, sir. This ESV plus does not have Strong's numbers. I'm not surely sure what the ESV plus stands for. So the old King James is the only one that I know of that's like that. Okay, I've not used Blue Letter Bible, maybe next week, or maybe I'll look at it this week and we can look at it next week. Yeah, so, and I mean, there are, it is amazing to me that there are people that put thousands of hours into writing these things so that God's people can have it. They don't charge for it, they just want people to dig deeper, to study the word. Let me look into that, Jack. OK? I'll find an answer about that next, and we'll talk about it next Sunday. That's a good question. Everybody ought to have an app that will read the Bible to them. Do you have an app that reads the Bible to you? OK. What kind of phone do you have? Do you have an Apple or an Android? OK. Yeah, I know there are, but let me do some observation and research. A global inductive study. What? And what is it? What's it called? Yeah, Bible Gateway is a... And so it's not, but it's not just the app, it's probably which version you're listening to. And the version, if you're having trouble understanding scripture, the version that I would go to first is called God's Word. Okay? And if you can't understand that, there's a version that was translated for children that you can go to. So I'll come back. We'll talk about it next Sunday, because that's a really good question, Jack. All right, we're going to keep digging deeper. Here's your assignment between now and next Sunday. I want you to read through the book of Philippians at least once. Read through the book of Philippians at least once so you're at least familiar with it. Because next week I promise more workshoppy stuff for you. That's right. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. Thank you that you've revealed yourself to us in black and white, something that we can study in order to draw an eye onto you. Help us to obey when you tell us to study, to search, to delight in your word. And I pray, Lord, that that will increase in each of our lives. For I pray this now in Jesus' name. Amen. See you next week, if not on Wednesday.