Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
In this sermon, Pastor Aaron Shamp concludes the series "How to Read the Bible" by emphasizing the power and necessity of Scripture in our lives. He highlights the importance of responding to God's message in the Bible, just as we would respond to a message from a loved one. He explains that meditating on Scripture and praying through it is a way to respond to God. He provides practical methods for praying through Scripture, such as repetition and composition. The sermon concluded with a time of silent prayer and worship.
Takeaways
Takeaways
- The Bible has the power to transform lives and bring about growth.
- We need the Bible daily, not just on Sundays, to grow spiritually.
- Reading the Bible should prompt us to respond to God in prayer.
- Meditating on Scripture and praying through it is a way to respond to God.
- Praying through Scripture can bring conviction, consistency, confidence, specificity, and simplicity to our prayers.
Creators & Guests
What is Redeemer City Church - Lafayette, LA?
Pastor Aaron Shamp preaches about the Gospel and facets of Christianity at Redeemer City Church. These podcasts are his sermons.
Aaron Shamp (00:00)
right so we are continuing we're actually we're finishing our series this morning called how to read the Bible this is one a series that we started after Easter and it's been seven weeks today's the last week looking at how to read the Bible why do a series on how to read the Bible in church don't we come to church to hear about the Bible and hear it
taught to us and you know if you're over here at Redeemer then we make a special effort to have scripture at the center of all that we do in our worship and our teaching. I don't want to come and just present my ideas with a couple of Bible verses to validate them but I want to present God's ideas as clearly as I can. Right so so why do that? Well because number one we believe that the Bible has power to transform.
We don't think that the power to transform lives, whether that means becoming a Christian or growing as a Christian, we don't believe that that comes through any program that we can do. We don't believe it comes through any particular experience that we can offer aside from scripture. We believe that transformation comes from scripture. It has the power to do this, to bring life and to bring about growth and so on. So we believe in the power of scripture to transform us.
However, with that, we believe that we all need the Bible as Christians daily. It's not something that we can get just on Sunday mornings, taught to us from a pastor, but it's something that we need every single day, just like in order to grow with healthy bodies, we need to have food every day. We need to have nutrition in our bodies every day. It's the same thing with the spirit.
We need the daily bread of God's word in order to grow a healthy spiritual life. We cannot have it just once a week. So that's why we're doing this. Now sometimes we get a message that prompts us to answer. Let's say you get out of the blue, you get a text message from someone that's close to you, your spouse, maybe a parent, sibling, cousin, friend.
You get the text out of the blue from that just says something along the lines of, hey, I love you and hope you're having a great day. Or hey, you're on my mind. Hope you're doing great today. Have you ever gotten a message out of the blue like that from someone that you love? Whenever you get that message and you read it, do you take your phone and just put it down and not respond to them? Maybe some of you guys do. Some of you all are not the best texters, all right? But you know.
Most of the time, when we get that message, we can't help but respond to it. Right. There are certain messages that we get from certain people that we cannot stop ourselves from responding to. They prompt us. They we love to respond and say, express gratitude or express some love back to them, express the same sentiment back to them of I hope you're having a great day or maybe you're not having a great day. And so it prompts you to share with them what's going on.
But there are some kind of messages that we get that are endearing and it's hard to imagine getting these endearing messages from a loved one and not wanting to respond. But what about when it comes to reading our Bible? What about whenever it comes to scripture and we read God's message to us? How often do we read it in a quiet time or maybe even in church and we don't respond?
It would be just like getting that message from a loved one of, I love you, I hope you're doing well, or you've been on my mind, here's what I'm hoping for you. Here's what I'm, you know, if you've ever had a message from someone saying, I'm praying for you, you know, and not responding, either in gratitude or in love back to them or with giving them a prayer request, whatever it is, it's the same thing whenever we read God's message to us, right? The God who has loved us.
to a more infinite and pure degree than any human could, right? Whenever God sends his message to us in scripture and we don't respond, it'd be like doing the same thing, right? The Bible is God's message to us and we should want to respond back. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today as we conclude this series and we're gonna talk about responding back to the Lord.
Roughly the first half of the series we were talking about how to interpret what the Bible is saying to us because sometimes it's really easy. It's straightforward and clear. Other times it takes a little bit of work. It takes some observing of the text and reading it. It might take some research into tools and resources that are available to us to help us to understand what the Bible is saying. It might take some work in community and talking about it with one another. It might take us talking to a trusted teacher.
to help us to understand this. But once we start to understand, here's what this story is saying, or here's what Paul is saying, then we need to move into application. That's what we talked about in roughly the second half of the series, is application. And today is wrapping up that application with really what should, what we should be ultimately led to, which is responding back to the Lord in prayer. Our Bible study time should truly begin in prayer.
but it should also end in prayer as well. And today we're gonna be talking about how to do that in this last era. So, I completely skipped reading. I just went straight into my introduction without reading the passage for today. Let's read it now. All right, so the passage for today that I'm gonna read to you guys and that we're gonna reflect on later is Joshua 1, seven through nine. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there with me.
Normally I do this and then I give my introduction. If you're new over here at Redeemer, but today I just jumped right in. I completely skipped over that, I apologize. I got so worked up talking about how much we love the Bible that I forgot to read it to you. So we're in Joshua chapter one.
and I'm just going to reverse this 7 through 9 to you. This is the beginning of Joshua and
In chapter one, verse seven, it says, this is the Lord speaking to Joshua. Above all, be strong and very courageous. To observe carefully the whole instruction my servant Moses commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right or the left, so that you will have success wherever you go. This book of instruction must not depart from your mouth. You are to meditate on it.
day and night, so you may carefully observe everything written in it. For then you will prosper and succeed in whatever you do. Heaven, I command you, be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. All right, now let us consider what we have to learn today as we wrap up this series. We're gonna begin with the foundational truth as we have each week and then look at arrow seven.
which is the last arrow in the seven arrows, which has been our kind of our structure for this series, the seven arrows from Matt Rogers and Donnie Mathis. And then if we're, I'm going to try to save some time for us to be able to apply this. Okay. So let's begin with the foundational truth. Every week we've looked at a foundational truth about the Bible that leads us into figuring out, well, how do we read the Bible? Because the assumptions and the presuppositions that we hold about the Bible,
will shape the way that we approach the Bible whenever we go to read it, right? If we believe that it is absolute truth, that's gonna shape the way that we read it versus if we think it's just kind of relative, right? It's not absolute truth. It's you can choose to agree with some of it, disagree with others, just whatever works for you, right? That's gonna change the way that you approach the reading of scripture. If you believe sometimes there are some errors in it,
versus there are no errors, it is infallible, right? That's gonna change the way you approach scripture. So that's why we've started with a foundational truth every week because we need to make sure we have the right beliefs about the Bible so that we read it appropriately. We've talked about how the Bible is a revealed word from God. This is not man's thoughts about God, but this is God's thoughts. This is his revealed will.
given to us through a written record. This is God's revealed word. We talked about how the Bible is clear. It's able to be understood by all peoples across all time and cultures. It's able to be understood by the kids who are in the back getting their Bible lesson. It's able to be understood by us who are here. The Bible is a clear word. We talked about how it is unified. There is one.
big story and one main character to the Bible. And that is the story of God. He's the main character and how he saves humanity and his creation from the curse of sin. It's a unified story that all the individual episodes connect back to. We talked about how it is inerrant. That means without error. So we can know that it is reliable. We talked about how it is necessary and how it is sufficient for life. And so.
Whenever we look at all these things that we can say about the Bible, and each week I've tried to give, you know, like a short argument for each one so we know that this is the right thing to believe about scripture. You can go back and hear those messages. But whenever we consider this book that we have in the Bible, how clear it is, how unified it is, how perfect it is, and just what an amazing resource we have here from the Lord. Let's ask the question.
Did God have to give us such a robust resource for knowing Him? Did God have to reveal Himself to us in the Word? Did He have to preserve it throughout the ages? Did He have to tell us about who He is? Did He have to tell us about His Son? Did He have to tell us about what He desires, how we come to know Him, how we are reconciled with Him, what His plan is for the future of our world? Did He have to? No.
He was under no obligation to have to reveal himself to us. He could have remained hidden, only somewhat known through his creation, or he could have remained hidden in a mysterious so that only certain people were able to gain knowledge of him, but not everyone. But instead, what God does is he reveals himself in such a way that everyone can come to know him, because he reveals himself through the word.
the word that can be read or even if someone can't read the word that can be heard. He reveals himself. And so when we ask the question, did God have to give us such a robust resource? The answer is clearly no, he did not have to and yet he did. And so what we have here is a great testament to the grace of God. That he loved us and that he is gracious to such an extent that he would.
that he would reach out to us in this way and reveal himself to us through his word. And so our last point, our last foundational truth is that the Bible is a gracious word. And we need to appreciate that. I think we often take for granted just what an amazing resource we have here and that the Lord delighted to reveal himself, to show himself to us in this way and by it invite us into a relationship with him.
The Bible is a gracious word. Let's consider just a few follow up points from this that the Bible is a gracious word and what that means. First of all, it is a gracious word because by God giving us his word in written form, it means that we have a more accurate preservation of God's words. We don't have to rely on just on people who hand down the story like a game of telephone. That's how a lot of people think that the Bible was written, but it's not accurate at all.
Frequently throughout scripture, we read about how God would say something to someone and then tell them, write this down, right? Go back and read about whenever God gave the law to Moses. He is revealing himself to Moses and he says, write this down. God himself writes the law on the tablets, but then there's further law that he tells Moses, write this down. But then there's more teaching that he revealed to Moses than when you go and read Joshua. It says that Joshua wrote these things down. Frequently we see,
God revealing himself and commanding or the people that he is revealing himself to saying, write this down. What happens is instead of us having the truths of God given to us through a game of telephone that lasts for centuries, that we don't know if it's accurate or not, instead we have the written word that can be preserved in its accuracy with multiple copies so that we can look and make sure that they do match and that word is preserved throughout the ages.
This is the grace of God in giving us his word written to us and that it gives us a more accurate preservation. Secondly, it means that it gives us the opportunity for repeated inspection of his words. If God had only, if God only revealed himself to us by speaking every now and then, let's say that that's the only way we knew. He revealed something about himself just in your mind once and then that went away.
And all you had to know him, all you had that based upon was those words that he would drop in your head every now and then. But what's the problem with that? We all know how our memory can kind of get things wrong. Sometimes we remember things incorrectly. We might remember, we think we remember someone saying something that they didn't. It was just over time, we kind of put words into that person's mouth and we remember incorrectly. We can't go back and reevaluate. Look at...
a spoken word again, like we can a written word. We have the opportunity for repeated inspection. You can go back and reread in one sitting or over the course of a week, over the course of the years, go back and read those words. This is an added part of the grace of God's word. Lastly, the grace of God's word being written down to us means that it makes the Bible accessible to many, many more people because,
The Bible can be distributed in its written form. It can be translated in its written form. And so it is accessible to many people. So it is a gracious word. So what have we taken to account? The grace of God revealed in his written word, the beauty of and robustness of his word. How should we respond? And that's what leads us to arrow number seven here, our last arrow.
Error number seven is ask the question, what does this passage prompt me to pray? What does this passage prompt me to pray? If we value God's word for what it is, then we will not be content with just reading what God says to us and then moving on, but we will be prompted to respond back to him in this great grace he has given us in his word. So lastly, we ask the question, what does this passage prompt me to pray?
Now it's important that we once again do the work of understanding the passage, right? What it means, what it is saying to us, what kind of change it is calling for in our lives, how we are to apply it. And then based upon this understanding, we respond in prayer. So we don't pick it up and just immediately go to question number seven, but we need to make sure that we're understanding it appropriately, right? For the last couple of weeks, we've...
been working on the skill of application, applying the word after we've understood it to ourselves. We talked about how we apply the word to our mind, our heart, and our hands, right? The Bible transforms the whole person, not just the things we do, but also what we believe, what we love, what we desire. We talked about applying the Bible socially. So we apply it to our family relationships. We apply it to our church relationships. We also apply it to our mission.
to those relationships with the world where there are people who are not believers yet. Our last skill and application here is the practice of meditation on scripture. Meditation on scripture. This is what it means to read the word in response to the word in prayer is to meditate on it. Whenever we read in the Old Testament how the Psalmists say that they love to meditate on the word of God, this is what they are doing.
You know, they didn't have the seven arrows, but what they were doing is they were thinking deeply on what God's word said to them. And then they were responding back to that in prayer and worship. This is what meditation means. In the verses that we just read in Joshua, Joshua is commanded to meditate on God's revealed word and to do so in the awareness of the presence of God. He tells them to meditate on it, to keep this in your mouth. He says in verse eight,
meditate on it day and night so that you may observe what is written in it. And then the last verse, in verse nine, he says, do not be afraid or discouraged for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. Joshua had been commissioned on a mission to lead the people of Israel. But in order to do that mission successfully, God did not tell him, you need to study battlefield tactics.
He didn't tell him, you need to work on your communication skills. You need to work on your administrative skills. He didn't say any of that, even though those things would be necessary. But what would hinge upon the success or failure of Joshua's mission was this. He says, you will meditate on my word and you will obey it. And you will remember that I am with you wherever you go. So this is important. And the reason I chose this passage to be our key text for this week is that, because it talks about meditation on the word of God.
So we need to understand what that means. But then God reminding him that as you meditate and obey the word, I am with you. So doing so in the presence of God. Meditation upon the word of God means to think deeply on what it is saying. There's because of the influence of like Eastern mysticism and different religions in our culture, a lot of people have the wrong idea of what meditation means biblically, right? Because there's meditation according to what
Eastern religion says which is an attempt to empty the mind as much as possible. We want to empty our self of desire as much as possible, to empty our self of thoughts as much as possible so that by emptying ourselves out we are supposed to become more aware of like the ultimate reality whatever that might be. Okay? That is not what biblical Christian meditation is. Christian meditation is the exact opposite.
If Eastern meditation or modern meditation today is the emptying of the mind, biblical meditation is filling the mind. We do not seek to empty ourselves with thoughts, but we want to fill ourselves up with God's thoughts. We want to fill ourselves up with the word. We're not trying to empty ourselves and rid ourselves of desire, but we want to stoke our desire for the Lord, for the Holy Spirit, for...
the calling is placed on our life for the mission of the kingdom. Whenever the Bible says to meditate on these words, this is what it is talking about, to think deeply on them. You know, in other words, this sermon series could have been called how to meditate on God's word, because the observation that we talked about in week one, where you just sit there and you reread that passage over and over again, that's meditating on it.
Even whenever you're doing research and pulling in tools to figure out your questions about a certain passage or to get some illumination of more context, this is meditating on the word of God. Whenever we're thinking about what does it say about God? What does it say about man? This is meditating on the word of God. It is not emptying. It is filling. It's not mental laziness. It might, in fact, be some of the hardest mental work that we do. This is meditation upon the word. However,
Like I said, we need to do so in the awareness of God's presence with us. God tells Joshua to meditate upon his word day and night, to obey it, to follow it, observe it. And he says, and remember that I am with you. Because for some of us, you see, we probably have people on opposite ends of the spectrum here. We have some people who might be quick to try to enter into God's presence without doing the mental work. Some of us don't like.
that and I understand that because I feel that way a lot of days as well where I don't want to do the mental work of thinking hard on what a passage says I just want to I just want to feel good and so I try to go straight into prayer without the word. That's okay sometimes but I hope you'll see by the end of this today that we really need the word in our prayer okay. On the other hand sometimes you know and I see myself falling into both of these at different occasions. On the other hand sometimes we might read deeply, study hard,
and then move on without taking what we have done in that mental work in scripture and bringing it into God's presence. You see, if we read the Bible and we attempt to apply it to our lives apart from prayer and the spirit, no matter how well intentioned we are, we are treating the Bible like a self -help book or we're treating it like a textbook and not like God's message to us.
If we are just using it as an intellectual exercise without responding in prayer and communing with the spirit of God, it's like a textbook, it's a study. It's just all intellectual. If we try to just take what God's word says and apply it to our lives and changing what we do, but without prayer and requesting the help of the Holy Spirit, then we're treating it like a self -help book. What we need is both,
Meditation on the word, right? Thinking deeply upon it and communing with the spirit of God as we meditate upon the word. Bring those together and then you will see transformation. Bring those two together and then you'll see power in your prayer. You will see victory over sin, over those besetting temptations that you have. You will see greater confidence in God's promises to you. If you're experiencing the opposite of those things,
And you cannot figure out why it is that your Bible reading doesn't seem to be effective. Why it is that your prayer seems so weak is because we need this meditation on the word and communing with the spirit of God in prayer together. Historically, this is how the spiritual disciplines were taught, but today we've done a really bad job in that, in teaching how we commune with God.
And so we have to bring these things back together. And so what that comes to is reading the Bible and then praying through what we are reading in the Bible, praying the scripture. This is an idea that might be new to a lot of us. But once again, in the context of church history, it's not a new concept at all. But I think it's something that we lost and that I hope we can retrieve. Praying through the Bible. Let me walk you through some of the benefits of praying through the Bible real quickly.
The first one is conviction. Whenever you pray what you read in scripture, the Bible will reveal things to you that you didn't know you needed to pray about. It's really easy for us to often get caught up in our prayers. We will forget to pray for things that we should, or we will be unaware of things that we ought to be praying because we just get in this rut, like I said. What the Bible does is it helps us to get out of that.
It'll help us to see things that we failed to think of on our own Remember that in Hebrews it says that the Word of God is living and active
If you have been struggling to see how the word of God is living and active, it's probably because you have not been taking God's words and praying through them. And seeing how the Holy Spirit opens up your heart, opens up your mind, reveals things to you that in your heart that you didn't see, maybe opportunities that you have been missing to obey Him more, to be engaged in the mission, whatever else it could be. Right, but this is how God uses His word and prayer together. Consistency.
This will help to make your prayers work consistent as well. If you're someone who struggles in prayer, then connecting that with a steady diet of God's word can give you ongoing nourishment for your prayers. I'm one of those people that has, it's always been easier for me to read than to pray. I struggle with prayer for years and I'm still nowhere near where I would like to be. But once I started to connect what I read in the word, because reading isn't difficult, what I read in the word,
to praying with the spirit, aware of the presence of God, then that is whenever my prayer life really began to grow. It really helped me to begin to be more consistent. So if you struggle to be consistent in your prayer life, connect your prayers to reading God's word, praying through what he is showing you in his word. And you will find that just as I said, like the Bible is our spiritual nourishment, it can be nourishment to your prayers as well. So you grow in your prayer.
Another benefit of praying the Bible is that it gives us confidence. Sometimes we hold ourselves back from praying certain things because we question, like, is this within God's will? Right? Have you ever done that before? I know I've had that question myself and that I've been held back from praying things before, maybe as specifically or as boldly as I should have because I was questioning, like, I don't know, I didn't have confidence. But whenever we take God's word,
We read it, we apply it to our hearts and minds and then respond in prayer. It can give us more confidence that we are praying in accordance with God's will. In John 14, 14, Jesus told his disciples that wherever you pray in my name, the father will give you. What this means is not that God is like a genie ready to fulfill our every selfish desire, but what it means is, is that as our heart...
is more sanctified in the word and as we become closer disciples of Jesus, we will be transformed so that we make requests in Jesus name that are more in line with God's will. Some of you guys...
need to be deeper in scripture to gain more confidence. Others of you guys have been discounting the work of the Spirit. You've been questioning your desires, you've been questioning your prayers and not appreciating how much God has done in your heart over the years to make you more like Jesus. But if you would trust what God is doing in your life, the sanctification that he is bringing about, the transformation of your heart, then you might trust a little bit more.
not in yourself and your wisdom, but in him to pray the things that he has put on your heart. This is the kind of confidence you can gain from being deep in the word and then praying and meditating on the word as you go through it. Another benefit is that it will give you specificity. You know, we often make our prayers very vague, very general, but when we read the word, we'll see how often requests of God and prayers to God are very specific. And it will help us to be like that.
The Bible will, one thing that you'll see after you practice this is that the Bible will improve your prayer vocabulary, right? One of the ruts that we often get into is just kind of saying the same thing over and over again. And that's okay at times, right? You know, like in our family, we pray before bed every single night. And every single night, I say roughly the same thing because my kids are really young, right? And so the prayers need to be simple and repetitive so they can learn.
that they can pray to, so they can join in. And as they're beginning older, they have been joining in. And you know what they're doing? Me and Layla help a little bit, but without too much prompting, they kind of follow the same pattern that I've been setting for several years now, you know? Because they're learning how to pray. So sometimes that's okay. But reading through scripture is going to improve your prayer vocabulary because you're gonna be praying to the Lord what He has said in scripture.
is going to help you to open up and be more specific when you're confessing your sin, whenever you're making requests, whenever you're interceding, and so on. Let me move forward a little bit. There's some of these. Another thing that praying through scripture will do is it will...
It'll make our prayer time a little bit more simple, okay? I don't want anyone to hear this and think, man, this sounds too difficult. If anything, what I hope you'll learn as you begin to practice this is it makes your prayers easier because you're taking God's word and you are giving back to him and you're praying back to him what he has said to you. You're using the Bible as your prayer book to teach you. Did you know that the Bible has a prayer book in it? It's called the Psalms.
The Psalms are a prayer book. It is intended that we would take those Psalms, that we would read them and that we would, you know, sing in some cases if you can have a tune to it or pray those words back to the Lord. It is our instructional manual in how to pray. And so praying through scripture, I don't want anyone to get the idea of, gosh, this sounds so difficult. This sounds so much harder. I thought you were going to help me to pray and not make it sound so much more difficult. No, if anything, it is going to make it simpler.
easier and you'll see how the Lord is like a tutor through his word teaching you how to pray what he says. Praying through scripture is going to require you to slow down, right, because you're reading through the Bible and your mind is meditating upon it, thinking deeply, so you're going to have to slow down in your prayers. You'll have to use thought and intentionality, all right? Practically, how do we pray through scripture? Let me give you...
to different methods, all right? The first is repetition. Simply repeat the passage back to God in prayer. This is something that I do frequently, especially whenever I'm reading the Psalms. The Psalms is the believer's prayer book, our instruction manual tutoring us how to pray. And so this is something we can do very frequently whenever we read the Psalms, is just to repeat the passage back to the Lord. Another thing that you can do whenever you're...
repeating a passage back to God in the Psalms or it could be somewhere else, is just simply change the pronouns to make it more personal. Say, take the plural pronouns and make them singular, personal, singular first person. I had a little bit of a brain fart there. So change the we to I. Change the you to me.
and so on, change the pronouns to personalize it a little bit more. Another way you can do this is, or other than in the Psalms, is in Hebrews. Let me just read this to you real quick. In Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2, you can read even passages like this in the New Testament and repeat them back to the Lord in prayer. In Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, it says,
Therefore, since we have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily snares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the source and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." So if you were reading this in your devotional time and you were praying through this passage, you could simply...
largely repeat the passage back to God in prayer. You can say, Lord, since I have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding me, help me to lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares me. Let me run with endurance the race that lies before me, keeping my eyes on Jesus, the source and perfecter of my faith. I thank you that it was for joy that lay before him that he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
It's not difficult. But how much better of a prayer is that than what I often say just on my own? Right, that's a strong prayer. And that is as real of a prayer as those words that you say on your own. This is what the Lord desires His Word be for you. So you can just repeat the passage back to God. Other times whenever there's a passage that specifically mentions something about God's character or gives us a clear exhortation,
for example, like bear one another's burdens. You can just repeat that back to the Lord in prayer, help me to bear the burdens of my brothers and sisters. In Exodus 34, six through seven, where it talks about how the Lord is a Lord who is compassionate and gracious, right? He has faithful love. You just repeat that back, Lord, I thank you that you are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love, right? So the first way that you can do this, practically speaking, is through repetition.
in those passages that are more easily done through that. And other passages where it's not as easy to just repeat what it is saying, whether it be a song, something else, where it's easy to just repeat what it is saying in prayer, what you can do is you can pray through the passage through composition. All right, so the first one was through a petition. So this is through composition. What I mean by that is if you have done the interpretive work,
to understand what that passage is saying. You've walked through the seven arrows that I taught to you through this series, right, on what is the passage saying? What is it saying about God? What is it saying about man? What is it calling from us? You can take these insights that you've gained from the seven arrows and use them to compose your prayers. So whenever you read and understand what the passage is saying about God, then you take that and you...
give it as a prayer of praise back to him. If you don't quite understand it, then maybe you ask for his help in understanding what it is saying about him. Whenever it reveals something about us and whether that be God's love for us, whether that be our sinfulness, whatever else it is, you take that insight that you gained about what it is saying about us and you pray that to the Lord. You take the applications that you pulled from it and you use that to inform your prayers. But even if it's not through repetition, you'll see how through,
just spending some time to understand what a passage is saying, what it is calling you to do, and then taking those insights to inform your prayers rather than just sitting down and saying, you know, okay, Laura, thank you. And here's all the things that's on my heart and mind and okay, I gotta go now. Amen, get on with my day. Instead using what God taught you through reading something in Genesis, maybe through reading one of Jesus's parables, maybe through reading a passage in Romans and understanding what it is saying.
can greatly inform your prayers more to give them back to the Lord. So now what we're going to do is I want us to have a little bit of space in the service to really apply what we've talked about. So Houston's going to come back up, and we're going to spend a few minutes to pray through silently, individually, on your own. Houston's going to play guitar. I'm going to give you all a few minutes.
And we're going to pray through a couple of different passages. We're going to use the passages that we were referring to throughout this series as we were working on applying these things. So the first thing we're going to look at is Psalm one. So if your Bible with you, whether that be a physical copy or on your phone, and you want to open it up to Psalm one for just a few minutes, we're going to sit here and I encourage you to read that song. And as you read through it, pray that song to the Lord.
So let's go ahead and do that now.
you
you
we consider continue meditating upon and praying through scripture we're gonna turn now to Colossians chapter 1 it's another passage we've looked at several times in this series Colossians chapter 1 verses 15 through 20 so let's do the same thing now we're gonna take about three minutes to meditate on those words and pray through them so that's Colossians 1 15 through 20.
you
you
you
you
As we close this time and we prepare our hearts to respond and worship, I want to invite you guys to close your eyes. Close your eyes and let these words of scripture just think of it as like washing over you. All right? Let these words of scripture wash over you. And as you hear them, receive them with an open heart and affirm them, agree with them, and pray them back to the Lord.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things.
and by him all things hold together. He is also the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace,
through His blood shed on the cross. And so Father, we agree with these things and we praise you for these words. Fill our hearts with your word and with your spirit so that we might love you more, become more like Christ, be a church united by your spirit and the word, and a church on mission because we are filled with the spirit of the Lord. We pray this in your name, amen.
Let us now respond to God's gracious word to us as we stand together and sing praises to him.