I may begin by reading from a commandment in 1 Kings 8.61. Be wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord our God, to walk in His statutes and to keep His commands. Let's go ahead and begin with a word of prayer also. Our great God and Father, we thank You for a new Lord's Day, the day that Your Son rose from the dead. We celebrate Him and in His resurrection. We pray that in His Spirit you would allow these truths to penetrate our mind and soul, spirit, and even bodies, Lord, that everything that we have, everything that we are would be holy and totally and fully devoted to You. This we pray in His name. Amen. As you can see, we're talking about Bible study and devotions. How can I grow in holiness and in favor with God? If you really want to know God, medieval monks might say you must renounce your life of luxury and live a solitary life of monasticism. John Wesley might say you must endeavor after a life of sinless perfection, giving your whole self and endeavors to God. The Roman Pope would say you'd be baptized into their church wherein you would receive grace through sacraments. Indulges for following him on Twitter. Revivalists would want you to see you bitterly mourn for sin, perhaps throw yourself on the ground and give some show that the Spirit had done His work in you. A Pentecostal might want to see you speak in tongues. An evangelical would ask, have you done your daily Bible reading? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? An Eastern so-called Orthodox may want to tell you about the ladder of divine ascent by which on 30 rungs your holy soul may steadily ascend to heaven as upon golden wings as the holy saints before you. But what do you guys say you must do to grow in holiness with Jesus? Inwardly, we worship in acts of faith and trust and fear, love, hope, thankfulness. But externally, we do things like confess and pray and sing and hear the word and partake of Christ's body. We make vows and we fast. Some simply call this religion spirituality or godliness. Some call these the spiritual disciplines. This morning we're just going to call them devotions and we're going to grow into and think about two devotions in particular, prayer and Bible reading. Now this is the vow that we take or that we take as members or to become a member. To the end that you may grow in the Christian life, do you promise that you will diligently read the Bible, engage in private prayer, keep the Lord's Day, regularly attend the worship services, observe the appointed sacraments, and give to the Lord's work as he shall prosper you? As I mentioned, we'll focus on these first two. Diligently read the Bible and engage in private prayer. These are in our vows. And there's something that even Jaina and I here on the way to church, we ask, like to ask every week, how did you do in your prayer? How did you do in your devotion or your Bible reading? And we Kind of think about how we did that last week as far as devoting ourselves to these things. Now, devotion is a noun. It means the state of being dedicated, consecrated, or solemnly set apart for a particular purpose. And second, a solemn attention to the supreme being in worship, a yielding of the heart and affections to God with reverence, faith, and piety in religious duties, particularly in prayer and meditation. Devoutness. Now a lot of people have a hard time even thinking about Christianity as a religion or as things that you have to do, although some of these people are the same people that kind of live a me and my Bible type faith. Well, our faith is and must be rooted in the Bible, but it's more than that. And this vow shows it, that you're becoming part of Christ's church. So let's go ahead and start, though, with an attention to prayer. I have a question to offer you from a book called A Call to Prayer by J.C. Ryle. He writes this. I have a question to offer you. It's contained in three words. Do you pray? The question on that, none but you can answer. Whether you attend public worship or not, your minister knows. Whether you have family prayers in your house or not, your family knows. But whether you pray in private or not is a matter between yourself and God. I beseech you in all affection to attend to the subject I bring before you. Do not say that the question is too close. If your heart is in the right before God, there's nothing in it to make you afraid. Do not turn off the question by replying that you say your prayers. It's one thing to say your prayers and another to pray." Maybe that strikes some guilt into you because you're not all up on your praying. But when we pray, we show our utter dependence on God. So in 1 Corinthians, Paul asked the Corinthians, is there anything that you have that you haven't received? When you pray, you show that everything that you need, everything that you're searching for, God has to offer. And of course, we need things in difficult times. I know people who only pray when their car gets crashed or when they lose something around the house. It's easy to pray in those times. But what about for the rest of the things that we have in life? Are we praying more constantly. Now, God truly hears us, and as Calvinists, some people might say, oh, well, if everything's predetermined, why pray at all? Because God's just going to do it, right? But no, God actually uses our prayer to accomplish His purposes and His ends. Are those ends predetermined? Yes. But God uses our prayers and the human will to His end. And so prayer isn't merely for us and for our satisfaction, if you will, but prayers actually accomplish things. God is actually working and doing things in our prayer. And so it's appropriate for us to do that. Now, there's private versus public prayer. And sometimes it's inappropriate to pray in the public for ostentatious reasons, like Jesus says about the scribes and Pharisees who stand in the corners so that they can be seen by people, muttering the same things over and over again. But appropriate prayer does happen in the church, and Paul commands that, like in 1 Timothy 2, where he says, I desire in every place for men to raise up holy hands in prayer, or in 1 Corinthians 14, and other places. There's also individual prayer where we seek God, like when our own Lord would depart to a private place, like on the mountain, and He would pray alone. There is time for that sort of thing. So what do you do when you pray? There are all kinds of different things that you could do. I sometimes journal out my prayers and write them. Some people like prayer books, like the Valley of Vision, a collection of Puritan prayers. Some people read Jesus Calling, which I don't recommend to you, which is like, it's this devotional book from the perspective of Jesus talking to you, which is always a red flag. Some people have prayer closets. Some people think about how they might keep other people in mind and have all kinds of different mechanisms for prayer. have just received from Diane Schaefer a prayer list that has people on every day of the week of a month so that we can pray for all of the saints in the church. And I think at the top, it actually has this vow that we're talking about today. Do you promise to pray? Or maybe it's another vow. But one thing is certain that we must be constant in our prayer. Persistent like the parable of the persistent widow who went to the judge over and over again. You can look that up in Luke 18. But not repetitious for the sake of being repetitious. Assiduous. So that's like in Eastern Orthodoxy there's something called the Jesus Prayer. where they repeat over and over again, beating their chest, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And some people believe that because the scripture says to pray without ceasing, that they're supposed to repeat this one thing over and over and over again throughout their life, just all the time. That's not what we're talking about when we say to pray without ceasing or to make our lives lives of prayer. It's not mere repetition. It's meant to encapsulate not just that one teaching about God having mercy on us, but all of life. We should be ready to go to God with all of our needs. And our needs are many. And if we don't realize that we're in need, we actually are in more need than we think we are. Right? If we don't pray because we think we've got it, that's when we don't. Right? Because no one has it all together. But we ask from true desires. Our prayer is relational. It's not an incantation. It's not like, you know, a magic spell that we use so that we can get what we want. But prayer is related to Christ and our love for Him. So in John 9, 31 we hear, So here we have a relationship that's being talked about. In Psalm 34, 15, And Isaiah 115, when you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. So here we see that the things that we do and the things that we believe are all part of our prayer. And God is going to listen to us accordingly. And so we must make special attention in our hearts and in our lives to pray and to grow in righteousness as we learn to pray and love Jesus more and more. Any questions on prayer? That's a big, big topic. If you want to just spend a lot of time on prayer, the biggest part of Calvin's Institutes, the longest chapter is his chapter on prayer, and I would recommend that to you. But any questions before we move on? Or thoughts, comments, anecdotes? Yeah. Do I think the Psalms are praying? Actually, at the end of, I think it's Psalm 76, something like that, somewhere around 10, within 10 Psalms, it says, the prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended. At the end of the second book, which is 72, yeah. So yes, they are absolutely prayers. And I think we can think about, are psalm singing in public worship as praying as well. We are praying to God. Any other questions? Rock on. Let us continue. So let's talk about Bible reading. Let me begin with what our Westminster standards say in the larger catechism. It asks, how is the Word of God to be read? So let me read this answer. The Holy Scriptures are to be read with a high and reverent esteem of them, with a firm persuasion that they are the very Word of God, and that He only can enable us to understand them, with a desire to know, believe, and obey the will of God revealed in them, with diligence and attention to the matter and scope of them, with meditation, application, self-denial, and prayer." That's a lot, you know. Whenever you read these things, you definitely, if you're like me, you hopefully measure yourself against them and realize where you're coming up short. And it's meant to do that, right? It's not meant to be like, oh, I mastered this and now I can move on. This is a lifelong calling to grow in your personal devotion. The way that you read will always be will always change with how you're growing as a Christian, right? So a Christian who has grown more in their sanctification will read the Bible better. It's just a fact, right? So we grow in our understanding of these things. Maybe you've heard of the hermeneutical spiral, I'll probably bring it back to this later, but when you read the Bible, let's say you read one verse and you misunderstand it, then you keep reading your Bible and you read another verse and you say, oh wait, I have to go back to that original verse. and understand it anew or afresh and change my mind about it. Well, that sort of thing is constantly happening when you're reading your Bible so that you're growing closer and closer to the heart of God, right? Because the only infallible interpreter of Scripture is Scripture. We'll get a little bit more into how to interpret the Bible in a little bit, But I wanna talk first about the Bible study kind of tools and approaches and make this a very practical Sunday school lesson. And I think there'll be something for everyone here. So first of all, who knows what the Bible was written in? A few different ancient languages. I heard one. Hebrew, quiet from a mouse over here. Greek, yep, and then some portions of Daniel have some Aramaic. So, Hebrew and Greek. Here's a picture of interlinear Bible translations. You probably can't see too well, but you can see Hebrew on the left over here and Greek on the right. Now, These are what the Bible's written in and there are lots of debates about translations and how to think about different words in all the Bible and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, God did not inspire like the King James Version or an English translation of the Bible. He inspired the original languages, right? So if the church has any disputes or anything like that, the final judge is going to be the Bible written in the original languages, which is why it's so important that our ministers know and care about these things. And you could go to your minister and ask him, what does this say? He might not know right off the top of his head. He might have to go study it, but It's important that in our Bible reading and study, we know that biblical Hebrew and Greek were immediately breathed out by God, and by His singular care and providence have been kept pure in all ages, so that in all controversies of religion, the Church is to appeal to them. But because not all people know those original languages, yet they have an interest in them and are commanded to read and search them, they're to be translated into our vulgar languages, like English, right? Wherever they go. There are about 4,000 languages in the world. About 2,000 have Bibles in their language. So there's still a lot of work to do, if you ever think about that. But the goal is that the word of God dwelling plentifully in all, we may in an acceptable manner worship God, and through scripture's comfort and patience, obtain our eager expectation. Let me talk about Bible study tools. So here's a picture of a whole bunch of different types of Bible translations, and you get word for word on one side, and you get paraphrases on the other side. Now, word for word is going to be closest to your closest to your Greek or Hebrew text. But they also sound the weirdest to English readers, right? So sometimes when you're reading, well, definitely an interlinear, which is the far most, interlinear is the one we just looked at, where it has both the Greek or Hebrew and the English next to it. There's an interlinear, but then, yeah, like the NASB we used to have as our pew Bible, and it is pretty clunky or wooden, a translator might say. It doesn't always translate things that might be easier if you put them into like an idiomatic way of speaking in English. On the far other end, you have translations like the message, which is not really a translation. It's like a paraphrase where someone Reads it said that Peterson read in Greek and Hebrew, but then he basically put it into his own words instead of directly translating And if you read like the message remix and stuff, it's like some weird like there's one verse I remember that's like this is not a cat-and-mouse game that we're in you know I was like to put that in the Bible. It's this weird kind of trans like paraphrase of your own words of the Bible But there is a spectrum. And so think about that when you're reading your Bible. Personally, for the New Testament, I prefer some of the more word-for-word translations. And in the Old Testament, you know, I like the NIV a lot. It's really easy to read. But these are gonna be questions that you have to ask. For certain books, I like certain translations because they have different translators who translate certain books. So you figure these things out as you grow in the Christian life, but know that, you know, no translation is perfect. They're trying to be faithful representations of manuscript tradition, but also the words that are there. And, you know, if you're struggling with what's a good translation, ask your pastor and he can help you through that. Another thing I think about with Bible reading is just to read. You can get really bogged down in just like, what Bible translation, where do I start? And there are certain Bibles called reader's Bibles that you can get, and they just look like a book. And there's no verses, there's no headings, there's none of that, it's just reading it. And I would commend that to you sometimes, too, because it can get really easy to get bogged down in all the stuff that I'm going to talk about, all the tools and everything. And never let that keep you from just reading and knowing the Bible. Nothing is more important than that, that you're taking the Word of God and consuming it and thinking over it, meditating on it. That being said, there's all kinds of tools. So I have here like a screen shot from one Bible where it's got like an introduction that's usually in study Bibles, but there's background things that are going to be helpful. And then if you look at the way that The text there is like the creation of the world. That's a heading that's not actually, you know, in the text of the Bible. But they're there to kind of help you work through and digest the Bible. And then you'll have verse numbers, footnotes, and cross references. There's a lot. So if you're not familiar with this, If you read here, in the beginning, there's an A before beginning. If you go over, it says chapter 1, 1A, it says Job 38, 4-7. So that's a cross-reference where, when you're reading your Bible, you can say, it will basically tell you, these other verses are related to this. So if you go to Job 38, I believe that's the part where God's saying, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? And so, it has a direct bearing on your reading of Genesis 1. So, the Bible is fully cross-referenced everywhere. It's like, you know, before the internet, people couldn't imagine something was so hyper-linked. Well, the Bible is, like, linked everywhere, right? And you're gonna help yourself along in that hermeneutical spiral the more that you get yourself into it. But that being said, again, there's no substitute for just reading it. Don't get too bogged down in the whiplash of looking up every single cross-reference. And then there are footnotes, which are usually translator notes. I'm just curious, who has read in their Bible the translator notes before the Bible begins? Who's ever read that? Yeah, nerd. Just kidding. Yeah, like no one ever reads it, but there's some really important stuff in there. Like, why is, in some translations, Lord is capitalized, L-O-R-D. Who knows why? Jaina knows, I mentioned it. Yeah, it's the underlying word that indicates what Pranayama does. Yeah, so you would only know that though if you read your translator notes and sometimes it's different in different translations what they capitalize, what they don't, where they capitalize it, whether they capitalize it in the New Testament or in the Old Testament and these sorts of things are important if you ever want to dig into that part of your Bible. I had a professor who said, if I could only take two books on a desert island with me if I was stranded there for life, the first would be my Bible, the second This is Greg Beal. Second would be my concordance. He was probably talking about original language concordance. But what is a concordance? It's basically you look up a word, like you can see here in the picture, journeys or joy, and it will tell you everywhere that word is used in the Bible. So they're usually pretty big. But if you have a question about any word or issue, it will help you look that up in the Bible so that you can do a deeper study on all sorts of things, whether it be a person or an emotion or anything, right? You can look that up in a concordance. Nowadays, people mostly use Bible dictionaries and software, like on their Bible software. You can find like everything on your phone. And I use a whole load of different Bible softwares on my phone. I like Pocket Sword. And there's one called Parallel Plus that's free. It's probably one of my favorites. Some people use Olive Tree. There's Logos. There's a whole slew of them. Just the Bible app, I think, has some good stuff. So think about that. It should be helpful to you. Before we get into this, I want to talk about kind of how people go into studying and approaching the Bible. But before that, any questions about all the different tools that you can use to get into the Bible? Yeah. Can we do something like that? Yeah, sure. Nathan can send them out. Yeah, there's, oh, you mean all the Bible softwares, or do you mean? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there. And again, you can always ask the pastor, or you can ask me what I mentioned after the fact. Anyone find any of these particularly helpful in their Christian life? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, Jaina? Yeah. Right. Yeah, there's kind of, I've seen Christians kind of fall into two categories where some people will just read so fast and stuff that they almost miss everything, and then other people get so debilitated they hardly read at all. Or they'll read like a little bit and then like maybe do a little deep study and go into all these places, but they don't have a idea of the grander scope. And so there are lots of Christians who go through their whole life and never even read the Bible as a whole, right? And you don't wanna be in that spot either. Just the Greek and Hebrew is what our Confession says. It says Biblical Hebrew and Greek are immediately God breather inspired. That's in the first chapter of the Westminster Confession. Yeah, I know, but that doesn't mean that our translations, insofar as they're faithful translations, aren't the Word of God, right? They are absolutely the Word of God, and we should think of it like that. Right, right. And unfortunately, you'll get people like Colts that take advantage of that, like the Book of Mormon. In the founding documents of Mormonism, it says, we believe the Old and New Testament insofar as they're properly translated. And then Joseph Smith tried to say, oh, well, all kinds of stuff is all lost and not translated. And of course, those are lies. But some people will prey on those who don't know the original languages in order to deceive them. And he was one of those people. Yeah? Yes. Yeah, so the New World Translation is a great example of a bad translation where They mistranslate John 1, 1 and they say at the beginning there was, they say, a God. Jesus is a God, not God. And then in Colossians 1, yeah, where you mentioned it says that, for by Him the Son were created all other things. And they just insert a word that's not there. So there are People, again, who will seek to deceive you based on translations. And it's hard if you don't know the original languages. You have to kind of work with your authorities, your elders, and trust in them to a certain degree. All right. A lot of times comparing different translations helps too. If you have, Janet does that all the time in the Bible app. You can click on a verse and then open it up in a whole bunch of different verses. You can see, and then you can ask, why did this one translation say a completely different thing? That's sometimes a very helpful tool to use. So you can think about that. Awesome. So yeah, let's talk about hermeneutics. 2 Peter 1.21 says, above all, you must understand that no prophecy of scripture comes from one's own interpretation. For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So you'll hear in lots of conversations surrounding the Bible, especially in disputations with unbelievers or whoever, they'll say, oh, well, that's just your interpretation. And the meaning is usually, well, you can interpret the Bible however you want and make it mean whatever you want. The Bible actually says the exact opposite. It says that no scripture is from someone's own interpretation, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so, as we grow as Christians, we get closer and closer to interpreting the Bible in the way that it's meant to be understood. You know, because we have sin, all of us are sinful, none of us here interprets the Bible perfectly. Which is, I think it should make us want to grow more and more and be more holy, so that we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear better, so that we can grow closer to the heart of God. And when we do that, then we read something and it's almost as if we read it for the first time. Like, oh wow, I never saw, how come I never saw this? I remember my first Bible, I like collect Bibles. I'll read through one and then I'll change the translation or something. And I went back to one of the first Bibles where I read Ephesians after I learned about predestination, election, all this stuff. I'm like, what was I thinking when I first read this? And I went back and I had highlighted everything around, but not those verses. It was like, I just totally missed it. And sometimes that happens. It's fascinating how that can happen. But God is working on us. He's growing us. It's probably the same thing for sermons. You could hear one sermon one time and not really get anything from it. But it might be because of you. And then the next time you hear maybe the same sermon on a recording, or maybe the pastor doesn't update it, and you hear it a second time, and it hits you. And you're like, why? Well, a lot of times it's because of what's going on in you, and where are you growing, and are you trying to grow? Are you trying to listen and grow toward God? So there's that. Hermeneutics means basically a principle of interpretation. How do you interpret things? And there are lots of different approaches. You'll see this tiny little icon is a book called Biblical Hermeneutics, Five Views, where some guys argue about the proper way to interpret the Bible. And it's a helpful book if you wanna think more about that. There are whole branches of Christendom based off of different approaches to the Bible, right? Like a Baptist is gonna interpret the Bible differently than a Presbyterian. And it's not just a few verses. It's usually like a whole approach to looking at the Bible. Or a dispensational that believes the Bible should be broken up more into dispensations. Not that there aren't those, but as a primary hermeneutic, there are different ways of understanding these things. Like, Israel, is it separate from the church, or are they on a continuity? That has to do with dispensationalism. So you're going to struggle with some of those questions, and those are good. Background questions around what does the grammar mean? What does the language mean? Historical issues. What happened during this time? that they would say this or do this. And some questions go unanswered that we don't really know the answer to. Why does it say don't bathe a baby goat in its mother's milk or whatever? I don't know, you know, but it's in there. There are some things like that that are difficult to understand in the Bible, but it probably had to do with the time in which it was written. Now, there are also different genres in the Bible, and you interpret according to genres. So, if you're reading a historical book, you read it historically. If you're reading apocalyptic, you expect more symbolism and a different type of language. If you're reading poetry, you shouldn't expect to be reading prose or vice versa. And those things are important for interpreting the Bible where they're at in the in the history of God's redemption. Now one thing that helped me when I was beginning at seminary is, I'm going to throw out some fancy words because this is what they taught me at seminary, it's fancy, but they talked about a hermeneutical or an epistemological triad. Epistemological we learn from the sermons, but it's how you know what you know. And the triad was orthodoxy, which means right understanding or teaching, orthopraxy, which is right practice, and doxology, which is right praise. So right praise, right practice, and right understanding are all growing us closer also into understanding the word. So, you know, you can study your Bible and know it really well, but I know guys who know the Bible really well and never go to church and never contribute to the life of other believers. They don't, you know, focus on loving their neighbors or themselves. So then are they, Are they growing closer in their understanding of the Bible really? No. They need to grow in those ways as well. So there's a few principles here. First, the only infallible interpretive scripture is scripture. So when there's a question about the truthful sense of any scripture, which is not manifold but one, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. And then the second is that the Supreme Judge determining and examining all controversies of religion decrees of councils, right, or like the Westminster Confession even, or ancient opinion, private spirits or doctrines of men, and in whose sentence we're to rest assured can't be anything else but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Word of God. So there's a few principles there. Any questions on those as I kind of give you a very, very like big overview of the monumental mountain that is like how to interpret the Bible? Good, it's easy. Yeah, no problems. Yeah, the three things are orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and doxology. So, right, yep, you're right praise. Yep. Right praise, right practice, right understanding or right doctrine. Yeah. And those things are like that spiral I mentioned. The better you understand, if you understand something better from the Bible, when you go to praise God and worship, you go upstairs to sing those Psalms, if you know the truth better, you're going to praise God better, right? And if you know the truth better and you praise God better, you're gonna live better in your life. And if you live better in your life, you're gonna want to understand better. And it's just this like, you know, you get into the whirlpool and then you start to love and enjoy it more and more. All right. With the remaining time, we got about five minutes, I want to talk about Bible study approaches. I mentioned the devotional reading plan of Just Read. There are lots of reading plans. There's a group going through a Bible reading plan right now in the church. Jaina mentioned she's behind. I'm a few days behind as well, and that happens, especially when you have a baby, or trials of life come. But it's good to just read to find reading plans or other people who can help you stay accountable. Audiobooks is a big one. The first time I went to the Old Testament, Bible Gateway had just come out. This is because I'm old. I think it had just come out. It was like in high school and I was 14 and I read the Bible with Bible Gateway and my Bible opened. Just went through the whole thing. So, I highly recommend audio listening to it as well. It can help you digest it, especially, you know, if you don't know how to pronounce stuff and things like that. Not that they always pronounce things right in the audio books. Who knows? But that's a helpful way to be growing in your reading and understanding. Now, I want to talk about arcing. It's actually one of the methods that I use. You guys see this? Okay, yeah. So this is awesome. If you wanna look this up, this is what I mentioned. There's so many ways to grow, but basically arcing is a way of relating different small segments of scripture to each other. So here you see a series. You're like, this is one thing in a series. Everyone who asterisks, the one who seeks finds, the one who knocks, it will be open. It's a series of things. or progression, where it's not just one thing after the other, but it's growing in importance in the text. And arcing is a way of finding all these things out, like an alternative. What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? Those are alternatives to one another. All these are logical relationships between things in the text. Action, manner, comparison, negative, positive. It's not for you to speak, but the spirit of your father speaking through you, right? Question and answer. There's all these different ways of relating sentences to one another. And you learn these ones, kind of all these ways, and then you can go and pick a passage of the Bible and do it on your own and find the ways that everything in the Bible is related to one another. I have found this to be incredibly helpful. There are parts of scripture where I'm like, I don't really know the main point, and I need to sit there and arc. My teacher taught me a different way, but it's basically the same thing. to find those relationships between the sentences and then the paragraphs and then, you know, the bigger portions of scripture so that you can benefit from them. So I would recommend that to you as a way to think about and study the Bible. Inductive Bible study is probably one that you'd be more familiar with if you had some evangelical background. There's The navigators, they're really big on it. A lot of like inner varsity groups and college groups use inductive Bible studies as well. And they're super helpful. Basically they make observations on a passage and then draw conclusions based on those observations. So here's the steps if you wanna think about doing an inductive Bible study, although I suggest you go look up more about it. There's first observation. You ask the who, what, where, when, why questions. You get out your highlighters, make notes, think about, you know, who said this, where was this, how did this happen? You ask all those questions. Then you seek to interpret it. What does that mean, right? And that gets into the hermeneutics thing we just talked about. And then lastly, how do I apply it to my life or the lives of those around me? So observation, interpretation, application. It's a great way to grow. I mentioned before journaling for prayer, but some people also have Bibles with journal things on the sides where they go through and meditate on different things. That can be of benefit. Probably the one we are most familiar with is family devotions. If your family goes through the Bible together, that's a way to be thinking about the Bible. Now, it's easy to tune out in those times or just think that it's a rote practice or tradition of your family, but it is valuable time that you can use to grow in the Word and in your understanding, so don't take it for granted. Likewise, singing through the Scripture. is not something to be taken lightly, but when we sing, we're to do so with knowledge, to understand or seek to understand what we're singing, so that not just how we sing it. Sometimes when we sing, I get so stuck in the tune and everything that I'm like, what did I just sing? So to sing out of a heart of understanding is gonna help you understand more about the Bible more about God, more about the scripture. Study Bibles, there's some good ones out there. There's some not so good ones out there. There's a lot of marketing traps where they just want you to buy some for women or apologetics or archaeology study Bible. They're all good stuff. A lot of them are great stuff. You can learn from them, but again, I know people or a lot of us tend to get some of those things and then we just spend the time reading the special articles and commentary and sometimes don't even grow more in the word. So those are things like pitfalls to watch out for, you know. Commentaries, I would just say if you're interested in commentaries and reading like digging deeper through that, ask your pastor about a good commentary because there's a lot of garbage in the world of commentaries. and some good books like How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth and others that I'd recommend. Any final questions? Yeah, Pastor. For different approaches to Bible study, there's a book by Rick Warren, and this is the only Rick Warren book I've read in my life, called I think it's just Bible study approaches or Bible study methods and he goes through like ten different ways that you can