Teach People How to Read Their Bibles

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0:00:00 – (Ligon Duncan): I just think that with the pace of life today, Matt, it’s easy for God to get squeezed to the very edges of the margins. And the more deliberate we are at finding ways to let him speak to us by His Word regularly, the more blessed we’re going to be, the more perspective we’re going to have.

0:00:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome to this episode of the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bol of ministry. My name is Matt Smethurst.

0:00:34 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:36 – (Matt Smethurst): And we’re going to be talking about teaching people in your churches how to read their Bibles better.

0:00:43 – (Ligon Duncan): Lig.

0:00:43 – (Matt Smethurst): This is a perennially important topic for any minister of God’s Word. But in previous episodes, we’ve thought about how the pastor himself can grow in biblical literacy and preparing especially to preach God’s Word week in and week out. But part of our responsibility as pastors is also to help our people be biblically literate, to love God’s Word and to be able to draw from it through the trials of life.

0:01:10 – (Matt Smethurst): So let’s just start with Lig. You kind of setting the stage for thinking about how amazing of a thing it is that here in the 21st century we have access to such a wealth of resources in terms of Bibles and tools to help us better understand our Bibles.

0:01:33 – (Ligon Duncan): That is one of the great blessings of the time that we live in. Most Christians, until the time of the Protestant Reformation, did not own a personal copy of the Scriptures. In the Middle Ages, if you were in Europe, you probably went to the church to hear the word red out loud, but you didn’t have a copy of the Scriptures and in your home. And of course, in those days, you didn’t necessarily hear the Bible read in your own language.

0:02:00 – (Ligon Duncan): You probably heard it read in a language that you couldn’t understand. And with the Protestant Reformation, that changes. And there’s a desire on the part of the Protestant leaders all over Europe to get the Bibles into the hands of the people. Because the Protestant reformers not only believed in the inspiration and authority and infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture, which of course, was also taught by the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

0:02:30 – (Ligon Duncan): But Protestants also believed that Scripture was necessary. You know, Paul will say in 2 Timothy 3 that all Scripture is given by inspiration or all Scripture is God breathed and is profitable. And it’s that part that Protestants said, you know what? The medieval Catholic Church has forgotten this, that the. That the Scriptures are actually necessary for discipleship. You can’t bypass the Scripture when you’re trying to disciple Christians. And so Protestants from the very beginning were concerned to get the Bibles into the hands of the people so that they could study the Scriptures for themselves and of course hear the preaching of the Word by those who have been prepared and equipped to explain the the Bible. And that’s how Hughes Oliphant Old teaches us this.

0:03:23 – (Ligon Duncan): The very first sermons in Christian history were explanations of Scripture. So the faithful pastor was presiding over the local congregation by preaching the meaning of the text and applying that text to the people. So Protestants wanted that to happen too. But as you say, we’ve just got a ton more help than our forefathers had for reading the Bible. You have all sorts of resources that are reasonably priced and available to people to help them to read the Bible. And yet I think you and I would also agree probably most Christians in North America are reading their Bibles less than Christians were reading the Bible 50 years ago in North America.

0:04:07 – (Ligon Duncan): That is, they may have 20 copies of the Bible at home and there’s probably not family Bible reading going on, which would have been a lot more common 50, 75 years ago than it is now. There’s probably only a certain percentage of our Bible. We’re talking about Bible believing congregations here. I mean that’s most of the people that are listening to us are part of Bible believing congregations. But even there, probably only 20, 25% of the people are reading their Bibles regularly with some sort of plan week to week.

0:04:41 – (Ligon Duncan): And so we’ve got more resources than ever. And I can tell you this, seminary students are coming to seminary with less Bible knowledge than they used to have. And so I’m really glad. I want to give you the credit you picked this topic, but I’ve actually been thinking about this this week. How can I help seminary students read their Bibles better? Well, we want to think as pastors, how do we help our people read the Bible better? But all of us need to to read our Bibles better.

0:05:14 – (Ligon Duncan): I had just looked at that great Sinclair Ferguson quote from his Ten Commandments for Preachers. And by the way, you can get that article on TGC’s the I think Carl Truman probably asked him to give that article to Themelios many years ago and you can read it on that site. But he opens up the very first thing he says is know your Bibles better. And here’s this paragraph that just gripped me. He said, as an observer as well as a practitioner of preaching, I am troubled and perplexed by hearing men with wonderful equipment humanly Speaking ability to speak, charismatic personality and so on, who seem to be incapable of simply preaching the Scriptures.

0:06:03 – (Ligon Duncan): Somehow they have not first invaded and gripped them. And I think a lot of that is the Bible hasn’t been taught particularly well in broadly evangelical churches over the last 50 years, as opposed to the way that it would have been taught in the previous 50 years in the churches. And so Bible reading is a. That’s a passion for me, helping people read their Bibles. But I care about that for seminary students, I care about that for church members. And I’m really glad you’ve chosen this as a topic, Matt.

0:06:39 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I love how you kind of showed us how historically we have, in light of the historical record, we have an embarrassment of riches today, and yet how often do we not access those riches? It’s easy to think about miracles in the Bible, but I think we want to help our people realize first and foremost the miracle of the Bible, meaning the miracle that is the Bible, the fact that we have a talkative God, the God who is there, the God who made us, is a God who has forfeited his personal privacy in order to reveal himself to us in His Son and in the pages of His Word. And really, there’s only two options at the end of the day, either speculation or revelation.

0:07:31 – (Matt Smethurst): Either we’re adrift in a sea of speculation, or God pierces through our ignorance and our wishful thinking and our idolatry and tells us who he actually is. And so it’s one of the greatest privileges of my life as I pastor my congregation here in Richmond, Virginia, to not just preach sermons to them that hopefully will edify them, but also model for them a way of approaching God’s word that they can carry with them into the week as they walk faithfully and intimately with this communicative and loving God. When you pastored Lig at first, Prez Jackson, how did you go about practically promoting biblical literacy among your congregation?

0:08:20 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, let me say that my successor, David Strain, is a younger man. He’s your age. Matt has done a better job than I did. They’re really doing a good job of promoting congregational Bible reading there. They’re doing themes each year and handing out helps to the congregation. So let me just hats off to him. He’s done a better job than I did. But what I did try to do is, number one, we tried to have a Bible reading plan for public work, public worship services, just like we had a preaching plan for public worship, just to get people into the Bible. So if you were coming Sunday morning, Sunday evening or Wednesday night, you were getting steady drip of a consecutive Bible reading plan in the public services of worship. Because we wanted them to touch on all of the parts of the Bible.

0:09:13 – (Ligon Duncan): We tried to balance out the preaching, Old Testament, New Testament history, doctrine, gospels, epistles. We tried to do that kind of thinking as we were thinking about the preaching, but we also tried to think about that in terms of the public reading. And then we encouraged discipleship groups. And there were a lot of people working through the Scripture in discipleship groups. And I led a small group from the very early days that I was there at the church. And the men that were in that group with me, all of them ended up being officers in the church. And we studied the Scriptures together and we encouraged that kind of study of the Scripture outside of the public worship of the church, as well as encouraging people to read the Scriptures with their families.

0:10:06 – (Ligon Duncan): And we had a lot of people that very faithfully did that as a kid. Things like the Robert Murray McCheyne Bible Reading Plan was something that helped me. And so we, you know, every year I would remind people that TGC and Justin Taylor and Ligonier Ministries and a lot of these other wonderful Bible believing organizations will put out Bible reading plans at the beginning of the year so that you can have a plan for reading through the Scriptures. And we tried to make that available through the church library and the church bookstore to encourage people to read the Bible. What do you do at your church to help Bible reading, Matt?

0:10:45 – (Matt Smethurst): A lot of different things. I mean, right now we have a Sunday school class on this very topic, teaching people how to read the Bible. So kind of a Hermeneutics 101 offering, because the Bible, I think for many is just an intimidating book. And a lot of it is difficult to understand. And we’re not even just talking about the Old Testament. Of course, the Apostle Peter thought Paul could be difficult to understand. And so I’m just wanting to give people, through this class, which I’m actually not teaching, but through this class and through other offerings, a sense that, no, this is actually, you mentioned the necessity of Scripture. We also believe in the clarity of Scripture.

0:11:25 – (Matt Smethurst): And that’s not to say that everything in the Bible is equally understandable. You and I have differences over things which are debated and have long been debated in church history. And yet I want my people to realize that they don’t have to go through me. They don’t have to get a seminary degree in order to hear from God and put his word into practice. And one of the things I recently preached a sermon on Psalm 1, and there’s that classic image of the tree planted by the riverbank and the blessed man delighting in God by meditating on his law day and night.

0:12:11 – (Matt Smethurst): And I had recently read a book by the church historian Matthew Bingham called A Heart Aflame for A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation, which Crossway published this year. And I told the congregation how that book really helped me realize that in what he calls the kind of reformation triangle of Scripture, prayer and meditation, that that third one, meditation, has often been the missing link in my own devotional life.

0:12:43 – (Matt Smethurst): I’ve read the Bible and I’ve thrown up a prayer, but I haven’t taken the time to actually press the truth of God deep into my heart until it warms my soul and kind of catches fire there. I shared this quote, maybe you’re familiar with this one. L only came across it recently, in 1560, when the Geneva Bible was published. There’s an introductory letter to the reader, and it describes Scripture beautifully as the light to our paths, the key of the kingdom of heaven, our comfort in affliction, our shield and sword against Satan, the school of all wisdom, the glass wherein we behold God’s face, the testimony of his favor, and the only food and nourishment of our souls.

0:13:31 – (Matt Smethurst): And we can say to that amen and amen. But it’s not just a general summons to read our Bibles, but a specific call to meditate. So talk a little bit about that missing link, perhaps in many of our devotional lives, the role of meditation in. In accessing the full riches of God’s word.

0:13:56 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, let me give credit where credit is due. It was probably J.I. packer in his writings that made me aware of this. As a teenager and a young adult, Packer had pointed out that this emphasis on meditation on the Scriptures, meditation on the truth of God’s Word, meditation on God, God and divine things, was a very important part of Puritan spirituality and that it was largely lost on 20th century North American folks. And so a lot of Packer’s writings, and you’ll get this in that collected writing of his, A Quest for Godliness, which is his Puritan vision of the Christian life.

0:14:48 – (Ligon Duncan): He addresses this issue of meditation and he says, in our day and age, when we hear meditation, we think of some sort of Eastern Transcendental Meditation type thing where you empty your mind and you become one with the universe. That’s not what the Puritans are talking about. They’re talking about taking the Scriptures and turning them over and over and over in our minds and working to see the truth of the Scriptures applied in our hearts and to come to a deeper spiritual understanding of the meaning significance of Scripture. And so Packer was my first introduction to that thought when I was a young man, and he has continued to be a guide to me ever since.

0:15:38 – (Ligon Duncan): Now, it seems to me that you do a little bit of this in your book. You wrote a little book called Before We Open Our Bibles, something like that, where you’re talking about sort of the heart attitude you need to have before you start studying the Scripture. Are you trying to give some direction in that book, Matt?

0:15:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Yes, because there’s a lot of great resources out there on hermeneutics, on teaching people how to study their Bibles. But I didn’t know of a accessible resource on kind of how to get people even to that starting line, because so often, as I mentioned earlier, I think the obstacles are in the realm of, oh, I’m intimidated by this book, or I’m bored. I’ve grown bored by this book. And so, as a way of revisiting the riches, I wrote the little book to help us think about nine different heart postures that are necessary in order to rightly approach God’s Word.

0:16:41 – (Matt Smethurst): And it’s a book that can be read in one or two sittings. It’s small and it’s cheap and it’s easy to giveaway in bulk. And I’ve been encouraged to hear of some churches doing that.

0:16:54 – (Ligon Duncan): So give us a little taste of that. I mean, what are some of the things that you suggest to people? We should definitely talk about the helps that are out there to help them read the Bible and understand the Bible. But this is important. So give us a little taste of some of the things that you say in that book.

0:17:09 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s kind of straightforward if I just share the table of content. So approaching before you open your Bible, which basically consists of approaching God’s Word first and foremost prayerfully. Spurgeon talked about prayer being the key that unlocks the wonders of Scripture to us approaching God’s Word, prayerfully, approaching your Bible humbly, which is with that mindset I mentioned earlier, of understanding that we didn’t deserve God’s revelation.

0:17:42 – (Matt Smethurst): He could have left us in our ignorance, in our sin. But he has initiated a relationship by speaking to us, and he sets the terms approach your Bible desperately understanding that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. So we need God’s Word or we will wither and die spiritually. Approaching God’s Word studiously. And this is where I’m trying to encourage us, not just those of us with seminary degrees, but every Christian, to think of themselves as a theologian in the sense that we’re all intended to go deep into God’s Word, think big thoughts about him in light of how he’s revealed himself, approaching it obediently and joyfully, and realizing that those two things go together, that actually the path of holiness is the path of joy.

0:18:36 – (Matt Smethurst): Approaching it expectantly, that knowing that God loves to work wonders when people open His Word, even taking them by surprise. I mean, I think RC Sproul was converted by a obscure verse in Ecclesiastes about a tree falling and people. Do you know what verse I’m talking about? Lig where the tree falls, there it lies, or something like that. The Lord used to arrest RC and help him realize that he was like that, that piece of dead, useless wood, and he needed to give his life to something greater than himself.

0:19:15 – (Matt Smethurst): Approaching your Bible communally. So it’s not meant to just be an individualistic me and Jesus endeavor, but we need to read our Bibles in light of the riches of church history and in the context of a covenant community in the local church, and then finally approaching our Bible Christocentrically, understanding that ultimately there is one plot, one hero and one point, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. So if that’s a resource that could be helpful for your people.

0:19:46 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s called before youe Open youn Bible. But that’s before you open your Bible. What about LIG when people have opened their Bible, what’s some general counsel that pastors can be regularly modeling, but also telling their people when it comes to reading their Bibles responsibly?

0:20:04 – (Ligon Duncan): I think one thing is that the Bible needs to be read in public worship so that people can actually understand the flow of the passage. And that means you don’t rush through it. You’ve got to read it like it’s going to be listened to be comprehended. And if you’ll just do that, very often it’s the pastor doing a lot of the reading. Even if you have other people doing it, the pastor ought to work with them so that they are able to read the Bible really well.

0:20:38 – (Ligon Duncan): And then you instruct the people how to listen to that. You ought to be able to listen to a passage read out loud and understand the basic argument of the passage. And if you do that as a pastor in the local congregation, it’s actually gonna help your people read the Bible better. They’ll go, oh, wow, that actually there’s an argument there in that pass that I can follow. I think the other thing, you’ve already mentioned this. If a pastor is preaching from the Bible and explaining the Bible, people will go, okay, I see where the pastor got that from.

0:21:13 – (Ligon Duncan): The pastor isn’t just some wizard that pulled a rabbit out of the hat. He actually is showing me where he’s getting the idea from. That’s a huge help. But I do think there are really good popular tools now to help us get some basic principles of interpreting the B that help us. I like to remind people that the Bible is one book, that it’s two books and it’s a library of 66 books, at least in English.

0:21:40 – (Ligon Duncan): And by saying that, I’m wanting to emphasize this. You may think that the Bible is this disjointed set of unrelated, but it’s actually one book. And Jesus himself said the whole book is is about God’s plan of salvation through me. Jesus himself in Luke 24, twice. First he says it to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Then he says it to the disciples in the upper room that the Scriptures are about me.

0:22:10 – (Ligon Duncan): So that should encourage us when we’re reading through Leviticus and we’re going, oh my heavens, what in the world is this about? Or we’re reading through Deuteronomy, or we’re reading through Judges, or we’re reading through Two Kings. Ultimately, the whole book is about God, and it’s about God’s plan of salvation through Jesus. And so Jesus encourages us not to view the Bible as a book that’s about all these disparate, unrelated topics. It’s about one thing. It’s one book, but it’s also two books.

0:22:41 – (Ligon Duncan): It’s an Old Testament and a New Testament. It’s before Christ and after Christ. And it’s very important to understand how those two things fit. Our mutual friend Mark Dever did a sermon series on every book of the Bible that got published into two volumes. And he titled subtitled the first volume Promises Made and the second volume, Promises Kept, Old Testament Promises Made, New Testament Promises Kept. And that, by the way, our listeners can get that from crossway. It’s called the Message of the Old Testament and the Message in the New Testament. By the way, that’s one of the things I would recommend people do if they want to learn how to read the Bible better read some Bible book surveys or sermons on Bible books. I tried to do it like Mark did it. I’m not good at it. Mark is really good at overviewing one Bible book in one sermon.

0:23:38 – (Matt Smethurst): Crossway just reprinted those. And I believe Sinclair Ferguson did the Ford for the Old Testament volume and Tom Schreiner for the New Testament volume.

0:23:47 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I find that kind of resource really helpful. You say, okay, that’s what Isaiah is about. Oh, that’s what Jonah is about. Oh, that’s what Micah is about. And that helps you as you read through the Bible. I think one thing we need to say as pastors to our people, they’re gonna run into things in the Bible where they go, I have no idea what that meant. That’s okay. It’s okay to read a chapter and scratch your head and say, I think I understood about 10% of that.

0:24:17 – (Ligon Duncan): Keep on reading. That’s. I. I mean, that’s still my experience sometimes that I read parts of the Bible and I think I have no idea what that means. And as many times as I’ve read the Bible, I still am learning the meaning of certain sections of the Bible. And I think to myself, how did I not know that before? Because I’ve read this so many times. So I wanna remind people, the Bible is one book, it’s two books, but it’s also a library of books. And that’s where you mentioned the idea of different literary genres, different types of writing. You need to know when you’re read reading history, you need to know when you’re reading poetry.

0:24:54 – (Ligon Duncan): You need to know when you’re reading something that is didactic. It’s meant to teach something. It’s meant to teach doctrine or living. You need to know the difference between wisdom literature that is not setting down a bunch of commands, but it’s actually talking about principles of life that are generally applicable. You need to know the difference between apocalyptic literature that’s talking about the end and what God is going to do in the great consummation of all things from other. And you get that in different places. You get that some in Jesus teaching, you get that some in Thessalonians, you get that some in Daniel, you get that some in Revelation.

0:25:39 – (Ligon Duncan): And so helping people know some of the basic types of literature that you’re gonna run into in the Bible helps them. And if I could give people a handy dandy resource on that, Phil Reichen and his dad, Leland Reichen, and then a professor of Christian education named Jim Wilhoyt produced a little volume called Reichen’s Bible Handbook. And it incorporates some of the material that Phil produced for the literary study Bible that Crossway published.

0:26:17 – (Ligon Duncan): So it gives you a Little bit of a literary feel for every book, but it outlines every book, it tries to hit the major themes in every book. And I use that thing all the time, Matt, to try and teach people the Bible. Just get em into the material. That and William Hendrickson’s survey of the Bible have been my sort of two go to volumes to teach the Bible to people that just have no experience in reading through the Bible because it will help them in some basic hermeneut principles.

0:26:49 – (Ligon Duncan): Reading principles, how to read the Bible. Well, hermeneutics just means how to read. Well, you know, you’re trying to read, you’re trying to do a good job of reading. And doing a good job of reading the Bible is a lifetime project. Again, pastors, when you’re trying to encourage your people to read the Bible and maybe they’ve not read the Bible seriously before, make sure that you encourage them. They’re going to run into stuff that they just don’t understand.

0:27:15 – (Ligon Duncan): And so you’re gonna need to be able to encourage them to keep going when they run into hard material when they get to Leviticus or parts of numbers or the end of Exodus or these various passages that are tough to get through. We were talking earlier, Matt, about how do you do this without promoting legalism. I actually find more Christians that they wanna do it, but they just don’t know how to do it.

0:27:40 – (Ligon Duncan): And that’s fun to help a person in that setting. You’re not cracking a whip, you ought to be reading your Bible every day. They’re just saying to you, pastor, I wanna read the Bible, but I don’t know how. And so Bible reading plans are a help, but also some of these other things are a help to get people reading through the Bible. How about you? What do you do, Matt, when somebody comes to you at church and says, pastor, I’ve really never read through the Bible, what are you pointing them to? What are the things that you’re recommending them to do?

0:28:10 – (Matt Smethurst): I’m going to encourage them to turn to the book of Revelation. No, actually revelation though.

0:28:20 – (Ligon Duncan): Romans 9, 11 though that’s not what I’ll do.

0:28:25 – (Matt Smethurst): I will say that a book like Revelation is more accessible if we keep in view the overarching point, which is why I’m glad you pointed that out. This is a book about Jesus and he wins, he’s on the throne. And Babylon, Rome, the, you know, the secularization of Western culture, none of it will finally prevail against the Lord Jesus. But yeah, I’m gonna probably encourage someone to start with a book like the Gospel According to Mark and try to help them see some of those differences between narrative and discourse and parable and think about, okay, what does this say?

0:29:18 – (Matt Smethurst): What did it, you know, what is, what did it mean kind of in its original context and how do we responsibly apply it today? And as a preacher, I’m wanting to model that kind of Bible reading I’ve mentioned before. Like, we have not succeeded if our people leave on Sunday wowed and impressed by what we showed them in the Bible that they never would have seen for themselves. Rather, we want to preach in such a way that people leave thinking, if I would just slow the heck down and pay more careful attention to my Bible, I would have seen that.

0:29:58 – (Matt Smethurst): Like, though we live in an age of unprecedented Bibles and tools, as we’ve mentioned, we also live in an age of unprecedented distraction. It’s harder than ever to come to God’s Word with a deliberate sustained focus. So how can pastors encourage their people to make space for silence and solitude, to be still before the Lord Almighty over the pages of His Word?

0:30:27 – (Ligon Duncan): I think one way is just to remind people what a blessing it is. Because if you’re like me, the minute I get up in the morning, there are already emails in my box, which I see on my phone, there are already texts in my box, which I see on my phone. There are already social media notifications which I see on my phone. And if I start my day in that world, I can guarantee you it’s not going to feed my soul.

0:31:06 – (Ligon Duncan): But if I start my day in the Word, everything, even if I don’t understand 10%, but 10% of what I’m studying, it’s going to be edifying, it’s going to be perspective giving. And then it helps me do a better job when I have to answer those texts and the emails and look at what’s going on in the world around me. And I think just stressing to people that being in the Word and being in the Word early, as soon as we can get into the Word early in the morning, it’s not, there’s some sword hanging over your head, you better do this. It’s actually a blessed relief from the din of noise that’s going on around us 247 and God’s trying to speak a word of blessing into our souls.

0:31:51 – (Ligon Duncan): He’s trying to make the world better for us. And I so often, I bet you’re like this. I read certain things that are out there and I think, you know, that just discourages me to know that people even think like that. But when I’m in the Word, I never, ever say that. I think, oh, that was just what I needed today. That was precisely the word of encouragement that I needed to keep going and give me perspective on everything in life. And I just think that with the pace of life today, Matt, it’s easy for God to get squeezed to the very edges of the margins.

0:32:26 – (Ligon Duncan): And the more deliberate we are at finding ways to let him speak to us by his word regularly, the more blessed we’re gonna be, the more perspective we’re gonna have, the more we’re gonna have to say to the world and about what’s going on, the world. This is not about going off in a holy huddle somewhere and forgetting the world, but it’s about given perspective on that world that comes to us from the scriptures. And so I think pastors emphasizing what a blessing that is to have that in our lives, especially with the noise that’s around us, that’s one way of getting at it. And I do think, as I said before, I’ve got a lot of people that are motivated, they want to read the Bible more, they want to read the Bible better, and they’re just looking for some help along the way, too. And I think it’s important for pastors to remember that as well. What do you say to people that are facing those kinds of.

0:33:22 – (Ligon Duncan): Of distractions, Matt?

0:33:24 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, I try to remind them and myself that the things that have captivated the attention of the angels in heaven are not always the things that have captivated our attention and are dominating our emotions on earth. And so if you imagine a kind of cable news ticker at the bottom of the screen with all of the major headlines, many of those things matter, and as pastors, we should be dialed into them.

0:33:51 – (Matt Smethurst): But the ticker of breaking news that we encounter every day in this fallen age, it is not the same ticker that has the attention of heaven. What has the attention of heaven? The things into which angels long to look are the people who are being converted by the power of gospel grace, the marriages that are being restored, the. The pastors who were laboring faithfully in the trenches without any fanfare because they’re laboring for the applause of God, for the. For the smile of God.

0:34:30 – (Matt Smethurst): We could just go on and on talking about the ordinary faithfulness that is so pleasing to the Lord Almighty. So I think in some ways, we just need a complete reorientation of our perspective in terms of what ultimately matters and therefore what should ultimately move and animate our imagination. And something else that I’ll sometimes tell folks, or again remind myself, is of an image that John Newton once shared in one of his letters. He said, read the Scripture not as an attorney may read a will, but as the heir reads it, as a description and proof of his interest.

0:35:15 – (Matt Smethurst): Now, it’s archaic language from the 18th century, but it’s a beautiful image if you can get your mind around it. Imagine a will. The way the attorney is approaching that will is going to be very different than the way the heir is approaching it. The heir is going to care just as much about the details of it. And so there’s going to be that, that deliberate, careful study. And yet the air is coming to it, understanding that this is my inheritance.

0:35:45 – (Matt Smethurst): Because in the pages of the Bible, we are meeting the author. We are experiencing God, and He gives Himself to us through the revelation of His Word. And that’s why we do well ourselves as pastors, to dive into God’s Word every day, even when it’s not necessarily for our job. And that’s why we need to commend God’s Word to our people week in and week out, because they will never regret having spent time before God’s face.

0:36:16 – (Matt Smethurst): Thanks for listening to this episode of the Everyday Pastor. We hope it’s been useful to you. Please take a moment to leave a review or share it with a friend so that we can continue to help pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.