Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Ten Minute Bible Talks: What They Are & What To Expect | Keith & Patrick

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. I want to welcome everyone to our inaugural episode. It's our very first take on 10-minute Bible Talks. We wanted to do this episode just to tell you a little bit about what you can expect in this podcast and about what we're going to be doing next. So let's start there. What can people expect from this podcast?

Starting point is 00:00:31 Okay, let's be honest for a second. We've been one to do a podcast for a really long time, and it has proven more of a challenge than we expected. But we've got our act together now, and we think we are ready to give this a shot. We'll be interested in your feedback as you tell us what works and what doesn't, what might be more helpful or even less helpful. All that feedback really helps. So 10-minute Bible Talks, what we're hoping to do is encourage you and your faith. I mean, part of it is as simple as saying that we need touch points through our week that help us reorient our lives. life around the things of God. And it's easy to get busy and distracted and hard to read our Bible

Starting point is 00:01:09 on our own. And so just having some resources in our life that help us reorient our life around Christ and the gospel seems like a good thing. You know, when I became a Christian when I was 19, obviously one of my first questions was, what's next? What do I do? Where am I supposed to be going? And some of the best advice that I got was from a mentor who said, well, you're a Christian now. You've got to start reading your Bible. You need to spend time thinking about your Bible, devoting time to your Bible. And I didn't know any better, so I did it. You know, I just started spending time doing it. I started in the book of Jeremiah. I had zero idea what I was reading. I was confused 99% of the time. And yet God used that time in my life to change who I was, to transform me into the kind of

Starting point is 00:01:51 person that I think he wants me to be. And so I'm excited to do this podcast because I talked to a lot of Christians who had the exact same experience as me. You know, you open up the Bible. It's confusing. What does it mean? And it doesn't seem like it really connects to my life. But if I had something like a podcast or a devotion that would help me do that work, help it connect to my life, well, man, that would help me grow. That would be something that would be really good for my heart. So I hope that's what this podcast can be. Okay, let's stop for a second. You became a Christian when you were 19. I didn't know that because I became a Christian too when I was 19. How didn't you know that? I think that's different years, though, that we were in 19.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Yeah, long gap. And you started in reading in the book. of Jeremiah and you kept reading. That's crazy because that's a confusing book, I think. I literally flipped open my Bible. I said whatever, I was very spiritual back then. I said, whatever book I flipped to is the book that God wants me to read. Wow. And so I got in Jeremiah. Well, okay, so back to the point here is that I just came back from this camp with the Crossings Middle School and High School students and we did a bunch of Q&As and, first of all, just impressive, the kind of questions that middle school and high school students are asking. But one question that I got more than once is, how do I have a devotional life?

Starting point is 00:03:02 How do I read my Bible? And it doesn't matter if you're in middle school, high school, if you've been a Christian a long time or not or maybe you're older in your faith, whatever. It doesn't matter. Everybody is trying to figure out how do I have some kind of devotional life. And so we hope that these podcasts can be part of that. Not all of it, but part of it. And hopefully you'll get something a little bit out of your Bible.

Starting point is 00:03:23 So I hope you enjoy as we kind of plow through 1 Corinthians, 13 and dig into what Paul says here in this chapter. Yeah, so like Keith just said, our very first set of podcast, we're going to be going through one chapter in the book, First Corinthians. First Corinthians 13. And in our next episode, we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about why Paul wrote this letter to the church in Corinth, what it's about. But we wanted to spend a brief moment here to talk about why we were excited about this chapter. So, Keith, First Corinthians 13. what's it all about? In my Christian life, one of the hardest things for me to do is love other people. You know, if you could define a Christian maturity in terms of what they know, well, I can do fairly well in that because you can go to school, you can read books, you can listen to seminars or sermons or podcasts, and you can gain in knowledge.

Starting point is 00:04:14 And for a long time in my Christian life, that's what I thought a mature Christian was. Or I thought a mature Christian was somebody who was really active in doing things for God. And so I committed myself when I had become a Christian in college to just be as busy for God as I could possibly be. But then I came across this book. It's called Charity and Its Fruits. And it's written by a guy. I've been dead a long time named Jonathan Edwards. And it's kind of a challenging book. It may not be a book that would be great for you to read right now. But it challenged me in my faith like nothing ever had because it said that the mark of a Christian is love

Starting point is 00:04:50 and that a mature Christian is one who loves other people. Well, I found that to be far harder than just knowing things or doing things. And it gripped me, though, because I thought, man, there's something attractive about love, whether it's found in the person of Christ or whether it's found in other people in my life. And I wanted to become a person of love, but it was very difficult. But this passage really helped identify for me what. a mature Christian was and gave me a pathway to pursue that kind of Christian maturity. I also think it's kind of a countercultural definition of love. I was reading a college professor,

Starting point is 00:05:32 you know, he's working mostly with people, you know, 18, 19, 20, 21 college age type people, but he teaches about love and he's actually teaching about the Hebrew conception of love. And so one of the things he does is he asks his students to write down on a piece of paper, what's love, define love, describe what love is. and from almost top to bottom, students' definitions of love were romantic. It was all about feelings. It was all about strong, emotive feelings for someone that you are romantically passionate about. He said the second place after that was actually love of country.

Starting point is 00:06:07 What he never saw was love of a child for a parent or a parent's love for a child. He never saw really active definitions of love, love that actually serves other people. It was all about how I feel and how other people make me feel. And so I remember, again, I read Charity and Fruits with you. I actually think you were the person who introduced me to that book when I was maybe in college. I don't remember that, but. Take credit for it. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:32 I'm an evangelist for that book. Yeah. It's a great book. And it rocked my perspective on love because I had that exact same definition. I thought, oh, loves about my feelings, loves about how I feel about one particular person who I'm, you know, romantically engaged with. And I read this book and I realized love does a lot. Love serves. Love gives. And so I'm excited for other people to get to slow down, read through each of the little definitions of love in First Corinthians 13, and to see, hopefully, how that love can be lived out in their lives. Yeah, so what we're

Starting point is 00:07:06 going to do over the next several episodes is just break this chapter down and look at love of kind of a phrase at a time. And I hope you really enjoy it. I think you're going to be challenged if you have thought of love as feelings like Patrick said or if you thought of Christian maturity as things you know or things you do, I think you're going to be really challenged by Paul's letter in the same way we have. Hope you enjoy the episodes and we always love hearing your feedback. Thanks. Thanks for listening.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Ten Minute Bible Talks: What They Are & What To Expect | Keith & Patrick

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.