today on Standing Alone. We are learning to faithfully read and embed scripture into our minds, our hearts, and our spirits. You don't do this for one verse that pops out at you. You're going to do this over time. It's a habit that you have to develop. And as you read, I told my daughter this, as you read, that Word of God is like a seed that just keeps implanting in your mind, implanting in your heart. And over time, you grow. It's not an audible voice that's going to speak. It's not a light that's going to come on. It's not going to jump out at you like a pop-up book. It's a seed that's going to plant within your soul. And every time you read, it gets deeper and deeper within you and makes you more like Christ. YOU'RE LISTENING TO STANDING IN THE GAP, STANDING FOR TRUTH IN A FALLEN WORLD. Welcome to Standing in the Gap, Standing Alone with Josh Tompkins, a topical discussion designed to offer listeners a pastoral insight from a biblical foundation regarding a variety of issues in the world around us. I'm your host, Mike Cross. Today we'll hear from Josh about the value of daily Bible reading and the standards set by the book that shows us what is good and what is bad. From his series titled Spiritual Habits, this is part three of You Are What You Read, The Best Book. Here's Josh. Welcome to another episode of Standing in the Gap, and this is part three in our series on spiritual habits, and we started this series, we want to do this through the whole summer, just look at some different habits that we have to form in our own spiritual lives. I think one of the problems that we have in Christianity is that Christians don't develop good habits. There's several habits we want to look at. We need to have the habit of praying. That's a great habit that we need. We need to always be praying. That's what the Bible says. So we need to develop that habit. There's the habit of going to church. You need to have that habit. Some people get out of the habit and they quit going or they go every once in a while. It's not a habit. So we'll talk about those different kind of habits that we need to have. But we started out, our number one focus when we started this series was on reading. And I didn't expect it to be three parts, but it is. We looked at the different aspects of reading, and this is the third part on Christian reading. So whether you're a light reader or no reader or an obsessed reader, the whole point was for me to get you to read. Encourage you to read. Go on vacation this summer and read. Turn off the TV and read. Turn off the Netflix and read. Again, I keep bringing up my kids because they're a major part of my life, but one of the things that I'm trying to get my kids to do right now, they sit with phones in their faces all the time. is that we need to cut that off. We need to turn it off and pick up a book and read. Our culture, our society has become a society that doesn't read. We watch everything. We need to learn to read again. I want my kids to read. We need to set maybe a time for our kids and say, phones in a basket, phones off. Tablets off. And just say, now you have to find something to read. And even as parents, we need to sit down and read with our kids. I did it last night with my four kids and my wife. I sat down and read Matthew to them. I just wanted to pull out a portion of the Gospels and read to them. My little girl, five years old, Emma, she'll come up to me and bring her book and sit down and read. Turn everything off and read. So we need to do that. But the thing is, we don't need just to read anything, we need to read good books. And that's been our goal, is to get you to read, not just read, but to read good books. Good Christian books, good solid Christian books, that's what we need. So we started with the bad books, don't read. We went to the good books, do read. Now I have to do one more because I know inevitably somebody out there that's listening to me is going to say, you know what, he did the good books and he didn't mention the Bible. Somebody out there is going to say, oh, Josh, he's reading men and he's not reading God. I get that. I know that somebody is going to say that. It's inevitable that somebody is going to critique and say, you know, Josh, he's lost it. He's reading man's thoughts and not God's thoughts. So I save the best for last. I want us to read not just good books, but I want us to read the best book, the Bible. Charles Spurgeon, and I'm mentioning, I think I've mentioned him in every one of these so far, but he says we need to visit many books, but live in the Bible. The Bible is the most important book. A lack of the Bible makes the bad books bad. The very first episode that we did on this, we talked about bad books, and the reason they're bad books is because they're not biblical books. So that makes them bad. Those good books that I just, that I've mentioned in the second episode, They're good books because they have the Bible in them. The amount of Bible makes the good books good. So we need to spend more time reading the Bible and about the Bible than anything else that we read. I want to encourage you today, read the Bible. That's the encouragement for today. I could probably stop right now and just say, that's it, read the Bible. Go turn me off right now. You need to read the Bible more than you need to listen to Josh. I don't mean that. You need to listen to me too. But you need to go read the Bible. That's what you need to do. So why should we read the Bible? I'm just going to take a few minutes and tell you why you need to read the Bible. What good will it do you? I want to encourage you to do that today. I want to, at the end of this podcast episode, that you're going to stop and say, you know what? Yeah, I do need to read my Bible more. So let me show you. Why should we read the Bible? And this is so simple. I'm sorry that I even have to do this. But the truth of the matter is, and you know this as well as I do, all the listeners, everybody has a Bible. Bibles are everywhere. I have two Bible apps on my phone. I can pull up Bible anytime I want to. I can be out in the woods somewhere, open my phone, and pull up a Bible. We have a physical Bible in our hands, too. Everybody has a Bible. But the problem is that the Bibles that we have, we are opening up to check it. I can check what I do on my phone, the amount of time I spend on each app. I do it. I set time limits on certain apps. On social media, I only have an hour a day for my my social media apps and it'll warn me it'll say five more minutes and then it's time it's cutting off time so you can look at your apps if you have a bible app look how much time you spend on your bible compared to how much time you spend on facebook you can do that it's amazing how you can see how much time you spend on something your messages your phone app i mean just everything that you have on your apps it'll show you how much time you spend in a day on it And I guarantee that most of us, if we looked at our phones and measured that out, that our Bible app gets less attention than every other app on our phone. Same thing in our house. When you go into your house, you'll find a Bible, for the most people, it has more dust on it than anything else. I don't know who said it, but somebody smarter than me said that our Bibles have so much dust on them that we could go in and write damnation in the dust. Because we're not reading our Bibles. This may sound simple. Yeah, read your Bibles. But the problem is, we're not doing it. That's what makes this necessary for me to say. We need to read our Bibles. So let me tell you why we should read it. Number one, it's God's book to us. That's the number one reason. It's literally God-breathed. Not just the red portions. There's people out there called red-letter Christians, that all they want to read is the red letters of the Gospels, the red letters that are in Revelation to the seven churches, the red letters here and the red letters there. You know that those Bibles that have red letters, it's saying those are the words of Christ. But we need to understand, and those red-letter Christians need to understand, that those red letters were put in there by some printer probably in the 19th century, maybe even later than that. But before that, everybody understood that not just the red letters were the letters of God, or the words of Christ, But all the words in the Bible are the words of Christ. Every single one of the words in the Bible from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 are the words of God. Every one of them are God-breathed. Every one of them are inspired. Every one of them are infallible. Every one of them come from God down to us. God has revealed himself to us in a book, and every word is the word of God. Whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, it doesn't matter. We know that every word is the word of God. So that's number one. You read it because it's God's book to us. God gave and has revealed himself to us, not in a video, not in a movie, but in a book. And we need to read it. The second reason we need to read the Bible is because it has all the answers to life and to godliness, all the questions that the great philosophers are asking in the world. And there are great questions. Where do we come from? People ask. Where are we going? Why are we here? I mean, some of the great philosophical questions that that everybody's asked throughout all time, and they sit and they think, and they rub their chins, and they sit in seminary, colleges, and universities, and they try to figure these things out, and they come up with these big, grand answers. Well, maybe it was the Big Bang, or maybe it was this, or maybe it was that. Well, you know what? The Bible has the answers to these things. The Bible tells us where we come from. The Bible tells us what our purpose in life is. Why am I here? The Bible will tell you that. What's the purpose of my individual life? The Bible will tell you that. Where do we go when we die? The Bible will tell you that. There's only two directions you're gonna go when you die. The Bible tells you which direction, the two directions and which direction you're gonna go. The Bible gives you that answer. Why is the world full of evil? The Bible gives you that answer. Why do bad things happen to good people? The Bible gives you that answer. Every question that you have in life can be answered through the word of God. So the Bible has answers to life and to godliness. All the questions we ask, and we can even go into what's God's will for my personal, individual life. It's answered in the Word of God. Who should I marry? I mean, that's a big question. I have people ask me that all the time. What kind of person should I marry? It's in the Bible. How should I parent? I've got kids now. I love that. I first had my little girl 13 years ago, and they give the baby to you. As a young parent, they give you the car seat, they walk you out, they put the baby in the car, and then you drive off, and they don't give you any kind of manual. They don't tell you what's going to happen when you get home. How do I know how to be a good parent? The answer is in the Word of God. So that's the second reason. It gives us all the answers to life and to godliness. It's found in those pages of the Word of God. The third reason we need to read the Word of God is because it's reliable. Everything it says is trustworthy. You go to a friend and ask for advice, it may be good, it may be bad, and you've got to kind of figure out which one that is. Is that good advice or is that bad advice? You don't know how trustworthy they are. They may be lying to you. You even go into some churches, and the pastor stands up to preach, and you think, is that right? Is that wrong? I don't know. So you're going to have a lot of advice. You're going to have commentators out there. I have to listen to Fox News. Are they telling me the truth? Listen to CNN. Are they telling me the truth? Is MSNBC telling me the truth? Is this one or that one? Is a professor at college telling me the truth? Is a teacher at the high school telling me the truth? When a science teacher at the high school opens up the book and says it's a big bang theory, are they telling me the truth? When you open up the Word of God, you don't have to try to figure out whether it's true or not. You don't have to figure out if it's reliable or not. You don't have to figure out if it's trustworthy or not. We can't trust what other people say, but we can trust what the Word of God says. We might not be able to trust other books, but we can trust this book. Other people may lie to us, they may give us their opinions, they may give us their theories, but the Bible gives us truth. 100% reliable truth. We need to read it because it's reliable in the midst of a world full of lies. In the pages of the Bible, we have truth. I'll say this, in the midst of a world of fake news, that's all we hear anymore. Fake this, fake that, false news. We have the truth in the pages of the Word of God. We need to listen to it more than we listen to them. So I'm gonna stop just for a second here and we'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll finish out this last episode of You Are What You Read. Here at West End Baptist Church we offer a variety of outreach ministries and we'd like to take an opportunity to let our listeners know a little bit about what all we've got going on. From 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. every Thursday everyone is welcome to come and visit our clothes closet where we offer a variety of apparel donated to us by our community. If you or someone you know are in need of clothes, come down and see us at the Clothes Closet. Again, that's every Thursday from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. And remember, if you'd like to make donations, bring them by while the Clothes Closet is open. Please do not leave donations outside of the church when the Clothes Closet is closed. And as always, we are so thankful for all of your support. Don't forget about our feeding ministry, Meals of Love. On the third Thursday of every month from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., we invite all of our community to join us for a warm meal and fellowship. Everyone is welcome so if you're in the area and you'd like a warm meal stop in and see us and bring your family and friends along too. We also want to let our listeners know about Refuge, our addiction support ministry. Every third Tuesday of the month from 6 p.m. until 7 p.m. we host a warm and friendly opportunity to meet our church family as well as others who may be suffering from the clutches of an overpowering addiction in life. We understand how devastating this can be to you and your loved ones and we are passionate about helping people find the right path to recovery. So if you or anyone you know are suffering from an addiction of any kind and you don't know where to turn, let us help. Everything at Refuge is kept strictly confidential and our doors are open to everyone. For a detailed list of these as well as other outreach ministries, check out our website at www.westendbsd.org. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy the rest of today's episode. Okay, now we're back. Okay, the next thing up. The fourth one is it is the means of spiritual growth. If you want to grow as a Christian, you need to read the Bible. Think about it this way. If you're looking at your life, you would agree that the more you read your Bible, the more holier you will become. If you want to read your Bible, the more you read your Bible, the more you'll grow. And the less, the same is true on the opposite end. The less you read your Bible, the less you'll grow. The less you read your Bible, the less like God you will become, the less like Christ you will become. So it's a good thing to read your Bible. There's a direct correlation, a direct connection between our individual intake of the Bible and our effectiveness and our enjoyment of the Christian life. It's better for you to read your Bible than it is not. That's just a easy, simple way of putting things. It will give us guidance in life. It'll make us wise. It'll show us how to make the most out of this life that we have here in this world. It'll show us how not to waste our lives. Many are wasting their lives. Open up the Bible and you read it. It'll show you how not to waste your life. It'll show you how to be saved. Everything you need is to grow spiritually. Number five, it'll keep us from sin. It will make us holy. The more you read your Bible, the more holier you'll become if you obey it. That's just reality. Number six, it will increase your love for God. The more you read your Bible, the more you'll love God. The more you read your Bible, the greater your worship of God will be. The more Bible we have in our churches, the greater the worship is. The more Bible you have within your mind, the greater your love of God, the greater your appreciation of God, the greater your fear of God will be. So we need to read our Bibles. That's why you read your Bible. The second thing I want to answer is, how should I read my Bible? Because that's the problem. I can sit here and tell you, read your Bible. My daughter asked me that last night. It's funny that I'm recording this today. I looked at her and I told her, you need to read your Bible. I mean, that's just, here's what you need to do. And she looked at me, I'm serious, this happened last night. And she said, where do I start? Do I start in Genesis 1 and just read through it? Do I start in Matthew 1 and just read through it? She wanted to know, how do I read my Bible? Where do I start? Is there a Bible reading plan I need to follow? Should I follow some chronological order? How should I do that? So I had to sit down and talk to her. It's the same thing I want to tell you. Here's how you need to read your Bible. And I would tell an older adult the same thing I told last night to my 13-year-old daughter. Here's where you begin. Here's how you start. Here's what you need to do. And I told her, pick a method. Because there's so many methods out there. I said, just pick one, and do it. It's not that hard. There's a Bible in a year. She can read the Bible in a year. There's the Bible verses laid out for you. Go through and mark it off as you read it, and do your best just to follow along. And if you get behind, you get behind. But make it your goal, your aim, to read the Bible in a year. There's a Bible in a half a year. Now, that would take a little bit more effort, and she kind of just said, eh, that one's going to be a hard one. You can read through the Bible. You can read in the Bible. You can read on the Bible. You can write the Bible. There's all kinds of ways and means available for us. You can do all kinds of things with the Bible. My thing is, yeah, you can pick a lot of different ways to read, but just pick a way and read it. That's what I told her. Just open it up and read it if you have to. It may be five verses a day. It may be five chapters a day. For the overachievers, it may be five books in a day. But read the Bible. Pick a plan, make a discipline, and stick with it. Make it a habit and stick with it. That's what I'm going to tell you to do. Just pick one. I mean, don't sit there and stress over, I don't know how, I don't know this, I don't know that. That's what I told my daughter. Just pick one. I can lay out before you a dozen different ways to read the Bible. Pick one, be disciplined about it, make it a habit, and do it. And it don't matter. If you read it, you'll grow from it. That's just the truth. Pick one and go. Now, I then sit down and I told her, when you read it, here's what you do, though. Because I don't want her to read it mindlessly. I want her to bring her mind with her when she comes. I want her to think when she reads her Bible. I want her to concentrate. I want her to focus. I want her mind to come. It's the same thing for church. You don't come into church and listen to a sermon mindlessly. You don't come into a church and listen to a sermon without focus. You don't come into a church and say, oh, I'm just going to turn my mind off today. I don't want to think today. No, no, no, no. If you want to get something out of it, that's what I say. Pick away and go. Read it. Five verses a day, five chapters a day, five books a day. But the key is to bring your mind with you when you come. When you sit down, if it's gonna be five minutes, if it's gonna be 50 minutes, whatever it is, whatever switch you gotta turn on, turn it on and think. Because you're gonna have to think. If it's just one verse, think through that verse. Focus, think, get a notebook. That's one of the ways that I do it. When I open my Bible, I've got a piece of paper and a pen sitting out beside of me, and I'm gonna think, and I'm gonna write. And I'm going to, whatever I need to learn there, I'm going to write it down. And you say, what do you write down? When I get started, I want you to understand, me too, that this isn't a diary. I'm not writing about my spiritual life. Here's what I think. Here's what I'm going through. No, no, no, no. The Bible isn't a spiritual diary. The Bible isn't about me. The Bible isn't what it means to me. So when I'm going to write this down, do this. When you read your Bible, ask these questions. Who is the author of this letter? Who's writing this? Who is he writing it to? So if it's Ephesians, Paul is writing to Ephesians. He's writing to the church at Ephesus. Why is he writing to them? You're sitting there trying to figure out the context of the passage. What is the purpose? Why is Paul writing to this church? What's his reasoning behind it? Why is he doing that? Again, it's called context. Anybody can do that. Maybe you need to get a study Bible, and it'll tell you, here's why Paul's writing this. So you're getting the original intent of the author. It's not what it means to me, it's what it meant when Paul wrote it, or what it meant when Mark wrote it, or what it meant when Matthew wrote it, or Luke wrote it, or John wrote it, or Peter wrote it. What did it mean when they wrote it? That's what I'm after. I'm not after what it means to me. I'm after what it meant to them. That's what I want. What did it mean to them when they wrote it down, when God inspired it? What did He mean by that then? And then you apply it. How do you apply it? So you're figuring that out. Who's the author? Who's the audience, what's his intent, what's his purpose, what's his goal in writing that? And you figure all that out, and then you ask, is this telling me something about God? And write that down. If it's teaching you something about God, write it down. What's this tell me about God? Or what's it telling me I need to do? Is there a sin I need to avoid? Is there a sin I need to confess? Is there a promise that I need to accept and I need to trust? I want to preach Psalm 102 tomorrow night in our Wednesday night service. And it's the second point, the second part of the passage is a promise that gives us hope, that gives us encouragement. I need to lay hold of that. I need to trust God because of what that said. Is it a command to obey? Is it something saying, do this? Then I need to do it. So you're gonna have to ask some questions. You're gonna have to apply it. But here's what you don't expect. Don't expect audible voices. Don't expect scripture to jump out at you. Through all the years that I've been reading my Bible, it doesn't always jump out at me, you know, just catch my attention. No, we're learning to faithfully read and embed scripture into our minds, our hearts, and our spirits. You don't do this for one verse that pops out at you. You're gonna do this over time. It's a habit that you have to develop. And as you read, I told my daughter this, as you read, that word of God is like a seed that just keeps implanting in your mind, implanting in your heart. And over time, you grow. It's not an audible voice that's going to speak. It's not a light that's going to come on. It's not going to jump out at you like a pop-up book. It's a seed that's going to plant within your soul. And every time you read, it gets deeper and deeper within you and makes you more like Christ. So it's something that happens over time, not in an instant, not in a moment. It may, God may use it in a powerful way, but we don't need to expect that every time. That's the reason a lot of people quit reading the Bible, is because it doesn't pop out of them anymore. The light doesn't come on anymore. It's just, I read through that today, and you know, I didn't get a whole lot out of it. But God is using that to grow you in ways that you may never, you may not see for a while. So don't expect that. Again, it's a seed that's planted that takes time. There may be days where you see fruit and days where you see growth, but there may be days where you see nothing at all. The key that I told my daughter and I'll tell you is faithful reading over time. The faithful reading of the Word of God makes a faithful man or woman of God. I'm going to say that again. I want you to get this. The faithful reading of the Word of God, the faithful reading, the habitual reading of the Word of God, I even mean this when it comes to preaching the Word of God. Let me finish my statement. The faithful reading of the Word of God is what makes a faithful man or woman of God. It happens in churches. The faithful preaching of the Word of God is what makes a faithful church of God. Just show up and preach on Sunday morning, preacher. Just show up and preach on Sunday night, preacher. There may be 18 people there, but just keep on preaching, and it'll do what it's set out to do. Just show up and preach on Wednesday night. You don't have to do something fancy. You don't have to do anything outlandish. Just a faithful preaching of the Word of God over years, over decades, over generations, and it will make a faithful people of God. That's what the Word of God does. It doesn't have to be outlandish. It doesn't have to be crazy. Just preach the Word of God. Just read the Word of God. And it will make a faithful man and woman of God. It's like lifting weights. Some days you'll see growth. I've lifted weights for a long time. And some days you go in there and the weights are hard. And you're not growing. And you're not getting stronger. And you don't see any improvement. But you know what you do? You don't quit. You show up the next day, and you show up the next day, and you show up the next day. And over a year, over five years, over ten years, if you keep doing that habitually, practicing it over and over and over, you will eventually get stronger. You'll eventually get healthier. And you'll see seasons of great strength and great growth. But don't stop. That's the key. Don't stop. Keep going. Day after day after day, you lift weights. Day after day after day, you read your Bible. And you will see eventual growth. There will be seasons of even great growth. It will build you. It'll make you. It'll help you know right from wrong. It'll really be the best thing you've ever done if you develop a habit of daily reading your Bible. Reading the Bible is a long-term investment. You're building God's Word into your soul and hiding it into your heart. And that's what's great about the Christian life. It's meant to be the simple everyday things that makes a huge difference in our lives. So read the book, read good books, and please, for your soul's sake, don't read bad books. And again, that's Pastor Josh Tompkins from West End Baptist Church. And we want to remind our listeners that we love hearing from you. So if you have biblical questions and you'd like to have them answered, please send them to us by logging on to our website at www.westendbsg.org and leave them there. Also search our website for a complete list of our outreach ministries and church services. And be sure to look us up on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by searching at West End Baptist Church. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time. Yeah.