Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Tools for Studying the Bible | An Interview with Jonathan Pennington

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

What keeps you from reading the Bible? Is it too intimidating? Too hard to understand? Jonathan Pennington, author of Come and See: The Journey of Knowing God Through Scripture and pastor, sits down with Keith to discuss practical tips for Bible reading. Join as Jonathan and Keith invite you to learn about God's goodness through spending time reading the Bible. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here.

Hey, every once in a while we get a chance to talk with somebody on 10-minute Bible talks that will help us become better readers of the Bible. And that's what our community is dedicated to, going through the Bible and just learning how to read it better. So today we get to hear from a good friend of mine. His name is Jonathan Pennington. We went to seminary together a long time ago, and you'll hear us talk about that at the beginning of our conversation. Jonathan is a professor of New Testament at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He's also a pastor, a father of six. He's a great guy, and he's written a book for the average Christian to help us learn how to read our Bible better.

It's called Come and See. I hope you enjoy this conversation and learn something from Jonathan. Jonathan Pennington, welcome to 10 minute Bible talks. Hey, thanks for being with me. It's super fun to be together because you and I went to seminary together a long time ago. Long time ago. And we had all these classes. And what I remember is going across from Trinity, across the street to the college, and we would eat dinner in the dorm once the night because we had like all day classes and the night classes.

Do you remember that? Yeah, well, I drove for five of the six years. I drove two hours, you may recall each way. And so I would cram a bunch of classes in, spend the night on somebody's couch and then do more classes. So I was there kind of intensively. Yeah. And I didn't drive that long, but I remember taking those night classes and we were eating dorm. dorm food, you know, and we were in our, what, late 20s, early 30s at the time, something like that,

and I thought, where's my life gone wrong, that I'm eating dorm food for dinner? That's funny. Yeah, so can you just start here with telling us what you do now? Like, you're a professor, but tell us a little bit more about that. Sure, yeah. For the last 18 or 19 years, I've been a professor of New Testament teaching back in a seminary, just like I had taught here in Louisville, Kentucky at the Baptist Seminary here. It's a real joy and very thankful to have a job where I get to train pastors.

And also, we have a lot of PhD programs. So I have a lot of academic orientation students too. So that's really great. But I'm also a pastor at Sojourn East, a church here in town. And there I do a lot of things. I preach about a third of the time and help lead the church and also run the men's ministry and mentor people. So it's a joy.

My whole life has been some combination of academics and church. It's kind of shifted the balance back and forth here and there, but I'm very thankful for that combination. It fits me well, I think. Well, I remember sitting in a New Testament exegesis class. This is an evening class that we had. And you probably won't remember this, but the professor told us all to read through the first chapter of James. Now, to me, James has always been one of those books that's hard to fit together and go like, what's the argument here?

It all seems so random to me. And he said, okay, what's this about? What's the through line? What's the argument James is making? and I was like, well, who knows? And then all of a sudden, you said this answer, and then the professor looked at you and said, well, that's exactly right.

I did not remember that all. I remember, and he goes, how did you come up with that? And I thought, okay, I want to be friends with that guy because he's going to help me do well in my classes. I do remember. We did study together a fair amount. I remember that. We did.

I cheated off you. I think I always appreciated that you have an academic mind, but kind of a pastor's minister's heart. and you've been able to blend those together. And I think that really comes out in your book, Come and See, that just kind of dives into reading the Bible at a street level, but with all the skills that an academic has, but you put it on a level that the average Christian like me can understand.

Let's start with this, though. When did you fall in love with the Bible? Like, how did that happen? Yeah, well, thanks for that about the book. I really do hope that's true. I really wanted to help people read the Bible better. Yeah, you know, I became a Christian at age 8. teen after a pretty troubled childhood with the death of my father in the young age and then just

a really rough adolescent time and became a Christian through James Crusade. And I think that was part of our other connection or crew now near Trinity actually at Northern Illinois University 35 years ago. And as far as I can remember, that's when the love for the Bible just started. Like there were men that were one guy in particular who was discipling me. And I remember I had no idea what the Bible was at all. You know, and he gave me a Bible. And then we started having Bible studies. And so I can't remember exactly except for like immediately that became like, this is amazing, you know. So it's been a 35 year love affair and very thankful for that. In the book you've written, the most recent book, Come and See, I think you're just targeting this for

the average Christian and trying to help them read the Bible better. The title, come and see. There's significance to that. What's your point you're trying to make with that title? Yeah, yeah, thanks. It's very personal, but it's also theological. think sort of the theological side is when you start reading the Bible in the Psalms, for example, there's a lot of invitation to come and taste and see that the Lord is good. That has become

one of my favorite verses and favorite ways I think about God and Holy Scripture. But particularly, I teach the Gospels mostly. And whatever I get to the Gospel of John, after teaching Matthew, Mark and Luke in my Gospels class, it's really striking that in the first chapter of John, there's all this invitational language like come Jesus is saying come and follow me and the disciples saying to each other come come and see this guy that we've met you know that's the most natural thing that we do when we see something we love we want to invite people we love to come and see it the same way taste this you know and come and see and so this is the idea that's in the Bible the personal comes right out of that and that over the years this has been my experience that as I

have followed the Lord and tried to follow after him and go to scripture and prayer that I have tasted more and more of his goodness. And I always think of what Peter said to Jesus in John 6, which a bunch of people decide, these teachers are too hard. Jesus is too weird, eat my flesh of blood. This is too weird. He turns to disciples and says, are you going to leave to? And Peter's words are tattooed on my heart, which is, where else will we go? You alone have the words of life. And I have known what it is not to have life. And I have suffered plenty in my adult life as well. And I have found that Jesus alone gives the life I long for. And so the point of this book is to say, come, I've been doing this for a little while. And I'm inviting others to come and see that there is life to be found

only in God and that Holy Scripture is not the only way we know God. We know God through prayer and discipleship and other means, but always scripture is the main way in which we come and taste and see God's goodness. So that's what's behind it. So it's kind of an invitation. You're just inviting anyone who would want to to come and see this great God, this gracious, merciful God made known in Jesus Christ that is found in the scripture. Unfortunately, Christians don't read their Bible, or if they do, they don't read them very well. I was just reading an article the other day that It was in Christianity Today magazine, and it said between 2021 and 2022, biblical engagement fell 21% among adult Bible users. That's the way they framed it.

And again, this is put out by the state of the Bible, American Bible Society's survey. It said one in five churchgoers said they never read the Bible. That's 20%. Never read the Bible. And then in another Christianity Today article, Ed Stetzer said that. that many Christians hold unbiblical views on hell, sin, salvation, Jesus, humanity, and the Bible itself. So, at one sense, it breaks your heart because there's so much found in the scriptures that we need to sustain our life, to bring us the joy and contentment and peace and all the things that God wants to do for us to let us develop a relationship with God.

Why is it that you think Christians aren't reading their Bible? You know, we can get to maybe how we're reading it wrong later, but what is it that you're seeing as a pastor that keeps people? people from the Bible. You know, I hate to sound like an old, you know, Luddite technologically or something, but I see, I think, in my own life and then in my kids' lives, just the rapid pace and availability of screens. I mean, I'm not original and raising concern about it, you know, that it just doesn't inculcate the kind of mental habits that reading requires and inculcates or develops in us. And I see it in myself. I mean, I see myself just wanting, just constantly needing this dopamine fix of a screen, you know. And it's interesting. I have six kids, 26 down to 18. And we talk about we're all

real close and we spend a lot of time together. And we talk about this, especially my 26 year old versus my 18 year old. They had very different experiences growing up because that was the generation where, you know, the iPhone came into being kind of in the middle of that and the internet became a more mobile and regular part of our life. So I can't help but think that part of it is that we're all like living this fast-paced screen life. And it's not only that. But I see it myself, you know. Yeah. What do you think?

I mean, as you think about this as a pastor. Well, I think there are a lot of reasons, and you said one, that definitely hits home and fits with the experience that I have. But I think also the Bible is intimidating. It seems like something that was written a long time ago, and it's hard to understand. And I think we just live in an instant gratification society. So, you know, it's kind of like the dopamine hit from screens, but just in all areas of my life, I want something I can use today to make my life better.

And sometimes reading the Bible is more like building a foundation, I think, than it is just kind of getting the immediate fix that you're looking for. That's one reason I really appreciated your book, come and see is because you're trying to take the Bible and show us different ways to read it that are all really profitable and maybe take away some of that scary factor of the Bible that it's intimidating. So inside the book, you give kind of three ways of reading the Bible. just walk through those real quick. The first one is informational. And with each of these ways,

you attach a person to it. So it's Ingrid, who reads the Bible for information. And can you just walk us through what you're trying to get at in that way of reading the Bible? Yeah. And if I might maybe pull back to the idea of all three of them and also how it relates to come and see, the metaphor, the idea, the framing idea I use for the book, as you can see in the subtitles, the journey of knowing God through Scripture, is that we're on a journey. And to think about reading scripture and knowing God as a journey. In fact, that might be helpful on this intimidation factor, that reading is not just this like acquiring of information that some people are really good at and some people aren't or some people are really into and some people aren't. Really,

Holy Scripture, the Bible, is this invitation to come to know ourselves more clearly and to know God more clearly. And it's a lifelong journey. It's not a quick fix. It's not a acquisition. It's a long journey of knowing. And so the idea of these three friends is that these three friends are going on a road trip together. And it's a road trip that's so long that they have to take turns driving. None of them can do it by themselves. And Ingrid, Tom, and Taylor are taking turns at the wheel on this journey. And as they each take a turn, they get to control the podcast. They get to control whether you listen to Ten Minute Bible Talk or whether you listen to something else, you know. And so each of them represent then different mode of reading.

a different set of questions, really, is the way to think about, a different set of skills to develop. But maybe a set of questions is easy this way. So, Ingrid, she's asking questions like, what does this mean? Like, how is this book structured? Like, Letter James, like you were saying, like, is there a order to this? Or is it just kind of random verses? Or how differently is it to read a story in the Bible versus reading like a letter from Paul that there's some kind of skills and things to know about reading those things differently that we call genres or understanding different modes of literature. Let's double click on that genre thing because I think it's really important. Can you just tell us what genre is in general and then maybe what are some genres we'd find in the Bible?

Yeah, yeah. So you and I probably both learned this at the same time back in seminary and it's borne a lot of fruit in my life. It's really helpful. I always like to think about the Bible, not as a book, but as a library or as a bookstore. So if you were to go into a library or bookstore, you're going to see different shelves have different kinds. Like here in my office, I've got Old Testament studies, New Testament studies, poetry, you know, I've got different books in different area linguistics or whatever. And that's how the Bible is in the sense that there are different kinds of books within it. Some are stories.

Some are poems like the Psalms. Some are wisdom sayings like the Proverbs. Some are this crazy thing that we call apocalyptic that's like the Book of Revelation and Martin of Daniel and others that's like really different. what we're used to. And the idea of genre is just that, you know, if you were to pick up the Wall Street Journal or Calvin Hobbs, you know, or Farside or whatever type of comic, or if you were to pick up the manual to your Mazda RX8 or whatever, you're going to read those differently because it's written in a different way for a different purpose. And so when we think about that,

when we think about the Bible as being a library where different books kind of work in different ways, it's really helpful to learn some little skills, like here's how you read a proverb, here's how you read a psalm, here's how you read a story. They're not contradictory, but they're also not the same. There's some general skills that we can use, like paying attention, but there's also some particular things that we can learn about each of those genres. So that's the idea of kind of a genre approach. Yeah, I've seen the importance of genre, just up close and personal. When we were starting the church, there was a guy who had known several years before. He was really devoted to his wife and his kids. He really tried to do the right thing in his church here.

in our town. He was a Sunday school superintendent because he thought this is what God wanted for him, that his wife homeschooled their kids. So I'm just trying to give you that this is a dedicated Christian who's trying to really live the Christian life. Whether you agreed with all the choices or not, he was sincere. And when I came back and had been here a while, I heard that he had left his faith and left the church. And I was like, what? I would never think that person. So I reached out to him, I'm going to have talked to him in years. And we got breakfast. And I was just saying, you know, what's happening? What's up? And he said, well, God failed me. And I was like, well, so what do you mean? He said, well, God promised me in the book

of Proverbs, train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it. And he had several kids, and some of them made some really bad life choices. And it ended up far away from not only God, but just any kind of life as a parent you'd want. And so he thought, God had failed them and I tried to explain to him, well, the Proverbs aren't promises. They're more wisdom of how things generally go in life, but they're not promises. And I don't know that he ever got it. Because at this point, you know, so many years have gone by and his heart was broken. And I don't know where he is now. Hopefully he, in a sense, has come back to Jesus in a meaningful way. But when you start talking about genre, it's not just this academic thing that's up here

that people in the ivory tower. It's like, is this a promise to me or not? You know, I mean, it really matters. That's a really powerful example. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Less personally, but another good example, I think, would be, like, when you read the Gospels and the stories about Jesus, it's really easy to maybe just kind of pull up some random thing from it.

If you don't understand that stories don't work by just kind of having little random verses in them, they have a plot, a flow of the argument. So, you know, I could give some funny examples or some serious examples. but the point is it's understanding how a story works is one really good advantage of recognizing the genre idea. So let's go back to Ingrid and she's driving the car and she likes information. She wants to learn. What are some other things that she encounters besides genre? Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, kind of recognizing literary structure, which sounds fancier than I mean it to sound. But the basic idea of literary structure is that take a psalm, like Psalm 1, which is a really important psalm, that it has like a heading and that it's all built on two different ways of being, two different worlds. You can give your life where you're meditating on God and seeking to live in his ways, or you can give your life to other influences. And those two ways are going to result in two different lives, a flourishing life or a chaff life that doesn't mean anything. And just paying attention to how the whole thing is built along these two ways, which doesn't require BHD to do.

all you've do is just kind of slow down and say, what's going on here? And recognizing like literary structure, that's a kind of paying attention in a certain way that gives us an information that is beneficial. There are lots of other things we could say in this area. Our shared professor back in the day, the inimitable DA Carson, you know, he wrote a famous book called Exgenical Falacies, and I talk about those a little bit in there, just some ways that it's really easy to kind of make mistakes when you're trying to read the Bible. So Ingrid, when she's in charge, she helps us think.

about some like mistakes you might make with word studies or other things like that. So yeah, she's offering us to kind of pay attention and slow down and learn from what God has to say. Don't just come with, I want to get this question answered, but like slow down and learn from the information that's there. One of the things you do in that chapter is you talk about an experiment, a friend of yours ran in Russia. Could you just share that with us? Because I thought it was really interesting and kind of shows how we all bring a perspective. of our own lens to the scripture.

And it shapes what we see and don't see. Yeah, yeah. So the idea, kind of the big fancy category for it would be cultural hermoneudics, but it doesn't matter if that phrase doesn't sound exciting to people. But the idea is just to recognize that, yeah, just that, that we have presuppositions, we have values that we've gotten personally from our family of origin and of the society we live in. And those aren't necessarily bad, but they speak to the fact that the one thing that's most true about humans, It's just good to kind of pull up to this level, is that the way we are not like God is not

even first and foremost that we're sinful and he's not. That's true. But is that to be a creature is to be limited, right? Even apart from sinfulness, Adam and Eve, before fall, they were limited. They're limited in bodies so that we're limited in space and time. We're limited in knowledge. We're limited in perspective. And how that works out in the Bible, if you just start with the humility of our limits,

plus our sinfulness, it means that when we read the Bible, we're not reading it as a neutral, like we're up in a control tower seeing all things. We're reading it as limited people. And we're all different, right? So we read it differently depending on our location, what our experiences are. Yeah, yeah, you know, race, gender, amount of money, amount of education, all these things make up the complex thing that we are. We bring those to the reading of the Bible. And again, that doesn't mean that we can't understand what God is saying, but it does mean when you start with this humility to recognize some of those limits of ourselves. And the way you really see that, I know you know that I've known this as well, is when you travel overseas, especially if you get a chance to live in another country.

And like you just see, oh, they think about things very differently, you know, and one of the big rules when you go on a short-term missions trip or long-term is, you know, it's different. It doesn't mean wrong. You know, the things they value are very different. So the Russia example that this scholar Mark Brown-Powell gives is that you read the prodigal son, that story in the United States or in, you know, a lot of Western civilization, you're going to think about it in a certain way. But when you read that story in another country, say in Russian society,

those students are going to see some things in the story, particularly the drought that comes as a result that really results in the prodigal son coming to the end of himself. that's something that we don't really tend to think of in the modern West, but for people who have experienced famine and experienced loss in that sense, that's highlighted. And kind of one of the consequences of this kind of difference between a Russian and American reading as well, is that if you were to ask the question,

what did the prodigal son of the younger brother who went away, what was his problem? Most Americans would say that he was immoral and wasted what he had, a lot of people, most people in other cultures would say that his problem was that he foolishly left his family system that he was a part of and therefore had gotten himself into trouble. Now, it's not really a matter of one's right and one's wrong. It's that both of those really reflect certain values and habits and customs that we have. Now, the whole point of that is, that's just one little example, is again, just to have the

humility to recognize that we do come with certain limits and we do come with certain perspectives. And this is why reading good commentaries, listening to good sermons, reading reference works on the Bible, reading about ancient cultures, whatever people have time for is all going to benefit us to be a little wiser, more informational readings to understand some of those differences. Yeah. And before we finish, I want to ask you what some of the reference books you would recommend for people who are ready to take that next step. But for now, I just think it's so interesting that if you have somebody read the prodigal son parable in different cultures, different things will stand out because I don't think I ever stood out to me that there was a famine. I mean, I just

I read it. I read it. I read it. I read it. I read it. And I just kind of went by it so fast. Or I never thought about the son leaving the family. Like that was a big deal because we all want to leave our family. We're looking forward to the day we can leave our family. So to me, the older brother seemed weird. He wanted to stay around his family. I just put my soul, of course he wants to leave his family and go give it a shot. And, you know, he did some foolish things. But if you live in a collectivist society, leaving your family to pursue your own interests is this kind of grave sin, or at least breaking the family value structure. All right, so let's leave Ingrid and Tom takes a turn at the wheel. And Tom, you talk about as a theological reader. Now, that sounds kind of heavy. What's

your heart behind, Tom. Yeah, and this is probably the one that for many of our listeners and many people in our churches is probably the least common or at least the one that, you know, we're not going to disagree with, but we're not used to this. This is not part of our habit. And the idea of a theological reading is that really when you and I read the Bible, related to what I was just saying about that we're limited, we're not starting from scratch when we read the Bible.

And we shouldn't be starting from scratch. We have 2,000 years of Christians who have thought long and hard and have wrestled with what Scripture teaches and have written what we sometimes call doctrinal statements or the older kind of forms of them or what we call confessions or creeds like the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed. And these formulations that come from Scripture are not the same thing as Scripture. like we don't want to replace scripture with them. We don't want to get rid of the Bible and just read the creeds or something. But they do help us understand what the scriptures are saying. They guide us. They shape us.

And anyone has, I mean, almost anyone who goes to church, there's some kind of doctrinal statement. They'll call it a lot of times. And again, that doesn't replace the Bible, but it does shape and guide our reading. Like, pay attention to this. Like, this is what's going on that even though the word Trinity doesn't appear in the Bible, a good reading of the scripture for 2,000 years. has shown that the way the Bible talks about the Father, son, and the Spirit, we need a word like

Trinity to make sense of and talk rightly about what the Bible is actually teaching. And so one of the big things about theology and the whole point at this part of the book is that's not something to kind of write off as just for the professors or just for later in the Christian life. Like, theology is a really important part of the reading of the Bible. We need help. We need people that go before us. We need teachers. We need pastors. And a lot of those pastors were really smart and they wrote stuff down and we still read what they wrote down. And that's really helpful. So that's something that I think in many people in our churches, they wouldn't disagree with, but they probably never really thought about it.

Like how important theology is to the reading of the Bible. That's kind of creedal. So right now at my church, I'm teaching a class on the Apostles' Creed. It's just a short class in the kind of 9 o'clock hour. And it's been really fun. You can see the light bulbs coming on for people that like, oh, it's a lot. helpful to actually not just walk through a biblical text, but last week I taught on who is the Holy Spirit and kind of looked at a bunch of different Bible verses and helped think about what is the

church and what does the church mean? So that's an example of kind of creedal theology or even systematic theology that helps us read the Bible well. There's other things too, but that's the first one that comes to mind. Yeah, so I think it's important that we don't feel this pressure to come up with some novel interpretation of the Bible. Please don't. If you've come up with something new, you're probably wrong. Right. That's right. Christians, faithful Christians from around the world have been reading this, studying it, writing about it for thousands of years. And so it's good to be in conversation with them and to see what they've learned because they probably have some insights that you don't have. And it doesn't mean there's nothing to learn. It just means that probably

it's been talked about somewhere and you can benefit from interacting with some of those creeds, as you put it. All right. So let's go to the next one. Transformational reading. with Taylor. Now, is this like, I want the Bible to transform me? Because if that's it, that seems like that's the ultimate goal, or am I misreading that? Yeah, I think it is. But yeah, so the point is in this section, and it's intentionally the third one, is that we have to keep really clear in our minds, why are we reading the Bible again? It's really easy, and it's going to vary by personality type and people, but it's very possible to read the Bible just to get a bunch of knowledge about God. And I'd rather have us have more knowledge about God than not, but just know a bunch of things about God and take furious notes when you're in a sermon or, you know, read a bunch of books about the Bible and feel, you know, that you're growing in your knowledge. That's great, but that's actually not the goal of reading the Bible. Or you could do the same thing with theology. Oh, now I understand what the nature of the Holy Spirit is and whatever. The goal of reading scripture is that we come and we see. And then through that coming and seeing, we become more like God. That is not in.

our divine nature, but that we are reformed into his image, which is exactly what the Bible talks about that God is doing in us. He's reshaping. We are created in his image. That got marred and broken and cracked and mud covered. And now we are being remade because the perfect image of God in Jesus Christ, he's the exact representation, has become flesh and has conquered death. And he now, now it invites us to also be remade into the image we're meant to be. And so we can also describe it as with this first and second greatest commandments according to Jesus, to love God and to love others. And so those two ideas of becoming more like God in the image of Christ, learning to be people of love.

That's why we read the Bible. We don't read it just to know more stuff. We read it so that we might become different and find life, find flourishing. So that's why Taylor's important. Yeah, I've heard people say in the past, I guess this is true, that Satan knows a lot of the Bible. I mean, he was quoting it to Jesus in the desert, right? And so the goal isn't knowledge because I get the impression, especially if you spend any time on Twitter, that there are people who use the Bible as almost a weapon. And maybe even you agree with the general point they're making, but they've weaponized it.

There's no humility, no grace, no love, no mercy. in the way they interact with people. So is that what you're getting at that it's possible to know the answers to a lot of test questions? You know, know the Bible, who the 12 disciples are, what the 12 tribes of Israel are,

name all the 10 commandments, and yet still find yourself far from God. Is that kind of what you're getting at? I mean, that's certainly part of it. And as one who spends a lot of time in the Gospels and in Matthew in particular, that's what's really striking is that that's the role the Pharisees play.

They're not bad people. Like, we shouldn't think of the Pharisees, as these like big meanies who are like creeping around, you know, doing bad stuff or living a double life. Like they're hypocrites, Jesus says, but not in the way that we think of hypocrisy, meaning that they're living this like secret immoral life. They're very moral people. They're pious. They tithe faithfully. They memorize the Bible. They fast twice a week. You know, they're doing all these things. But they actually lack the most important thing is that they don't have a heart that's any longer connected to God. They're whitewash tombs. They are cups that

they're clean on the outside but filthy on the inside to use Isaiah that Jesus does. This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. So this becomes the conflict Jesus has with the Pharisees, but the really profound part is that we can end up being the exact same way, even claiming the name of Christ. I look at one person said it that a lot of times the church is the second coming of the Pharisees. And I just think that is so profoundly powerful that the religious, person is in danger of knowing God the least because the veil of knowledge about him can protect us from looking at what's really going on inside of our hearts.

Right. And so that's part of the point of Taylor is that, yeah, we've got to press into that. There's also another point, which is that I am trying to make a larger point about, like, what happens when we think about reading the Bible well? A lot of times the Taylor part, the transformational part, kind of like the theology part is kind of put on a shelf, like, okay, well, the real, reading the Bible is what Ingrid offers. Like, she's given us the details. And then, oh, you know, applying, that's something else, you know. But the point of the whole book is that you

need all three of these to really know God well through Holy Scripture. You need information. You need theological help. And you need to be pushing towards that goal of knowing God truly. And if I had to say one more thing about that. Sorry, my answers might be too long. Oh, this is great. I teach Matthew a lot. I have a PhD in Matthew. I have written a lot. the Sermon on the Mount within Matthew, I've written and do a lot of stuff with that. And just recently, I have been writing like a more devotional kind of commentary thing

on the Sermon of the Mount for somebody. And I've literally spent the last 15 years of my life deeply in these texts and in the Sermon of the Mount. And I've been blown away again by things that I'm seeing in the Sermon of the Mount because I'm asking a different kind of question or the most important kind of question is, how does this apply to my life? Not that I wasn't doing that before, but writing something that is purely devotional makes me ask, it's the same way with preaching. I find this with preaching.

Once you ask the transformational question, then you really see what the Bible's saying. That's what I have experienced over the last 25 years, 30 years of preaching. I don't know if that's been your experience too, but that's why Taylor is important. One of the things that people say sometimes is, boy, I really love that sermon. and I wonder if there's really something in the sermon that was different, or if they were just in a different place spiritually, that their heart was more open, that they were asking the kind of question of,

how do I need to put this into my life, right? That they were confessing their sin and dealing with those things before they came to worship that morning. And so sometimes I think when we love a talk, I mean, there are some talks that are better than others. Let's all admit that. But I think a lot of it has probably something to say about where we were and our heart being open to it. Okay, so one of the things that I get from you,

you said it earlier, I think earlier you said, we just need to slow down a little bit when we're reading. And so when somebody's picking up their Bible to read, are you encouraging people to kind of have a goal like, we're going to read to the Bible in a year, or, you know, there's these different reading plans you can find? How do I know how much of the Bible? Should I just read a verse and just think about that verse every day. Let's just get that on the table. If you're just the average Christian out there, you're a banker, you're a teacher,

you're a lawyer, you're a doctor, you're a truck driver, whatever. I pick up my Bible. Like, how much should I try to read? That's a great question. I mean, I think ultimately it'd be great to have multiple, like, let's use an economic metaphor. It's good to have multiple revenue streams, you know.

It's probably good to have multiple Bible streams coming into your life. So, like, you've got Sunday morning. Hopefully you're hearing the Bible preached. Like at our church, like all our churches, we have men's and women's Bible studies where you're doing something more in depth, like we're going through First Peter right now. That's pretty good. And then the personal study would be another one. And I think the wisest person is going to have those multiple streams of Bible coming into them,

which are going to give different kind of levels of how much you get, right? When it comes to the personal side, I think Bible reading plans, of course, are great. Most of us may get through January, you know, if that. So I don't want to diminish them in any ways. and for many people, they're great. The potential downside of them is that if it does become, you know, for those who just like to check boxes off, and it becomes like plow through it, right? And, you know, there's some good and just kind of a soaking in, but it's probably better to take a smaller amount and to slow down and to do something a little bit more meditative.

I mean, a lot of Christians throughout the church's history have taken. I don't necessarily mean just one verse, although you can do that. But what would be maybe one story or one psalm or one paragraph in a letter and to prayerfully read it, maybe in multiple translations if you can, and honestly get on your knees and ask God to open scripture to us because it is a spiritually understood thing ultimately. And just prayerfully read. And I guess the whole point is use all three of these, you know, ask informational questions, ask theological questions.

and don't forget to ask personal questions. And so whatever you can do, it's probably a smaller amount than just blowing through, I would think. Do you remember one of the professors that we had? We had to meditate on a passage of scripture. It was just kind of like this thing you were supposed to do a few times a week.

And he encouraged us to pray a prayer. And I'm not going to get exactly right. You will, which will frustrate me. It's in the book. I pray that the word would be open so that I could see its truth and that my heart would be open so the word could do its work in my life.

And that's not exactly right, but it's the gist. of it. And I still remember that. It's been a long time since I heard that. And I still remember it. And on my wiser days, I pray that prayer. So, okay, a couple more kind of fast-paced questions here. You mentioned multiple versions. Which version of the Bible should I get? I get to ask this a lot. Surely you do too. What version? Yeah. I'm so bad at this answer. Come on, man. Yeah, I mean, I... Do you give me two? Okay. I mean, I preach from the NIV myself. So is that what you read?

And, well, I mean, you're reading. Okay, not you. I don't want it to hear about your Greek. I probably read the NIV and the CSB. Those are probably the three that I kind of run into. The Christian Standard Bible. It's a newer one. Okay.

But my friend's Tom Shreiner, my colleague, and Darien Lockett, and maybe don't know him, another friend and some others were involved in it. Would you call it again Christian Standard Bible? Yeah, it used to be the Holman Christian Standard, and then they revised it again and made it the CSB. I feel like it hits a kind of middle ground. NIV, English standard version, those are the three that you would, to your average Christian out there, say, pick up those and read those in your personal times.

And they're different, you know, what do you use? I am big on the NIV, although I don't mind the NLT, the new living translation as well. I like to mix it up. Should people get a study Bible or no? I think they can be great, you know. Again, as with everything, good servant, bad master, you know, in the sense of like you don't want to make your Bible reading the notes more than thinking about the text yourself, you know? Which is always the temptation, because I'll be leading a group of guys and I'll ask a question

and then I'll go, well, my notes says, and I was like, come on, dude, help me out here. If I wanted to buy one or two books for the beginning of my resources to help me study the Bible, so not the Bible itself, but books about the Bible, what are one or two or three things besides come and see, but what are one or two references books that you mentioned earlier that I might want to get. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, too. I mean, I would say a study Bible is a good first step because you've got the Bible and then some good reference works in there. I think a good, solid, but not too complicated commentary series, like the Tyndale New Testament commentary series or something like that. And that's a paper back one? Yeah, it depends on your level of

interest and time, you know. Right. Well, there's so many good references and some of them you can get digitally. Yeah, for sure. And so you don't have to carry them around and lug them around. with you everywhere. Okay, one last thing is, would you pray for us? As we kind of close up, would you just pray that we would become better Bible readers, but also that we would take up your invitation, come and see the great God, the merciful Savior that we have. Yeah, gladly.

Thank you so much. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank you, that though we are limited as we've spoken of, and that we're made of the earth and will return to the earth, that you are timeless and you are larger than us in every way and that you're good. We thank you, God, that you are good and you're kind and you're full of love and joy. And I pray for myself, for Keith, for all of our hearers that even now by the power of the spirit, you would open our hearts. And when we study the Bible, bless us, God.

we want to ask you to bless and say, Lord, have mercy, and help us see you, protect us from the evil one, and fill us with your very spirit. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks for praying for us.

Thanks for writing this book, come and see. And thanks for being an academic who's studying the scriptures and then passing all those riches on us. I really appreciate your time with us today. Thank you. Great to be with you.